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Accepted Paper:

The biosociotechnical as a far-right political project: implications and ontologies  
Shahin Nazar kermanshahi (Utrecht University)

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Short abstract:

I show how far-right communities intertwine politics of the environment with the body, employing biosociotechnical practices to shape bodies and generate new onto-epistemologies.

Long abstract:

The European far-right continue to occupy a significant (digital) presence across Europe. Most notable are their climate change conspiracy theories, often deemed as anti-scientific due to how they antagonize epistemic authorities. STS scholars have been put in a difficult position to guide hypermediated information cultures into new terrain. Yet, what is often overlooked are the far right’s more long-standing concerns for nature. Between conspiracy theories about Jews starting forest fires and the “modern soyscience” of “scientists who plan to block the sun”, some far-right communities offer ecological visions of the communal life while others call for accelerationism as the only sensible solution to addressing the point-source of the climate crisis.

As environmentally concerned social activists, what pervades their “onlife” practices concerns a politics of the environment as being at the same time a politics of the body. At the locus of scientific knowledge, digital infrastructures, and political concerns, I explore the biosociotechnical as a frame to understand how they ground socio-technical practices to make and do biological realities. From “dietary racism” to workout routines meant to escape a “gender dystopia” or abstinence from alcohol because “it’s been used as a tool to keep human consciousness at a lowered state for thousands of years”, I observe a highly ambivalent onto-ethico-epistemology, where the body is both static and fluid, loved *and* hated. The notion that the body is the locus of nefarious epigenetic forces shows a much broader conspiracy meta-theory: that the conspiracy not just in the social, but in the genes.

Closed Panel CP481
Navigating biosociotechnical complexities: five case studies in making and doing the body.
  Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -