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- Convenors:
-
Katie Kung
(Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich)
Luiza Teixeira-Costa (Meertens Instituut)
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- Discussants:
-
Mason Heberling
(Carnegie Museum of Natural History)
Leonardo Teixeira (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Abby Keller (University of California, Berkeley)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract
Bringing together ecologists and STS scholars, this combined panel+workshop examines invasion science as an eco-social practice, exploring cultural meanings, ethical tensions, and possibilities for coexistence with so-called invasive species, exploring cross-disciplinary opportunities in practice.
Description
“Invasive species” provoke questions that reach far beyond invasion science. Core ideas like species origins, temporal thresholds, and distinctions between harm and change reveal how human activities and understandings of the past shape our experience of the present ecological reality. The idea of and our attitude to biological invasions reflect things that are not only ecological, but also fundamentally cultural, social, and political. In a rapidly changing world marked by environmental destruction and precarity—conditions to which invasive species are often said to contribute—how do we live with species cast as enemies?
Responses from the humanities and natural sciences have exposed both practical and ideological divides, as evidenced by the ongoing and emotive debates in journals and other intellectual spaces. At the same time, invasion science continues to evolve, proposing new theories and developing new management technologies such as toxins, traps, and genetic tools that promise greater control, monitoring, and eradication.
This panel seeks to engage these cross-disciplinary tensions through an STS lens—borrowing, with Karen Barad, the commitment to “meet” biological invasions “halfway.” It combines two sessions: (1) paper presentations and (2) an ecologist–humanist pair workshop.
The first session invites contributions that explore:
1. How invasion sciences operate as situated social practices, shaping and performing the very phenomena they study;
2. How biological invasions can be reframed as more-than-biological questions; and
3. How alternative ways of knowing and living with invasive species might shape future coexistence.
The second session, a collaborative workshop, invites exchanges between scholars from different fields who converge on the topic of invasive species. Working in groups led by pairs of ecologists–STS scholars specialised in the field, participants will engage with case studies, discuss and experiment with interdisciplinary approaches to studying and living with invasive species—exploring what research beyond the natural sciences can offer, and laying groundwork for future collaborations.