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- Convenors:
-
Rebekah Ciribassi
(University of Oslo)
Louis-Emmanuel Pille-Schneider (University of Bergen)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how kinship, technology, and speculation intertwine in the crafting of heritable futures. Understanding technoscience as a site of care, repair, and collective world-making, this panel rethinks technologically-mediated kinship in the uncertain temporalities of the more-than-now.
Description
What does it mean to act, design, and imagine in the constant and contingent state of becoming future ancestors? This panel invites contributions that explore how kinship, technology, and speculation intertwine in the crafting of heritable futures.
In a time when inherited worlds are being actively unmade through genocide, ecological collapse, resurgent fascisms, and the ongoing violence of colonialism, the question of what can or will still be passed on (and by whom) acquires new urgency. Building on the EASST 2026 theme of the “more-than-now,” then, this panel approaches the future as a shared and ongoing inheritance in the making, given form by the entanglements of human and more-than-human kin, technologies, and imaginaries that take shape in the present.
Contemporary technoscientific innovations reveal particular priorities for kin-making as a temporal act. New reproductive and gene-editing technologies raise questions about genetic ancestry and the engineering of lineages, while AI projects promise the possibility of digitally sustaining relationships with the dead. What kinds of kinships are enacted through these technologies? What forms of care, accountability, or repair do they enable—or foreclose?
Beyond more commercial and institutionalized forms of technoscientific innovation, we also invite contributions that treat technology more broadly as the material and symbolic practices through which kin relations endure. These may include infrastructures and craft-based techniques of survival that highlight how technologies materialize continuity, care, and adaptation across generations. A decolonial and Indigenous framing foregrounds how such technologies persist as living archives of relation, complicating linear narratives of progress and innovation.
“Becoming Ancestors” thus invites speculative inquiry; we ask panelists to consider how current technoscientific practices and agendas, broadly construed, condition the lives and relations that follow. This panel builds on feminist and decolonial STS traditions that understand technoscience as a site of care, repair, and collective world-making, extending these insights into the uncertain temporalities of the more-than-now.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
How do the limits of reproductive optimisation reshape kinship and inheritable futures? Reading S. B. Divya's Meru (2023) as a speculative intervention, this paper argues that engineered ectogenesis redistributes vulnerability rather than simply securing resilience.
Paper long abstract
Today, the creation of a ‘better’ future is increasingly framed as an optimisation problem. Across domains ranging from climate governance to reproductive technologies, the mere existence of a problem appears to invite its optimisation. Building on McKelvey and Neves’ (2021) account of optimisation as an ‘operating system for the present’, this paper examines how optimisation logics reshape the conditions of inheritance of future worlds.
I turn to S. B. Divya’s Indian science fiction novel Meru (2023), which imagines a far-future posthuman society that seeks to minimise environmental harm after ecological collapse by optimising reproduction itself. The novel’s ‘alloy’ beings rely on engineered ectogenesis and designed rebirth to reduce biological vulnerability and ecological impact, destabilising linear models of gestation, descent and generational succession.
Instead of reading these reproductive innovations simply as imaginative extrapolations, I treat them as interventions into current debates about reproductive technologies, planetary stewardship and posthuman futurity. Specifically, drawing on STS scholarship on optimisation alongside feminist and posthumanist work on reproduction and vulnerability, I argue that the alloys’ reproductive system redistributes rather than eliminates vulnerability. In seeking to secure more resilient futures through technological reproduction, vulnerability is displaced from gestating bodies to engineered offspring.
This optimisation of reproduction counteracts the alloys’ professed posthuman ethics of relationality. Instead, optimisation becomes a technocratic claim to reproductive competence that legitimises new forms of authority over planetary guardianship. Thus, Meru reveals how projects aimed at engineering sustainable futures may, even if inadvertently, reorganise kinship, inheritance and the governance of life at planetary scales.
Paper short abstract
This paper offers a geoanthropological critique of Donna Haraway’s (in)famous credo “Make Kin Not Babies.” It argues that techno-capitalism produces non-biological kinship infrastructures that fix hierarchy and scarcity via immutable distributed ledgers such as blockchain.
Paper long abstract
This paper develops a geoanthropological analysis of blockchain technologies to critically revisit Donna Haraway’s slogan “Make Kin Not Babies!” in the context of the Anthropocene. While kinship has been mobilized as an ethical response to planetary crisis, the paper argues that kin-making is not inherently emancipatory and can be reorganized as an infrastructure of domination when technologized. Focusing on blockchain, the paper shows how techno-capitalism produces non-biological forms of kinship that regulate social reproduction through immutable ledgers and fixed scarcity. Drawing on Marxist anthropology and the lineage mode of production, it demonstrates how blockchain reproduces senior/junior hierarchies analogous to lineage systems, while suspending the redistributive effects of death and inheritance. Situating these dynamics within debates on entropy and geopower, the paper argues that blockchain articulates two strategies for escaping Earth-bound limits: the production of post-mortal forms of value and ownership insulated from biological finitude, and the spatial displacement of economic reproduction beyond the planet through inter-planetary and post-terrestrial imaginaries. In other words, the former strategy seeks to secure ownership for immortal beings, while the latter seeks exchange and wealth creation through space colonization. Together, these strategies reveal how techno-capitalist kinship aims not to inhabit haritable earth, but to transcend it.
Paper short abstract
By investigating biobanking practices at a zoo biobank this paper maps out new forms of relationships spanning from freezer to enclosure to in-situ sites and asks if there are alternative stories towards heritable futures coming out of unlikely places and technologies.
Paper long abstract
Keeping genetically viable populations – especially of endangered species – is slowly becoming modern zoos’ overarching argument for their relevance and value, at the very least in conservationist circles. As a result, geneticists are becoming more and more involved in decisions regarding individual animals and their (captive) species, including their mobility, kinship groupings, and, most of all, reproduction. Institutionalizing this shift towards conservation even further, the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) introduced its biobank in 2019, providing means to broaden research relevant to species conservation and potentially holding pathways open for species survival. However, this paper argues, shifting practices also (re)make relationships.
Based on an ethnographic study at one of the biobanks “hubs” at the Antwerp Zoo, I explore how and whether alternative stories for heritable futures emerge from an unlikely site like this. Theorizing the bank not only as a collection of biomaterials but also of relations within and across species boundaries, I take a close look at practices of sampling, storing and releasing (if not animals to the wild, at least samples to scientists). In doing so, I map out how kinship is conceptualized in the practice of ‘doing conservation’ at the zoo, and how these notions are shaped by logics of care and accountability as well as for example (violent) history, opportunity and imagination. These developments entail shifting roles for zoo staff, mobilizing (samplified) animals for their species and potentially extending a sense of belonging beyond the boundaries of the enclosure.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on E. A. Povinelli’s work, this paper proposes a notion of “procedural animism”, investigating how boundaries between Life and Non-Life are strategically mobilised within contemporary infrastructures of governance, allowing AI agents participate in the reorganisation of agency and authority.
Paper long abstract
This paper develops the concept of techno-animist relationality through Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s distinction between Life and Non-Life and her concept of geontologies (Povinelli 2016). This paper asks how algorithmic systems can be understood within the ontological and political boundary that separates Life from Non-Life in late neoliberal governance. I argue that AI systems, while clearly belonging to the domain of Non-Life (as material infrastructures, code, and computational processes), are inevitably figured and encountered as relational agents. AI agents are aesthetically presented and sold as “digital humans”, assistants, customer service, romantic partners, grief bots and other parasocial relationships.
This tension produces what the paper terms procedural animism: a mode of sociotechnical relation in which computational systems, deliberately animated and bestowed with economic agency, reproduce sociotechnical imaginaries of labour, affect, productivity and humanness within AI agents, where capacity for efficient action-taking in the digital infrastructure becomes more significant than personhood itself. I want to analyse this condition through imagining the impoverished and reduced late neoliberalist Life where AI agents appear as more capable and preferable to humans in workforce, and where relationships with such agents become increasingly offered as substitution to originals in humans’ affective lives online. Acknowledging techno-animist relationality, but also understanding AI through the lens of Non-Life raises questions about how technological systems participate in the reorganisation of responsibility, agency and authority, and how the boundaries between Life and Non-Life are strategically mobilised within contemporary infrastructures of governance.
Paper short abstract
This contribution discusses troubled ancestry relations in more-than-human ruins of northern Norway’s WWII legacies. By examining forest soils as material archives of violent pasts we ask for how these material testimonies can become sites for collective reimagination, care and repair.
Paper long abstract
Scattered broken glass fused together with rocks, partly overgrown with moss in the forests of Finnmark (Norway) – these are persistent remains of burnt-down food stores of the Nazi occupation. There are variants of plants and fungi that presumably arrived with the occupants’ horse-drawn supply carts. Ammunition depots hastily blown up (to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army) left bare spots without a single blade of grass, bearing witness of the violent ‘scorched earth’ Nazi policy. WWII legacies are entrenched in further historical layers: Arctic settler colonialism, Norwegianization, pollution from industrial mining and nickel smelters, state borders of Norway, Russia and Finland cutting through Sápmi lands. The Nazi occupation in Finnmark has materialized in specific more-than-human relationalities with soil, rocks, plants, nematodes, wind and weather. Encountering those enmeshed legacies today, its layered sedimentations of war, forced labor and white supremacy, begs uneasy relationalities not least for us as scholars with (West) German background. Following the memorialization practices that work as reminders of ‘never again’ as to Nazi atrocities committed in Eastern Europe, attention to the material archive and testimony of soils invites us to rethink ancestry in view of the current global rise of fascisms. How can we understand the more-than human relationalities of such sites in ways that allow reimaginations of antifascist futures? This contribution is an attempt to grapple with kinships that result from troubled ancestries, asking for how remains of violent pasts can become sites of care, repair and collective world-making.