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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.