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This paper explores the dynamics of a once free-flowing river and its monopolization at the capitalist guise of g(l)ocal Dawki in India, wherein three village economies are sustained and survived by its river-water; in their own collective terms of market strategies and pluriversal realities.

Paper long abstract

At the onsets of growing consumerism and a market worldview, three villages at Dawki in Northeast India are no less at incorporating strategies and contested claims over their flowing river and river-water, but in their own ways of collective pluriverses, which sustains livelihood, fetches households and holds on to the chain of rural tourism and recreational activities. With the Umngot turned to an economic asset and locals getting inherently engaged, the river and the river-water went through a trajectory of situated innovation; wherein they have a shared commitment for its use, income generation and strictly adherent to community performatives. Yet it continues to be a heated topic of debate, discussion and contestation, when it comes to building control or asserting monopoly under the socio-geographical jurisdictions. Time and again, these conjectures and water-politics need to be understood at the realm of developmental regime and collective actions' dynamics, and what alternative narratives it holds for public attention. Is it possible for a resilient-planned, sociotechnical future? Or can it be promoted at the capitalist onset?

The objective of this paper lies at focusing on this systematic power hegemony amongst the groups of local communities; the river being the focal point while situating discussions for better prospects. It will also reflect the nuanced dilemmas and vulnerabilities surrounding ‘dependencies’ on the river economy and will pinpoint the ongoing onto-epistemology and contested fights for spaces, beyond technocratic paradigms. With an ethnographic fieldwork and being a participant observer, the contextualization will be discussed and deliberated.

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We probe new theoretical approaches to care by thinking and living with microbes within the intersections of feminism, posthumanism, and justice in a relational understanding considering how the notion and practices of microbial care could create a more sustainable and just futures.

Paper long abstract

Drawing from case examples of biodiversity (guts) and bioremediation (soil), we probe new theoretical approaches to care by thinking and living with microbes within the intersections of feminism, posthumanism, and justice in a relational understanding. We consider how the notion of microbial care pushes ontological, epistemological, and ethical boundaries with a distinct contribution to the latter to create a more sustainable and just futures. In this focus, we argue for an essential relationship between care and justice in a more-than-human setting that seeks a radical departure from human exceptionalism. With a focus on science and technology studies (STS), we provide a framework that can make claims for more-than-human justice, multispecies justice, and microbial care that aims to be inclusive of diverse human, microbial, and other non-human entities and groups. The paper seeks to compute existing social justice frameworks between groups of people and unfair power dynamics between species in the same framework. We conclude that one crucial way to understand care is to consider it as a practice of justice.

In this presentation, I focus on an example of Agential Guts from a human-goat-soil-microbe assemblage point of view that reconfigures human-microbial relationalities from a situated perspective that imagines more resilient natures. In this experiment, microbial care goes beyond instrumentalising, objectifying, or isolating microbes in an artistic collaboration that embeds my agency with the more-than-human world. In this process, care for and caring in leaky and complex relations require challenging the logics of capitalism that promote technocratic governance of care.

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Do invasive species also come bearing gifts? By acknowledging the other in or around one’s corporeal system, I focus on the interweaving of bodily material at the cellular level to rethink the gift as an enduring entanglement, empirically different from the classic model of debt or exchange.

Paper long abstract

In the context of inter and intra-corporeal embodiment I ask whether invasive species may also come bearing gifts. By acknowledging the presence of the other – even potentially malign others - in or around one’s corporeal system, the gift is rethought as an enduring entanglement, ontologically and empirically different from the classic model of debt and exchange. Conventional theory is radically displaced by exploring gifts in an intracorporeal as well as extra-corporeal location, specifically thinking of the interweaving of bodily material at the cellular level.

The arenas of organ transplantation, pregnancy and stem cell therapy - where life-threatening rejection is always a risk – already show that giving/receiving a gift need not imply any distance, but rather an entanglement. The areas of the microbiome and microchimerism provide ample evidence of the ambiguity of such gifts. On a more challenging level I consider the onslaught of global pandemics like Covid-19, widely characterized as aggressive onslaughts of external bioagents to be countered by defensive strategies. A better understanding sees a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by diverse agents. Rather than wholly formed entities being in conflict with would-be invaders, they are produced by millennia of previous mergers and entanglements. Not all encounters are beneficial, but the condition for any species’ thriving lies in an openness to otherness. Biology and medical technologies that offer new understandings are embedded in complex socio-cultural, political, environmental discourses that reject singular causes and the crude binary of positive and negative effects to offer resources for resilience.

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This paper presents an ethnography of a northern lapwing conservation project in Austrian farmland to suggest that it holds lessons for multispecies analysis in STS. How diverse actors attempt to think like a lapwing may provide insight into the complexity of analytically accounting for nonhumans.

Paper long abstract

The northern lapwing (Vanellus Vanellus) is one among many inhabitants of European farmland that have experienced considerable population decline over the past decades. To help this bird and other species recover, conservationists have attempted to establish ways of preserving lapwings and (especially) their nests within agricultural practice. These include interventions such as marking nests or leaving breeding patches on fields uncultivated. Many of these measures are supported by subsidies to compensate farmers for any income lost to conservation work.

On the basis of an ethnography of one such conservation effort, a project for farmers to support lapwings in designated regions in Austria, I will suggest that conservation practices in farmland may hold lessons for multispecies analysis in STS. Moving beyond the idea, often implicitly held in STS, that biological scientists can serve as primary spokespersons for non-humans, my ethnography suggests that the diverse range of actors involved in conservation practice – including not only scientists, but also e.g. farmers and subsidy schemes for biodiversity in agriculture, contain particular, sometimes divergent, interpretations of how lapwings think and why thy act as they do. Thus, subsidy schemes may materialize the value of certain amendments to common agricultural practice by offering specific amounts of money to compensate for, say, late mowing, while farmers may wonder about the birds’ preference to breed on fields with certain crops. By combining different human interpretations of lapwing thinking, I suggests, these various interventions can jointly suggest a way forward for thinking like non-humans in STS work.

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This study examines how Latvian animal-help volunteers perceive the moral status of stray animals and frame their activism as social justice. Based on 10 semi-structured interviews, it reveals how grassroots actors challenge institutional power hierarchies that systematically devalue stray animals.

Paper long abstract

Moral status is a concept that provides the framework for animal rights, integrating moral rights, legal rights, ethical treatment, welfare, and the inherent value of animals. This study analyzes perspectives on the moral status of stray animals, particularly cats and dogs, among animal-help volunteers in Latvia, and explores how this perspective can be integrated into the broader social justice movement. The author conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with volunteers to examine how their beliefs about the moral status of stray animals affect their relationships with institutional power and align with contemporary social justice theories. The author examines how volunteer activists formulate a moral stance through their subjective interpretations of social justice, and how they become catalysts for social change by aligning their actions with ethical principles. Volunteering in animal protection in Latvia is intrinsically connected to the practical application of concepts of justice. Informants believe that justice extends beyond humans to encompass animals as morally meaningful entities. The moral status of animals underpins the volunteers’ ethical and civic engagement: they regard stray animals as equal members of the community, entities with inherent value deserving of protection, dignity, and quality of life. Volunteers confront the perspectives of institutional authorities (veterinary inspectors, veterinarians, politicians) who prioritize companion animals with owners, thereby neglecting the welfare of stray animals. They perceive this disparate treatment as an injustice rooted not in an objective evaluation of needs but in a moral hierarchy that systematically devalues stray animals.

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Focusing on the SEAtwins project through the lens of (in)visibilisation, this paper traces the tensions within socio-ecological modelling to explore how the EU’s Digital Twin Ocean constructs a virtual marine space.

Paper long abstract

The European Union’s ‘Green Deal’ and ‘Blue Economy’ aspirations frame the ocean as a site of ‘hidden potential’ requiring legibility for effective management. Consequently, the EU is advancing its Digital Twin Ocean (DTO) initiative—aligned with its ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ mission—as a multilateral negotiation tool for achieving a governable ocean. Its infrastructure relies on ‘FAIR Guiding Principles,’ which function not only as technical standards but as a normative framework for the production of a virtual marine space.

By focusing on the ‘SEAtwins’ project cluster, the paper investigates the EU DTO’s implementation of socio-ecological models (SEMs) and how data and modelling practices are reconfigured across the differing expertise constellations of the SEAtwins projects in conjunction with top-down visions for ocean governance. The paper explores the ways in which researchers navigate sites of ‘sticky’ complexity in constructing the socio-ecological dimension, turning a disordered ocean into one that is digitally encapsulated, and how these manifest in their data practices amidst inseparable tensions posed by computable, ‘FAIR’, and prediction-enabling visions.

In mapping the work of the SEAtwins project cluster within the EU, this paper analyses how tensions between different actors shape the modelling practices of the SEAtwins projects through the lens of (in)visibilising as a form of epistemic injustice. In doing so, the paper attends to how the EU DTO’s digital infrastructuring practices seek to shatter the boundaries of the ocean frontier.