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- Convenors:
-
Jahan Hadidi
(University of Vienna)
Erik Aarden (Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- C-7, 0.16
- Sessions:
- Friday 11 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
Short Abstract
This panel brings together STS perspectives on ways to examine how more-than-human actors are mediated, represented, and governed across scales. It encourages insights from empirical studies that confront the complexities of (socio-)ecological constellations.
Description
Attempts to address the combined ecological, climate and other contemporary crises (commonly described as a ‘poly-crisis’) are often based on technoscientific interventions and governance models. These approaches aim for optimisation of repair and recuperation of ecosystem degradation. The consequence of planetary exploitation thereby aims for the recovery of ecosystems and mitigation of further harm in reactionary terms. Such forms of conservation focused on the status quo largely manifest as technocratic solutions that reinforce views of nature as a computable, instrumental resource that reinforce a human-nature divide, rather than thinking in terms of more-than-human ecosystems’ joint survival.
Drawing on ethnographies of conservation, digital infrastructuring, corporeal ontologies, and more, panelists explore the ways in which non-human actors exceed human systems of understanding and governance. The contributing papers to this panel look to present ideas and findings surrounding the uncovered frictions of the management of complex living ecosystems. We invite enquiries of various scales - from individual species to entire ecosystems and beyond – to be addressed in the panel’s presentations. The panel brings critical debate of questions such as ‘who has a voice?’ and ‘who can speak on behalf of others?’ to the forefront. Presenters are encouraged to destabilise defining value systems and call into question ethical challenges that shape their research.
The collection of ideas and insights from this panel will generate new frameworks for interrogating technocratic approaches to ecosystem management, advancing the ongoing discussion of multispecies justice.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Friday 11 September, 2026, -Paper short abstract
“Shallow” Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) undermine urban resiliency and frame nature as something to be engineered for humans. Drawing on Deep Ecology, this paper reimagines an ecocentric, “deep” NbS to challenge and transform both NbS and Deep Ecology, suggesting new pathways for urban resilience.
Paper long abstract
That Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have gained prominence in urban resilience and climate adaptation agendas is not surprising given their utility in mitigating floods, reducing heat stress, and enhancing wellbeing. Although NbS may provide local relief to climate change symptoms, this paper argues that “shallow” forms of NbS undermine durable resiliency and sustainability through perpetuating the instrumental, technologizing paradigms responsible for the very symptoms they aim to relieve.
Drawing on Deep Ecology, the paper explores what it would mean to reimagine NbS through an ecocentric ethic grounded in a fundamental reorientation of our relationship to the more-than-human world, technology, and urban life. Deep Ecology argues for an expanded conception of selfhood that includes ecosystems and, ultimately, all life. From this perspective, “Deep NbS” would not merely deliver ecosystem services but cultivate ecological self-realization and strengthen affective connections between urban residents and the more-than-human world. Additionally, Deep Ecology’s emphasis on decentralization and living close to nature challenges dominant assumptions about the sustainability of urbanity.
The goal of “Deep NbS”, however is not to argue for a return to idealized “pre-modern” societies, but a reimagining of urban resilience beyond service provision or adaptive capacity for human populations alone. This reimagining of NbS may also foster an understanding of our cities as living systems warranting ethical consideration. At the same time, engagement with urban spaces and modern technology challenges Deep Ecology, requiring transformation if it should have a role to play in creating more sustainable futures for humans and nonhumans alike.
Paper short abstract
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.
Paper short abstract
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.
Paper short abstract
Educational practices that “bring nature into the classroom”, such as school farms or plant and animal adoption programs, miniaturize and isolate living beings from multispecies networks. Nature becomes domesticated, mediated, and pedagogically staged, appearing familiar yet unsettlingly artificial.
Paper long abstract
Educational practices aimed at “bringing nature into the classroom” - such as school farms, plant or animal adoption programs, and environmental education initiatives - have become increasingly common. While intended to connect students with nature, these practices mediate and radically simplify its complexity. Nature is miniaturized and staged through isolated elements - a plant, a chick, a small controlled ecosystem - detached from the multispecies ecological networks to which they belong. This produces a pedagogical uncanny: removed from context and transformed into an educational object, nature appears simultaneously familiar and artificial. Its dimension is domesticated, and narratively stabilized, producing a reassuring, moralized image of the environment. Yet this very artificialization generates an effect analogous to Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley”: like artificial entities that resemble, but do not fully replicate, living beings, these pedagogical forms of nature provoke unease by imitating life without conveying its relational complexity. Through a feminist and multispecies lens, particularly drawing on Donna Haraway, these practices can be interpreted as devices of epistemic domestication. Contrary to Haraway’s vision of the world as a network of situated, non-hierarchical multispecies relations, such pedagogies risk reproducing an anthropocentric and simplified view of ecology. They may be read as forms of ecological simulation, akin to the “most photographed barn” in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where the barn becomes a hypermediated simulacrum of nature. Similarly, pedagogical nature emerges as a hyperreal, mediated version of the living: familiar yet unsettling, domesticated yet revealing contemporary tensions between ecological experience, cultural mediation, and simulacra.
Paper short abstract
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.