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Paper short abstract

Drawing upon ethnographic research, this presentation explores the various limits encountered in the making of the artificial placenta; and how these limits enable the enactments of futures rooted in the specific everyday work of biotechnological development.

Paper long abstract

The artificial placenta, one of the technologies that falls within the ambit of the Artificial Amniotic Sac and Placenta Technologies, is currently under pre-clinical development. Through an enforced continuation of the physiological foetal state, these technologies seek to increase the chances of survival for extremely premature babies. Driven by a range of disciplinary expertise, including different kinds of engineering, biomedicine, as well as caregiver involvement, this work regularly encounters techno-biological, organizational, as well as epistemic limits. This includes limits around working with/against non-Newtonian natured blood, constrained project timelines, and disciplinary differences between collaborators. The enactments of these limits, moreover, are contingent upon the diverse spatio-temporal realities that the work of biotechnological development is located within.

Drawing upon ethnographic research done with a group of European scientists working on developing the artificial placenta, I will present findings that point to the negotiations, contestations, and coordination around these limits, which emerge in the course of this work. I will bring forth the role played by tools, objects, and entities that enable the materialization and navigation of certain limits. At the same time, I will explore how, faced with these limits, distinct epistemic realities perform temporality in different ways. In so doing, I will highlight how the limits of developing an artificial placenta enable the enactments of futures rooted in quite specific presents, which in turn draw upon past ideas of futurity by reaching into both science fiction and biotechnological worlds.

Keywords: Artificial placenta, techno-biological limits, epistemic realities, pasts-presents-futures