Paper short abstract:

A feminist engagement with relational ontologies and STS is useful to reconsider the gendered and cultural assumptions that remain embedded in emerging technologies and techniques of biodiversity conservation, such as genomics and big data.

Paper long abstract:

Discourses about climate emergency and extinctions excite passionate strategies to stem drastic ecological disruption, disintegration and loss. A keening for endangered or lost kinships with nature is matched by vigorous efforts to repair and rebuild relationships with non-human species. Many of these efforts are born from Western biological sciences and are tacitly shaped by cultural assumptions about the nature of gender, kinship and reproduction in the “modern” world. While political ecology’s focus on parks and protected areas has succeeded in helping to challenge colonizing conservation paradigms using Marxist approaches, it has been less attentive to aspects of conservation that are not contained within the analysis of property relations and access to material resources. Yet schemes for the care and protection of non-human species routinely instrumentalize and institutionalize the ideological basis of normative Euro-American kinship systems, with all their connections to the model of the entrepreneurial and sovereign nation-state. “Natural” visions of family-making and family management are affirmed by strategies for species conservation, at the same time that they naturalize the interventions we make to achieve ecological reproduction. Drawing on critical feminist approaches to embodiment, technology and kinship, this paper takes a tender look at techniques of biodiversity management that mobilize evolving technologies of conservation, from genomics to GIS.