Dear colleagues,

Please note our call for papers on: "Logistical Natures. trade,
traffics, and transformations in natural history collecting"

A workshop organized by the joint research project “Animals as Objects.
Zoological Gardens and Natural History Museum in Berlin, 1810−2020”,
Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Feb 13/14 2020
Deadline CFP: Sept 20 2019

No collection, no research, no natural history museum nor zoological
garden without logistics. Traders, colonial shipping routes, transport
companies, feed producers and distributors, chemical and pharmaceutical
industries, waste disposal infrastructures, but also computerized
databases, catalogues, daily veterinary logs, and finances, all take
part in forming and maintaining natural history collections. We
understand natural history collections to encompass both informational
and material collections of specimens in museums and databases, and
collections of living animals and other organisms in zoos and botanical
gardens. In order to supply these collections with specimens or animals,
the objects have to be procured, transported, prepared, maintained,
organized, displayed, and disposed of. Furthermore, the objects
collected are turned into data and ingested into the changing apparatus
of natural sciences. All these operations rely on pre-existing
infrastructures, while simultaneously shaping them.

This workshop invites scholars from science and technology studies,
history and history of science, technology and media to focus on the
trade, traffics and transformations of animal-objects within and between
sites of knowledge in their global logistical, political, scientific and
economic context. We therefore bring together perspectives on the
material and informational infrastructures of animal-objects, which form
and inform their care, conservation and sustainability. We encourage
special attention to the ways animal collections – be it in zoological
gardens or in natural history museums – are assembled, maintained, and
consumed through those infrastructures, and to the circulation of
objects, organisms, and data. Specifically, this workshop invites
contributions concerning translocations of collected organisms and data
as well as their traffics between political, cultural and epistemic
spaces, between the living and the dead, and between the material and
the digital.

Thus, we are interested in contributions that unravel the techniques,
artefacts, infrastructures and biographies which transform organisms
into objects, data, and assets or subvert these categories. In combining
attention to practices and practicalities (Mol 2002; Haraway 1997) with
historical sensibilities to rupture and continuation (Nyhart 2009;
Kohler 2002), we situate our approach at the intersection of science and
technology studies, history, and history of science.

We hold that this focus on logistical matters in natural history
collecting can provide a generative approach to chart its articulations
of nature and society.
In this spirit, we invite theoretical approaches to the logistics of
‘animal collections’ and papers that attend to these practices through
specific cases. We aim to collectively rethink the past and present of
natural history through its infrastructural preconditions and effects,
as well as through its collective and distributed practices, and their
transformations over time.
 
The workshop will focus especially, but not exclusively, on:
● Trade: the history and practices of trade in animals on a local or
global scale from barter and gift economies to sales; processes of
valuation and devaluation of animal objects; spaces of object
distributions, like markets, auctions, databases; the relations between
traders, researchers, dealers and collectors, and their respective
boundary works.
● Traffics: the itineraries of objects past and present; legal,
hygienic/medical and ecological regimes of animal and plant
translocations, e.g. CITES, Nagoya Protocol, Cartagena Protocol; data
journeys from the field to the database and back, and beyond.
● Transformations: the history and practices of transforming organisms
into living zoo attractions, museum exhibits or data sets; the logistics
of turning animals into objects and data and the related practices of
objectification in animal collecting institutions; thresholds between
“dead” and “alive” as effects, intended and unintended, of logistical
practices, understood as biological as well as political and
technological categories; transitions from the material to the digital
(and back) and the infrastructures of data; transformations of the
material culture of data and the informational investments in material
artefacts.

The workshop “Logistical Natures. Trade, Traffics and Transformations in
Natural History Collecting” on 13/14 February 2020 will be followed by a
second paper-workshop in the autumn of 2020 which aims to assemble a
special issue (journal tbc). Please send your abstract (max. 500 words)
and CV to [log in to unmask] no later than Sept 20, 2019. We will
cover travel and accommodation costs. For further information, please
contact [log in to unmask]

The workshop is conceived and organized by the joint research project
“Animals as Objects. Zoological Gardens and the Natural History Museum
in Berlin, 1810˗2020”
(https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/en/science/animals-objects):
Filippo Bertoni (Humanities of Nature, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin)
Ina Heumann (Humanities of Nature, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin)
Clemens Maier-Wolthausen (Zoological Gardens Berlin)
Tahani Nadim (Humanities of Nature, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin)
Mareike Vennen (Institute for Cultural Studies, Humboldt University
Berlin)

It is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

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