Dear all,
We welcome contributions to our panel on 'Manufactured super creatures for damaged environments' at the POLLEN 2024 conference (details below). If you are interested in contributing, please send an abstract of no more than 200 words along with your name, affiliation, contribution title (max. 20 words) and 3 keywords to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by January 13th (apologies for short notice).
The session will be held in a hybrid format, and participants can take part in either of the three hubs of the conference (Lima, Dodoma, or Lund 10 - 12 June 2024). We are planning to join from Lund.
Barbara and Anneleen
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Call for contributions POLLEN2024: Manufactured super creatures for damaged environments
Many peasant farmers and other people living with, not just on the land, are well aware of the importance of soil life and biodiversity in maintaining good growing conditions and reducing pests. Nourishing the soil and preserving biodiversity through a wide variety of techniques like polyculture, water retention, the integration of trees or crops with livestock, as well as the care for skills, ways of knowing and being with the land, are all crucial to their daily life. Confronted with damaged environments these practices might be more important than ever before.
These practices stand in sharp contrast to the Western-driven agro-scientific-industrial complex which sees and sells new technologies as the prime instruments to increase and maintain performance in difficult conditions. Gene editing, in particular, is promoted as the remedy for a wide range of ills created by changing environments. As the next step in a long history of the modernisation of agriculture - from the plantation to the introduction of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, from industrial breeding techniques to the robotisation of agriculture - gene editing and digitalisation are now presented as the summum of the modern dream. This time techno-scientists will ‘optimise’ agricultural environments, through massive data extraction, data repackaging and by correcting Nature itself through new forms of genetic engineering. The promise is that gene-edited super plants will fight off diseases or produce toxins to eliminate insects. The ‘knocking out’ of genes in fish, sheep, cows and pigs will create super muscled ‘high yield’ animals. Super micro-organisms and super trees will make industrial processes more efficient. And super root systems will enable plants to capture carbon more efficiently. Or at least, that’s what we are told.
But how super are these super organisms really? In what ways are these new creatures really superior over the many extinct plants and animals which were our co-earthers for such a long time? Superweeds resisting glyphosate, rabbits with enlarged tongues, pigs with extra vertebrae and other ‘blunders’ of genetic engineering show that these technologies are, at least, not up to speed. But more importantly, we wonder how the destruction and creation of biodiversity relate to each other practically and ontologically? And, what do farmers and others who are supposed to live and work with these new creatures say, think or feel about them? How can political ecology help us better understand the worlds that ‘super creatures’ are born from and help shape?
Many accounts from people living with the land show that earlier generations of genetically modified organisms are tied in with destruction, erasure and dispossession. We therefore ask, paraphrasing Michelle Murphy, how might we trouble and unsettle the genealogies of super creatures and their narratives? How are super organisms entangled in histories of persistent racism, speciesism, ableism, gender and class privilege, colonialism and imperialist ambitions? Which stories are we told, or are seemingly almost universally embraced, and which role can political ecology play in opening up spaces for other narratives? How may a better understanding of these technologies, and of how they operate in our contemporary worlds, help us unlock different and plural futures?
In this session, we seek to attend to the genealogies, ontologies and epistemologies of genetic manipulation, which has recently experienced a revival under terms such as genetic engineering, gene-editing and precision breeding. We invite contributions that trace the histories, power dynamics and strategies of manufactured super creatures and their worlds, from industrial boardrooms to laboratories and fields, and how they have been cast as indispensable in the modern agricultural toolbox. We welcome contributions, in any format, that help to trouble the strategies, paradigms and imaginaries of superorganisms. Contributions can be speculative in imagining the fictional worlds of super creatures or down-to-earth ethnographies of super creatures in practice.
If you would like to contribute to this panel session please send a 150-200 word abstract to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by January 13th
Barbara Van Dyck, Research fellow political ecology, Agroecology Lab, Université Libre de Bruxelles (BE), Honorary fellow Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University (UK);
Anneleen Kenis, Lecturer Political Ecology & Environmental Justice, Brunel University London (UK)
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