AVAILABLE PAPERS ARE POSTED
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Abstracts
Coral Futures
While humans have been making meaning with coral for centuries, this paper examines coral futures and the speculative narratives produced around them in the era of climate change. Advances in underwater photography and deep-water diving have brought to light the haunting beauty of coral blooms taking hold in the nooks and crannies of scuttled warships and pH-balanced cement sculptures to attest to the resilience of coral amidst adverse conditions. Scientific breakthroughs have met the devastating evidence of mass coral death with the highly marketable promises of coral farming and coral IVF. Meanwhile, new financial instruments have linked up with climate science to design coral insurance schema for coastal and island resort industries.
An interrogation into the political and affective economies generated around these forms of coral commodification, the paper engages broader questions about the profit in ecological debilitation, settler colonial legacies of wastelanding, and the development-oriented structure of environmental law. With an attention to settler notions of land as property and “the ecosystem” as a managerial construct, “Coral Futures” analyzes the promissory fervor around coral resilience, which not only fuels the financialization of environmental disaster, but also indicates a longing for analogic stories of possible human survivance. The heart of the inquiry coalesces around a call to turn away from forms of settler environmentalism to reorient our environmental politics around abolitionist forms of accountability and harm reduction. Foregrounding longstanding Indigenous feminist models of relational (rather than hierarchical and possessive) approaches to thinking land and water, the paper concludes with a consideration of contemporary art and media that model planetary methods informed by reciprocity rather than extraction, or abundance rather than scarcity (Candace Fujikane 2021).
Empty Fields: Furtive Abundance and Weaponized Loss in the Seed Bank Database
Seed banking is a technoscientific enterprise that has come to represent the hope for human salvation through the capture of abundance (10,000 seeds per accession), while at the same time serving as a reminder of the failure of humanity’s stewardship of life on Earth as evidenced in the loss of biodiversity (40% of plant species at risk of extinction—Guardian 2020). This paper draws on the theories and practices that structure the identification, categorization, and organization of seeds and their meta-data in the bank.
Steeped in the histories of standards, epistemology, and bioinformation, I show that with multiple possible systems of classification, it matters what kinds of archival strategies are used to sort and store meta information about the plants (Bowker and Star 2000). Since it “matters what worlds world worlds,” in this paper I narrate how the seed bank world’s worlding happens through inscription practices in the database (Haraway 2016). I probe the limits of data capture and ask how identity is determined and stabilized and for whom. The elisions, omissions, and erasures of local and indigenous identities of the seeds evidence the ‘empty fields’ of the seed bank database. These gaps of knowledge and history are what allow the grand narratives of biodiversity loss to persist.
Dwelling on the tenuous relationship between the physical objects that are stored in the banks and the data about them that are stored on servers, I show that the choices to store and prioritize data about plants, traits, and genes reveal the expectations for the future held by scientists and administrators. I argue that for the project of transnational seed banking to have any value, the robustness of their data storage, organization, and access need to be challenged.
Damian Carrington. 2020. “40% of world’s plant species at risk of extinction,” The Guardian, September 29, 2020.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/30/world-plant-species-risk-extinction-fungi-earth
Donna J. Haraway. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. MIT Press.
Facing History: Returns of Human Biological Diversity Research in A’uwẽ Territory
Striking images, in black and white, stream from the projector to the whitewashed wall as a group of A’uwẽ watch, seeing the faces of their ancestors and kin as they were in 1962. It is 2019 and their communities have asked for the digital return of these materials, a set of anthropometric photographs originally made to document and quantify A’uwẽ difference. Scientists predicated their project of exhaustive data collection on assumptions of inevitable loss, and on appraisals that framed Indigenous Peoples as a reservoir of knowledge about human evolution. But these materials have different resonances of loss and value in the present for the people they document, who persist in vibrancy and political struggle. This paper examines our collaborative work to return the anthropometric materials, and the unexpected afterlives of scientific objects made to document human diversity. But it also poses questions about what it means to do this kind of work at a moment when settler academics, like myself, are turning to Indigenous Peoples and their knowledges with renewed fervor, in ways that may replicate the very colonial dynamics that our work seeks to undo. What are the potentials and pitfalls of trying to learn from A’uwẽ histories of science?
Elective Sexual Diversity: Histories, Archives, Politics
Numerous scholars have traced what might be termed “naturally-occurring” sexed and sexual diversity in the organic world. From Sigmund Freud, who asserted the “primary bisexuality” of human beings due to our sexually ambiguous embryonic status, to trained biologists such as Bruce Bagemihl and Karen Warkentin who study sexual diversity in non-human organisms, to interdisciplinary scholars who track the political economy of scientific study and its influence on vernacular understandings of gender and sexuality, what Bagemihl terms “biological exuberance” has become something of a well-worn scholarly path in science studies and sexuality studies alike. This paper will build on, and depart from, these conversations by asking how they change when the focus is on elective sexual diversity, rather than sexed and sexual diversity that is “naturally-occurring” in organic life forms. Focusing on transatlantic Anglophone medical and agricultural print culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this paper will explore the burgeoning interest in, and theorizing of, the effects of castration in both humans and non-human animals. Even the most cursory glimpse at newspapers from the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries will reveal significant engagement with the question of castration and the bodily and putatively temperamental changes that attend it. Newspapers from these far-reaching era advertise the services of workers who will castrate farm animals; include natural philosophical essays on the effects of castration in horses, bulls, sheep, dogs, and fish; post notices promising rewards for the return of enslaved people who had run away from those who enslaved them, sometimes noting, alongside height and age, that the person in question had been castrated; report self-castrations, sometimes in salacious detail; and reprint the equivalent of British celebrity gossip column that speculated about the procreative capacity of Europe’s most famous castrati opera singers. In more elite contexts, doctors and theorists of anatomy and physiology addressed the effects of castration in humans with increasingly frequency over the course of the nineteenth century, as these fields garnered considerable cultural traction as a result of their centrality to medical sciences in the era of its professionalization. Indeed, even Robley Duglinson, the so-called “Father of American Physiology” and personal physician to Thomas Jefferson, published a treatise on the effects of castration in humans in 1837.
This paper takes as a point of departure the fact that these increasingly loud conversations have something to tell us about both contemporary (18th and 19th-century) understandings of diversity in nature, even or especially when that diversity is sought out or coerced. From attention to changes in voice, fat distribution, emotionality, character, and sexual appeal, these putative effects—which scholars tend to read in the context of the history of the endocrinological sciences— are also meditations on both chosen and coerced sexed and sexual diversity. The archive at the center of the essay will consist primarily of discussions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical journals on the effects of castration in humans, following the medical experimentation—both violently coercive, and self-chosen—upon which these articles relied. While I am still developing the argument at the center of the paper, one of the broad objectives for this project will be to situate biological diversity, during the period of its focus, more centrally in the contexts of its social and political instrumentalization.
Colonial Rodent Control in Tanganyika and the Emergence of Ecological Frameworks
This article traces the emergence of ecological frameworks in the control of rodent outbreaks and plague disease transmission in colonial Tanganyika. At the end of the 1920s, Tanganyika Territory experienced several serious rodent outbreaks that threatened cotton and other grain production. During the same period, regular reports of pneumonic and bubonic plague were occurring in northern parts of the Territory. These events led the British colonial administration to dispatch several studies into rodent taxonomy (i.e. rodent biodiversity) and ecology in 1931 to determine the causes of rodent outbreaks and plague disease, and to control future outbreaks. The increasingly ecological approach to rodent populations and plague disease in colonial Tanganyika represented a wider, gradual shift in the biological sciences toward multi-causal (i.e. diverse) and systematic understandings of animal populations, infectious diseases, their vectors, and the environment. A focus on the natural ebb and flow of rodent populations allowed colonial officers to locate the responsibility for plague prevention and pest control in the realm of social policy that included propaganda, public health campaigns, and building regulations that incorporated colonial notions of sanitation and modernity. The article draws on sources from the Tanzania National Archives that discuss rodents as both agricultural pests and carriers of plague. It offers an important case study of the emergence of ecological frameworks (i.e. what “meanings and values do such frameworks provide anyway to understand human-rodent relations?) in a colonial setting that anticipated later global scientific interest in studies of rodent populations and rodent-borne disease ecology.
Using Fish to Think About Diverse Classrooms
In late September 2022 an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that faculty of color, including tenured professors, were leaving academia because they felt “disenfranchised, exhausted, and isolated.” That same week the Washington Post exposed how rapidly salmon populations are falling explaining that the “cultural damage is vast.”
The crisis in academia may seem remote from the salmon crisis but there are lessons to be learned if we examine “diversity” loss in social and ecological systems together. These seemingly disparate articles spoke about inhospitable environments that could no longer sustain certain human life. People —in one instance Alaskan natives and First Nations peoples and in the other people of Color—were opting to leave to survive. The conditions detailed in each article explained how these two groups in vastly different environments had struggled to remain where they were but the “climate” had changed.
For decades we were taught that a diverse professoriate was vital for us to flourish as a society. The value in different scholarly perspectives and lived-experiences usually remained unquestioned in higher education. But how to achieve this so-called diversity? Was this a numbers game? If so, what was the ideal number of so-called other professors? When would this balance be achieved? The same week that the Chronicle article revealed a slow but seemingly steady trickle of scholars of color leaving academia, the Ford Foundation announced it was ending a longtime fellowship designed to diversify academia. Among the reasons given was that it was time to sunset a program and allow others (private monies? Government? Universities?) to take the helm.
In this essay I will examine both meanings of “a changing climate” to attempt to explain how language of environmental historians and activists may help us understand a (un)changed academe.
“Diversity seems to me a good in itself”:
Human and Natural Diversity in the Work of Marston Bates
The work of biologist and author Marston Bates offers an entry point for examining the values of diversity across the twentieth-century life and human sciences. Best known for his environmental writings of 1949-1970, Bates was active in a publishing landscape that included figures like Rachel Carson, Desmond Morris, and Paul Ehrlich. His work on ecology, human nature, and population never reached the same heights of popularity or controversy as these contemporaries, but his widely-read books offered a synthetic view of scholarly disciplines concerned with humanity’s place in nature. Because of the way Bates moved promiscuously across the natural sciences, human sciences, and humanities, as well as between academic and vernacular science, his work offers a revealing snapshot of diversity discourse in formation. His work––perhaps uniquely so––engaged both with nascent concepts of “biodiversity” in ecology, genetics, and environmentalism, and with an emerging “diversity” framing of cultural, racial, and sexual difference in anthropology and civil rights movements. Bates’s writings reflected multiple mid-century diversity discourses, but also refracted them through the prism of his own experience. His perspective was deeply shaped by his career as an applied biologist in Latin America and the Mediterranean during the 1920s-1940s. His work, with the United Fruit Company and Rockefeller Foundation, brought him into close contact with an unusually wide array of biological species, environmental contexts, and human cultures, but also entangled him in processes of economic development predicated on the radical reduction of such diversity. His sexuality––as a queer man married to a woman––also positioned him to question dominant norms and modernity’s homogenizing tendencies. Later in life, Bates increasingly argued for the value of both human and natural diversity, which he saw as interconnected (yet not reductively so) and essential for survival and freedom. His life and work provides a vantage point for understanding the origins of today’s hegemonic diversity discourse, including “biodiversity” and “DEI,” and an avenue for recapturing a generative moment before diversity became reduced to a buzzword.
The “Unthought Known” in Ecological Writings
One of Donna Haraway’s slogans in her recent work is: “We are all compost.” This is only one of numerous calls in recent ecological writings and environmentally conscious ventures to consider the rhetorical and material liberatory potential of compost. In this essay, I argue that this “we” and the desire in Haraway’s and other ecological writings to become compost buries how blackness—almost always attached to people of African descent—has been defined by the being compost or that which issues from death to yield life for something else. The black(ened) position’s defining and unchosen state of being becomes an ethics of becoming for the white subject. These writings adopt the biological concept of symbiosis to consider generative becoming-with—an abundance—that requires the destruction or deformation—a loss—of one entity in the creation of a new or revised lifeform. Where is abundance to the entity that is always taxed and tasked with enduring loss?
The essay ends with an exploration of how radical anti-relationality emerges in the deconstructive practice of early twentieth century and present-day black artists rehearsing what Patricia Yaeger calls the “everyday world of white unseeing” or the “unthought known.” I consider how blackness as compost is an “unthought known” that these artists de-sediment by rendering strange “the omnipresence of ideas that are known but not acknowledged” (Yaeger).
Security, Territory, Primate:
Rhesus Monkeys, Racial Imaginaries, & the Politics of Population in Postcolonial India
This paper considers how the racialized Cold War project of controlling human population in postcolonial India was enmeshed with the governance of non-human primate populations. It focuses on the rhesus monkey’s emergence as a vexed site of population politics in the postcolonial state. As India struggled with famine in the years after independence, agricultural experts positioned the abundant commensal species as anobstacle to food production and consequently as a problem for human population management. They pointed to India’s growing rhesus populations as evidence of the nation’s developmental incapacity to feed and care for its growing human populations. At the same time, however, reproductive scientists positioned the rhesus monkey as a critical natural resource for Third World population control efforts. To these actors, the rhesus monkey was essential for modeling human reproductive physiology and developing new technologies to regulate the fertility of Third World women. These understandings of the rhesus monkey as simultaneous problem and resource for the control of India’s human populations mobilized transnational networks of experts and laymen. Politicians, demographers, American taxpayers, economists, and family planning officials all weighed in on how to manage India’s monkey populations. Yet if in the 1950s scientists framed the abundance of the rhesus monkey as a threat to effective human population management, by the early 1970s that relationship had been dramatically refigured; scientists now expressed fear that human abundance threatened the rhesus’ survival and accordingly launched programs to breed the species. By tracing the shifting preoccupations with the reproductive life of the rhesus monkey, this paper draws out the conceptions of abundance and loss that have shaped the more-than-human project of postcolonial population control.