89. Organisms and/as Technologies: Responsibilities and Response-abilities Towards the More-than-human
Maya Hey, Colorado State University; Marie F Turner, Colorado State University; Erika Amethyst Szymanski, Colorado State University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
What responsibilities do humans have to creatures that we make into technologies? How do we build response-abilities with organisms who are also tools? Humans depend on the lives of myriad others, and contemporary science and technology presents fresh reasons to negotiate those interdependencies (e.g., E. coli producing insulin, xenotransplanting pig hearts). In this open panel, we invite contributions that juxtapose responsibilities and response-abilities to think through what constitutes responsible research and innovation (RRI) in explicitly more-than-human terms.
RRI often produces checklists, protocols, and solutions about humans. Multispecies studies lead with reflexivity around decentering humans, but often remain theoretical without necessarily arriving at answers. In this panel, we hope to hold onto the tension inherent in multispecies RRI to open up the premise of “responsible relations.” How do we respect intractability and inabilities-to-know while still taking responsable/responsible actions we must? Following examples set by Vinciane Despret, we are interested in how relationships among humans and other creatures constitute response-abilities and responsibilities in grounded, practical terms that do work within these tensions without necessarily resolving them.
We suspect that, although RRI and multispecies studies are usually separate conversations, bringing them together will foreground and poke at conventions that each often takes for granted, while exploring the practical matter of how to use organisms and/as technology in the present and toward desirable (more-than-human) futures. While we, the convenors, tend to work with microbes, we enthusiastically invite contributions from others whose work concerns working relationships with other critters, contemporary and otherwise.
