124. Taxonomies in an Era of More-Than-Human Agency // Taxonomías en la Era de Agencia No-Humana
Elana Shever, Colgate University; Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo, University of Pennsylvania
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
Scientific taxonomies are powerful ordering techniques, power-laden devices of inclusion and exclusion, and influential discourses that do not merely describe the world but actively remake it. Despite frequent claims that modern scientific taxonomies reveal the intrinsic order in the apparent chaos of nature, scientific taxonomies are neither intrinsically rational nor value-neutral. Like other classificatory practices, scientific classification is simultaneously a political, discursive and material act. In this context, some scholars have criticized scientists for imposing an order on life that does not inherently exist. Yet other scholars—in both the social and life sciences—show that nonhuman beings create taxonomies of their own. At the same time that novel taxonomies are being constituted, contested, reconfigured, scholars are revealing new forms of agency, voice, and ethics that are troubling long-standing assumptions about the natural order of the world.
For this panel, we invite proposals of research papers that examine a wide range of taxonomies and their world-making implications, in the past and present. We hope to pay special attention to the ways in which taxonomies challenge the boundaries among landscapes, organisms, and objects, among forms of agency and power, and between matter and discourse. We also hope to discuss the implications of historical and emergent classificatory systems for those studying science and technology, and their implications for the future of these fields.
