147. Unsettling Taxonomic Difference: Caring for More-Than-Human Ecologies
Hina Walajahi, MIT HASTS; Salina Suri, Harvard University - History of Science
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
Prompted by the “multispecies” turn in STS towards care and interdependency, this panel seeks to historicize the reproduction of privileged taxonomies through contemporary “multispecies” discourse and antagonize this reproduction by “stirring up and putting into motion” (Murphy 2015) the ways classification systems and care-based approaches are predicated on asymmetrical labor and messy relations. Caring is a troubled and evolving process that is vital to the recuperation, reunion, and reconfiguration of relations between humans and other-than-humans. For this panel, we invite theorization of what it might mean to live and write with more-than-human ecologies, resisting and interrogating taxonomies of difference while holding close a feminist ethic of care. Here, we hold Puíg de la Bellacasa’s formation of care as “an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” in concert with other critical pedagogies and praxes of care (Tallbear 2011; Whyte and Cuomo 2017; Haraway 2008). We especially welcome scholars who consider care through decolonial, feminist, queer, and/or crip lenses.
This panel encourages critical engagement around unsettling practices of care and applying this ethic in service of plural and more just relations (Murphy 2015). How can care as praxis and pedagogy contribute to the cultivation of many worlds? How does “multispecies thinking” maintain taxonomic categories that privilege humans and Western science? Further, how does “multispecies thinking” reproduce and encourage this difference? How can care be applied to challenge taxonomic hierarchies, when care itself is situated in “affective economies” (Ahmed 2004) formed through uneven circulations of labor and power?
