Call for Papers: Biomimicry and the Nature of Technoscience
Biomimicry informs an expanding range of ‘nature-inspired’ technologies developed in response to social and environmental concerns. Although mimicry is common throughout biological life, the concept is often attributed to Benyus’ foundational text, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997), and conceptualized as the ‘conscious emulation of nature’ applied to the design of technologies and societies alike. We encounter examples of biomimicry across a variety of everyday contexts; in Velcro® closures modeled from seed pods of burdock plants (burrs), high-speed trains and planes with aerodynamic shapes mimicking beak and wing structures of birds, hydroelectric dams inspired by the architectural sensibilities of beavers, the Internet of Things (IoT) modeled after beehives, urban planning models using the puzzle-solving capacities of slime molds, among others.
Biomimicry is often referred to as a science of nature that draws on problem-solving approaches developed by biological organisms and systems during the past 3.8 billion years of life on Earth. It is also regarded as a science of technology that draws upon this repository of solutions to create new technologies and technical cultures (Fisch 2017). Critiques of biomimicry note its division of nature and culture, marking the cultural production of nature as an ontologically distinct, exploitable, and ‘natural’ resource (Johnson & Goldstein 2015). This angle of approach situates biomimicry among projects of bioprospecting and biopiracy as appropriations of biological life and knowledges thereof from ecosystems and societies rendered exploitable through the growth of bio-economies (Reid 1993; Shiva 1998; Birch & Tyfield 2012). These practices continually transform nonhuman life into fungible forms of biovalue and biocapital (Waldby 2002; Rajan 2006; Rose 2007; Helmreich 2008; Mitchell & Waldby 2010).
Biomimicry also gathers humans and more-than-humans into generative assemblages mediated through science and technology, wherein multiple bio-logics and vitalities converge and emerge anew (Donati; 2019; Szymanski 2024). Multi-species encounters, biohybrids, and biotechnologies developed to address a wide range of social and environmental concerns are championed among those advocating for a new biomimetic world. Addressing environmental and climate concerns at planetary levels, for example, biomimicry borrows from biological organisms and ecosystems as models of environmental adaptation and proxies for environmental knowledge (Johnson 2020). As such, biomimicry reframes social and environmental crises as a crisis of epistemology, marking the limitations of human problem solving while recruiting the knowledge of nonhuman beings. By thinking with and through nonhumans as a mode of transformational becoming, biomimicry is an onto-epistemological project anticipating the conscious co-production of biological and technological life (Braidotti 2009; Houle 2011; Ingold 2011; LaPlante 2015; Tsing 2015; Haraway 2016).
This Call for Papers (CfP) welcomes submissions for a series on ‘Biomimicry & the Nature of Technoscience’. 4S Backchannels seeks contributions from established and emerging scholars engaging broadly with biomimicry, biotechnology, the production of biovalue and biocapital, and the biopolitics that emerge throughout. Submissions should include original research contributions and reflections attending to historical, contemporary, or speculative domains. We encourage submissions situated within Science and Technology Studies (STS), History of Science (HOS), and adjacent disciplines including anthropology and sociology, with implications for fields including biology, botany, ecology, urban planning, architecture, engineering, material science, and various approaches to design.
Short form submissions (~3000 words) should be formatted using the Chicago Manual of Style using hyperlinks for in-text citations (no footnotes, endnotes, or lists of citations required). Submissions should be sent as a Google Doc (alternate formats are not accepted) and emailed to the 4S Backchannels Editorial Team at: backchannels@4sonline.org
Questions regarding submissions can be sent to Aaron Gregory PhD (Editor, 4S Backchannels) at aaron.gregory [at] ucr.edu
