Forests as Techno-Natures: Translating Digital Environmental Subjects

In the EASST Conference The Politics of Technoscientific Futures, taking place in Madrid July 6–9, Cluster Member Robert Stock was part of the panel ForeSTS, which aimed to bring together STS perspectives on forests.

Abstract: Forests have recently become the object of renewed concerns, as wildfires and deforestation alarms have positioned them as the sentinels of the damages of climate change and environmental degradation, while their capacity to act as carbon sinks has revealed them as a potential venue for fighting climate change by reducing global CO2 emissions. The panel proposes to relate these recent developments to longstanding analyses of forests as the locus of future-making. In line with the conference theme, we invite contributions that examine the multiple temporalities of forests and the processes by which the past, the present and the future are drawn together and acted upon. More broadly, we aspire to position forests as an object for STS: an object that fruitfully lends itself to the categories and methods of STS, and an object that STS should think with if it ambitions to dissect the politics of techno-scientific (and other) futures.

Stock's talk »Forests as Techno-Natures: Translating Digital Environmental Subjects« was closely related to the project Active Trees – Knowledge, Technologies and Futures. This research project is part of Material Form Function and will contribute to their research by developing an interdisciplinary and humanities-based perspective on wood, forests, and bark. It will draw on new materialism, STS, history of knowledge; decolonial thought and posthuman approaches to map tree-related knowledges, technologies, and futures by drawing on scientific works, material cultures, and cultural production (film, arts, literature, exhibitions).