Chaired by Nalan Azak
Ana Maria Delgado: Living: Microbial materials and future-makings
This presentation invites a reflection about the temporalities of microbial based living materials, and the concrete practices that enable their future existence. I will explore how people imagine, experience, and intervene the “living” in living materials such as fermented foods and newly engineered living materials (ELMs).
Fermenting food has traditionally been a way of preserving it. Using microbial metabolisms, air-control, water and salt, one can slow down natural processes of material decay. I will provide insights on the array of practices that people deploy in their home experiments with fermentations when trying to keep their microbial cultures living, growing and to make them develop towards future desired states. In contrast, engineered living materials as developed in laboratory practice, rely on design, algorithms, and mathematical models for growth control and to optimize properties of the living such as the capacity to self-repair. I will contrast these two practical domains to explore how people may engage in making futures in relations with living things, and to ask: How would it be to live with living materials? What do people need in order to keep them living and evolving over time? What expectations are they inscribed with? What kind of new socio-technical ecologies do they trigger into being? I draw on the concept of “informed materials” (Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers, 1996) to explore those interventions in living things by which they are projected into the future. The presentation is based on collaborative work in the Fungateria project and on my current ethnographic work on grassroots experimentation with fermentations. References: Bensaude-Vincent, B and Stengers, I. (1996). A History of Chemistry. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Bio: Ana Delgado is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies working at the TIKCentre for Technology, Innovation and Culture (University of Oslo). Her research is concerned with how people known, make and own living things, including the political ecology of biodiversity data. She has collaborated with scientists in the field of microbiology, and she is currently investigating a growing public interest on fermentation. Her research has also explored the intersections between activism, and science. She is the author of articles such as “Assembling Desires: Synthetic Biology and the Wish to Act at a Distant Time” published in Environment and Planning D; “DIYbio: Making Things and Making Futures” published in Futures, the Journal of Policy, Planning and Future Studies; and “Microbial Extractions: Sequence-based Bioprospecting, Augmented Promises and Elusive Politics”, published in Science, Technology and Human Values, among other.
Camelia Dewan, Elisabeth Schober and Johanna Markkula: Submission title Perilous Life Cycles: Studying the Transformations of Ships as both Theory and Method
In the maritime industry, the temporal concept of the "life cycle" is a widespread notion used to flag how, in our day and age, ships need to be considered from their production stage until the end of their purported utility. Such a holistic perspective on cargo vessels presumably also allows for a clearer focus on sustainability and the gradual greening of a notoriously polluting maritime industry.
The "life cycle" concept, with all its anthropomorphic connotations, is particularly suitable to the context of ships, which have traditionally been thought of as being “born”, having “a life,” and eventually being sent to their spectacular “death” on the shipbreaking beaches. Importantly, these stages in the “life” of ships map onto current geographies of production that span the entire globe. The construction of large-scale cargo vessels today primarily takes place in East Asia. These ships then sail worldwide under various flags and are manned with international crews drawn predominantly from South-East Asian nations, before they are sent to be “broken up” and recycled on beaches in South Asia.
Building on our collaborative ethnographic work on the container ship where we relate to three different temporal moments in the life course of cargo vessels (that is, shipbuilding, shipping, and ship-breaking), in this paper we investigate the notion of “perilous life cycles” as both a methodological tool and a theoretical contribution to the study of temporality and material assemblages that we seek to develop. By taking the emic industry term of the life cycle of container ships as our starting point, we seek to unpack how these ships are (dis-)assembled amidst high-risk labour processes that also relate back to the human temporalities and the frailty of life of the diverse work-forces involved throughout the ships' life cycle.
Bios: Camelia Dewan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway.
Johanna Markkula is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Vienna, Austria.
Elisabeth Schober is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway
L. Sasha Gora: Best Before: Time and Other Ingredients
In 1496 John Cabot received King Henry VII’s permission to sail westward to Asia and claim nonChristian lands. One year later, his ship coasted the shores of what is now Newfoundland and Labrador where he witnessed “codfish so thick they slowed the progress of our ship.” Upon his return to England, he promised the sovereign enough fish “to feed this kingdom…until the end of time”—an example of how fish claims land and creates wealth. In 1991, Historica Canada documented this history with a one-minute video. Ironically, however, time ended the following year: Newfoundland’s fishery collapsed on July 2, 1992. Cod should have lasted forever, but the entanglement between human appetites, fish as commodities, and technological developments overthrew the order of nature in the northwest Atlantic. It stopped time.
This vignette introduces the two stories that my paper proposes to narrate. The first weaves together resource temporalities—as exemplified by environmental exhaustion—in dialogue with multispecies timescapes and the second reflects on, and perhaps reconsiders, time as a means of marking an end. This can be the end of a resource, or the end of a recipe, or perhaps even the end of an ending. My paper will draw from my research project 'Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment,' but will also push beyond its thematic focus on the relationship between cuisine and extinction to more generally consider how culinary perspectives can contribute to understandings of time in the era of the Anthropocene. Jenny Linford, for example, calls time “the missing ingredient” (2018), and as the “fast” and “slow” food binary introduces, the speed of a clock often defines a dish just as much as its ingredients. Like a film or a song, the headnotes of many recipes list the amount of time required to turn plants and animals into dinner. Furthermore, commercial food products wear their lifespans on their sleeves, warning buyers when they are “best before.” In short, “Best Before: Time and Other Ingredients” will contribute to the 'Lifetimes Conference' and its consideration of the contemporary complications of collectively speaking about time.
Bio: L. Sasha Gora is a writer and cultural historian with a focus on food studies, contemporary art, and the environmental humanities. Her doctoral dissertation at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich chronicled the history of Indigenous restaurants in the lands now known as Canada, and received the 2021 Bavarian American Academy Dissertation Award. After a fellowship at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, she is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI), Essen, and will join the University of Augsburg in May 2023.