Multiple imaginaries and practices gather under the term ecology. What counts as ecology, and for whom? This year the Technoscience Salon gathers up scholars, students, artists, and scientists to collectivity explore the many contours and incarnations of ecology.

Ecology names the study of the patterns of interactions between organisms and their environments. Ecological thinking can be attractive for the ways it articulates the dynamic interrelationships between living things and their milieus. Ecological approaches are particularly generative for rethinking becomings, and the dynamic processes that shape the beings and doings of lives enmeshed. But, ecological thinking also carries a moral valence; both scientists and environmental activists, for example, value some kinds of ecologies and relationships over others. And for many contemporary scholars, ecological “entanglements” have acquired an aesthetic value.

Ecology as a term is always implicated. Like “history” and “biology” the term “ecology” names both a mode of inquiry and its object of study. The term “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 in close association with and contradistinction from economy, referring to the study of “the economy of nature”, both of which derive from the Greek term ‘oikos’ – meaning household or dwelling. In this sense, ecology was understood as the study of ‘natural’ relationships as opposed to the human-governed economic exchanges. In the 20th century, ecology became closely associated with the study of ecosystems, profoundly shaped by functionalism, systems thinking, and cybernetics, binding the “economy of nature” ever closer to specific (human) economic rationales and calculations. This we might call the discipline’s conventional eco-logics.

In feminist science and technology studies, to engage ecology as natureculture is to emphasize the ways that practices of knowing and intervening involve more-than-human others. This year’s Technoscience Salon aspires to query ecology’s inheritances as a functionalist systems science and to provoke alternative articulations. The Salon will take up the political, epistemological, ontological and aesthetic work we want the concept of ecology to do.

Core Questions

• What are contemporary trends in ecological thinking?

• What appeals and disturbs about 20th century thinking in the discipline of ecology?

• What are the current ontological struggles over what counts as ecology?

• Where do ecologies end and begin?

• What about ecologies have been fetishized?

• What are ecologies’ others?

• What entities, relations, and imaginaries have been abjected from accounts of ecology?

• What subalterities do ecologies make or challenge? What is buried, ignored, unloved?

• What exceeds ecology?

• In what sense is ecological thinking predicated on the assumption of a balance and holism in nature?

• What senses of disruption, unevenness, friction, and inequality might reorient moral, political and aesthetic investments in ecology?

• How might ecologies provoke orientations that exceed the human, or even the organism?  As a name for the dynamic interactions between living and non-living forms, what are the stakes for theorizing the more-than-human and the more-than-organism? Might we imagine something like the more-than-ecological?

• “Political Ecology” which has grown as a subfield of geography, takes up the study of the politics, economics, socialities, inequalities and natures. It insists that human interactions with non-human entities and processes are always political and having been profoundly altered by economic relations. Yet, the field of political ecology also is filled with temptations towards functionalist systems thinking that have historically molded political economic thought as much as scientific ecological approaches. What is the epistemological choreography that continues to bind ecology and economy in advanced capitalism, and how might it be disrupted?

• What temporalities and topological imaginaries are at work in different versions of ecology? What time-hopping and scale-jumping does the figure of ecology encourage, and what is occluded?

• How might we build on Rob Nixon’s sense of the hard to perceive pace of “slow violence”? What interrelations are made visible and invisible by planetary and geological scales of space and time?

• How is ecology imbued with Darwinian narratives of competition and life struggle? What work does re-visioning ecology as filled with entangled communities, supports, and symbiosis do?

• What are the dominant narratives of crisis, change, equilibrium, and utopia that shape our imaginary of ecologies? What alternative ecological imaginaries exist or can be evoked? By and for whom?