[Air-L] Call For Papers: Murmurations in Avian Technoscience - Catalyst Special Section

[Marika L. Cifor]

Call For Papers: Murmurations in Avian Technoscience a Special Section
of *Catalyst:
Feminism, Theory, Technoscience**Guest Editors:  **Maya Livio* (American
University), *Pamela Perrimon* (University of Southern California), *Hamsini
Sridharan* (University of Southern California)
https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/announcement/view/976

Birds have long been subjected to technological collection from shotguns to
mist nets, cameras to algorithms. They have also been made into tools of
data gathering themselves, as canary sensors in coal mines, pigeon
messengers, and aerial photographers. Ornithology, one of the oldest
organized scientific disciplines, centers on bird data that extends from
specimen bodies to digital repositories. Across these sites of
bird/technology encounter, power is surfaced—to identify, to count, to
kill, to conserve—raising questions around classification, control, and the
logics of capture.

Nonhuman animals such as birds have offered invaluable perspectives to
feminist STS scholarship. As early as the nineteenth century, feminist and
more-than-human concerns have been brought into dialogue regarding the
treatment of women and nonhuman animals by science (Adams and Donovan 1995,
34-35). More recently, feminist STS scholars such as Lynda Birke have
emphasized the stakes for separating the study of human and more-than-human
animals as leading to “a fragmented knowledge” that limits understandings
of concepts like gender (Birke 2010, 341). “Feminist politics,” Birke calls
to action, “stands to gain by a more sustained examination of concepts of
species—how we use them, what purposes they serve, how they are sustained
by material practices” (Birke 2010, 346). Similarly, Yuka Suzuki
demonstrates the urgency of more-than-human study for addressing racialized
oppression, reminding us that the maintenance of the human-animal boundary
“render[s] certain groups of humans more beastly and other types of animals
more human” (Suzuki 2017, 109). Nonhuman beings like birds therefore direct
our attention to the processes, technologies, and injustices of
categorization (of race, of gender, of species, etc.), as well as to the
relational webs that bind human and nonhuman together.

Jody Berland observes that “of all species, birds are the most common
mediators between people and wildlife” (2019, 178). It is not surprising,
then, that birds in particular are present in recent STS explorations in
what could be called “avian technoscience.” Etienne Benson (2017), for
example, examines the historical community science practices of bird
banding, while Frédéric Keck (2020) maps the circulation of flu viruses in
cross-species interactions between humans and birds. Feminist avian
technoscience, more specifically, has engaged with the questions surfaced
by birds around areas such as knowledge hierarchies, care, and materiality.
Vinciane Despret, reflecting on her nighttime encounter with a blackbird,
considers how scientific accounts of the avian may open or foreclose birdy
possibilities: “There are explanations which end up multiplying worlds and
celebrating the emergence of an infinite number of modes of existence,” she
writes, “and others which seek to impose order, bringing them back to a few
basic principles” (2021, 6). Selen Eren and Anne Beaulieu (2023),
meanwhile, draw attention to the “intermittent care” between researchers
and black-tailed godwits, examining how ecologists oscillate between caring
for individual bird welfare and caring for the species as a whole through
data collection. And following a tissue sample taken from a bird carcass on
its journey through a natural history museum, Adrian Van Allen (2020)
examines how the material practices of preserving birds as specimens and
data sustain dominant standardizations of nature.

Linking this work back to human-centered feminist thought, Maya Livio
(2023) brings a queer ecological lens to the study of avian data. Noting
the male and heterosexual biases in scientific and cultural bird
datasets—where female, intersex, and queer birds are largely absent or
misclassified—Livio highlights the power of avian science to naturalize
normative assumptions of sex and sexuality for all species, including
humans. Nicholas Mirzoeff (2022) unpacks ornithology as “a white way of
seeing,” (123) reflecting on the racist and settler colonial histories of
birding and its technologies of capture in the wake of the 2020 Central
Park birdwatching incident. And Sunaura Taylor (2017) calls attention to
the disabling effects of the technologies of forced egg production on the
bodies of battery hens. She argues that by refusing to acknowledge
disability in nonhuman animals, humans sustain the human/nonhuman divide at
the expense of recognition of mutually resonant vulnerabilities that could
lead to collective liberation. Taylor asks, “if humans can share this sort
of vulnerability with nonhuman animals, what else might we share?” (31).
This question only becomes more salient in the face of escalating
environmental crises.

In this special issue, we call for a motley flock of research and
practice-based approaches to the avian-machine interface. We invite
birders, that is, those who notice avian relations, to explore how birds
enter, become, confound, or mutate technology (expansively defined). We
seek to engage in how the stuff of birds—their beaks, bones, and
feathers—is datafied, mechanized, and digitized. We are also interested in
constellations in flight that reflect on avian boundaries and breakdowns as
they intersect gendered, queer, crip, raced, classed, and anticolonial
questions, highlighting what may otherwise go unremarked when birds become
a passive thing to ‘think with.’

Submissions might include engagement with avian technoscience as it relates
to:

   - Birds becoming technology (e.g. data, models, maps, sensors,
   sentinels, as well as Indigenous and non-Western approaches to technology)
   and how, for example, these may reinforce or challenge dominant modes of
   knowledge production
   - Technology becoming avian (e.g. biomimicry, or the use of bird bodies
   and behaviors as technological reference points) as, for instance,
   instrumentalized for military tech development
   - Technologies of ornithological study (e.g. bird banding/ringing,
   radar, passive acoustic monitoring, 3D scanning, machine learning) and, for
   example, their relationship to the colonial logics of capture
   - Technologies of managing avian life and death (e.g. technologies for
   conservation, de-extinction, bird breeding, reproduction, and response to
   avian zoonoses) and how, for instance, they instantiate control of sex,
   gender, and sexuality
   - Contact zones between birds and technological infrastructures (e.g.
   interactions between birds and cell towers, energy infrastructures, etc.)
   as related to environmental and multispecies justice concerns, for example
   - The link between birds and technologies of surveillance (e.g. drones,
   birdfeeder cams, and nest cams) and, for instance, what they surface about
   racialized hypervisibility and invisibility
   - Bird taxonomy and classification technologies, and, for example, how
   they reinforce hegemonic categorization
   - Community science platforms and other collective modes of bird
   tracking, including, for instance, their exclusions of marginalized peoples
   and the consequences of those exclusions for birds
   - And creative approaches to imaging, sounding, or sensemaking of birds
   through media and computation technologies relating to any of the above

We welcome diverse submission formats including writing (scholarly,
creative, interviews, reviews, and more); creative
research/research-creation; visual, moving image, and sonic artworks; media
rich essays; and other innovative approaches. Interdisciplinary research is
particularly encouraged.

To be considered for inclusion in this themed section, please send an
abstract or proposal (300-500 words) and a short bio (max 250 words) to
Maya Livio (livio at american.edu), Pamela Perrimon (perrimon at usc.edu), and
Hamsini Sridharan (hamsinis at usc.edu) with “Murmurations” in the subject
line by March 31, 2025.

Full papers and projects should adhere to the Catalyst author guidelines
<https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/style-guidelines>. Selected
papers and projects will be invited to submit fully developed submissions.

-- 
Marika Cifor, PhD
Assistant Professor
Information School, University of Washington
Box 352840 - Mary Gates Hall, Ste. 370
Seattle, WA 98195-2840
mcifor at uw.edu
https://marikacifor.com/
pronouns: she/her/hers