笔谤辞箩别肠迟听蝉耻尘尘补谤测
In an ocean of poachers, pollution, overfishing, prey decline, and climate change,聽preserving the lives of many endangered marine species requires persistent monitoring by sensing technologies like drones. For academic critics, these conservation drones contribute to a problematic disciplining of a once-wild ocean. For conservationists, drones are necessary tools for protecting threatened marine species. While many scholars debate 鈥渢he end of nature,鈥 few empirically understand what conservation technologies mean for the supposed convergence of nature and culture as well as the prolonging of non-human life. Ethnographically examining the use of drones in marine conservation, OCEAN/CULTURES explores the fraught but now fundamental relationship between technologies and non-human life in an ocean on the brink of collapse.
In the eight chapters of OCEAN/CULTURES,聽drones fly through whale breath for health checks, collect data for stories about starving seals, intervene in the poaching of porpoises and sharks, and record disintegrating coral and urban whale migrations. In this work, drones contribute to the mortal cocreation of ocean/cultures鈥攊ntertwinements of scientists, activists, marine species, atmospheric technologies, and the tumultuous sea.聽OCEAN/CULTURES makes the uncomfortable argument that slowing聽extinction might require 鈥渂lue governmentality鈥 or the entrapment of existence by technologies of science, conservation, and control. This management of life is paradoxical and will never be complete as drones fail, species collapse, and oceans and cultures, although entangled, remain distinct. OCEAN/CULTURES concludes by positing a multispecies ethics that聽honours聽that distinction with care and awe.
Researcher:
Scientia Associate Professor Adam Fish
Funding body:
糖心logo Scientia Fellowship
Research area:
technology studies, media studies, anthropology, posthumanism