Genomics; Philosophy of biology; Cattle selection; Material-Semiotic Bodies; Political Ecology
Abstract :
[en] Cattle farming is nowadays at the core of environmental concerns regarding lands that are being ruined. The very quality of air for instance is concerned, the breathability being affected by the enormous presence of cattle bodies.
Therefore, genomic interventions aim at remediating this situation by engineering the bodies of the cows through different practices such as breeding or intervention within the rumen microbiome.
In this presentation, I would like to engage with practices that aim at remediating environmental damages in both senses of the term: repair and create mediations. How to mediate cows’ bodies with those environmental imbalances?
Elaborating on this, I would like to analyse the ways through which a problem and its potential solutions might transit into the animal bodies. How, in that sense, a given body could be seen as an interpretation of its epoch? A body could be understood as a sign; the place where different interests, tentative or power relations are bodily written. Therefore, there is a kind of mediation that takes place between farm animals and the world they live in. I want to think about that passage, about this transaction between a body and its environment; be it human, technical, animal, bacterial and all the entities that create something called the environment through their interactions.
And finally, I would like to propose a new understanding of the practices of dissection as a way to open a body, a material semiotic body, in order to “read” it, underlying this reading as an ecopolitical practice.
Research Center/Unit :
SPIRAL
Disciplines :
Political science, public administration & international relations
Cattle farming is nowadays at the core of environmental concerns regarding lands that are being ruined. The very quality of air for instance is concerned, the breathability being affected by the enormous presence of cattle bodies.
Therefore, genomic interventions aim at remediating this situation by engineering the bodies of the cows through different practices such as breeding or intervention within the rumen microbiome.
In this presentation, I would like to engage with practices that aim at remediating environmental damages in both senses of the term: repair and create mediations. How to mediate cows’ bodies with those environmental imbalances?
Elaborating on this, I would like to analyse the ways through which a problem and its potential solutions might transit into the animal bodies. How, in that sense, a given body could be seen as an interpretation of its epoch? A body could be understood as a sign; the place where different interests, tentative or power relations are bodily written. Therefore, there is a kind of mediation that takes place between farm animals and the world they live in. I want to think about that passage, about this transaction between a body and its environment; be it human, technical, animal, bacterial and all the entities that create something called the environment through their interactions.
And finally, I would like to propose a new understanding of the practices of dissection as a way to open a body, a material semiotic body, in order to “read” it, underlying this reading as an ecopolitical practice.
