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) DEADLINE: March 31, 2025 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@american.edu), Pamela Perrimon (perrimon@usc.edu), and Hamsini Sridharan (hamsinis@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. -- *Maya Livio, PhD* Assistant Professor of Climate, Environmental Justice, Media & Communication *| *American University