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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Rhetorics Of Species Revivalism And Biotechnology – A Roundtable Dialogue, Eva Kasprzycka, Charlotte Wrigley, Adam Searle, Richard Twine Jan 2023

Rhetorics Of Species Revivalism And Biotechnology – A Roundtable Dialogue, Eva Kasprzycka, Charlotte Wrigley, Adam Searle, Richard Twine

Animal Studies Journal

This informal dialogue contextualises and explores contemporary practices of nonhuman animal gene-modification in de-extinction projects. Looking at recent developments in biotechnology’s role in de-extinction sciences and industries, these interdisciplinary scholars scrutinise the neoliberal impetus driving ‘species revivalism’ in the wake of the Capitalocene. Critical examinations of species integrity, cryo-preservation, techno-optimism, rewilding initiatives and projects aimed at restoring extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth and bucardo are used to map some of the necessary restructuring of conservation policies and enterprises that could secure viably sustainable – and just – futures for nonhuman animals at risk of extinction. The authors question …


The Unnaturalness Objection To De-Extinction: A Critical Evaluation, Carolyn Mason Jan 2017

The Unnaturalness Objection To De-Extinction: A Critical Evaluation, Carolyn Mason

Animal Studies Journal

De-extinction of species has been criticised for being unnatural, as have the techniques that might be used to accomplish de-extinction. This objection of unnaturalness will be dismissed by those who claim that everything that humans do is natural, by those who claim that naturalness is a social construct, and by those who argue that ethical concerns arising from considerations of unnaturalness rest on a failure properly to distinguish facts from values. However, none of these criticisms of the objection of unnaturalness is convincing, for reasons I will explain in this paper. The objection of unnaturalness might be motivated by concerns …


Making Sense? Visual Cultures Of De-Extinction And The Anthropocentric Archive, Rosie Ibbotson Jan 2017

Making Sense? Visual Cultures Of De-Extinction And The Anthropocentric Archive, Rosie Ibbotson

Animal Studies Journal

This article examines the operations of visual representations within discourses advocating deextinction. Images have significant agency within these debates, yet their roles, and the assumptions they naturalise, have not been critiqued. Demonstrating the affective, triumphant and subversive potentials of these representations, this article then turns to the implications of relying on images made by and for humans within the expressly multispecies space of de-extinction. Discourses around de-extinction tend to place undue weight not just on how candidate species look(ed), but on how they appear to human eyes after the mediating processes of representation, and the notion of recreating a nonhuman …