Please note the time change for this session!
Reevaluating Insects as Archives – Collection Ecologies as Multidisciplinary and Multipractice Conversation
Dominik Huenniger, German Port Museum, Hamburg
Karina Lucas Silva-Brandão, Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change
Christian Reiß, Regensburg University
Xiaoya Zhan, Nanyang Technological University
Abstract:
Historically marginalized beings gain significance when networks of relations are redrawn through ecological sciences. These sciences are typically seen as working in or on “the field,” but natural history collections are used increasingly by scholars to readdress ecological questions. Natural history collections, understood as environments themselves, foreground both the materiality of specimens and the knowledges extracted from them in an ongoing discourse about the norms of scientific practices. Insects reevaluated as archives foreground possible sites of multidisciplinary research, with multifaceted potential for the history of science. With different disciplinary approaches to the study of small animals and the production of collections, history of science, archaeology, environmental history, and natural history are brought into conversation a forum on “Collection Ecologies” published in a Focus Section of Isis - A Journal of the History of Science Society in March 2024. The participants of this exchange about collections as a web of relationships entailing regimes of value, epistemes of logistics, and bureaucratic and scientific practices explore how multidisciplinary knowledge of “natural” bodies can be formed around insect collections. For the Collecion Ecologies CHSTM Working Group meeting they share their experience in collaborating on this forum.