There might be a wasp in my soup: dodgy organisms in rapid biodiversity assessments

IT University’s Technologies in Practice Research Group invites you to an upcoming event of our Environmental Futures Seminar Series (16/1/2015, 10:30-12:00, room 3a07): a talk by Tahani Nadim (Natural History Museum, Berlin/CSISP, London) on an emerging paper, entitled

There might be a wasp in my soup: dodgy organisms in rapid biodiversity assessments

With this talk I would like to attend to some of the material-semiotic overflows provoked by the “biodiversity soup”, a novel molecular method for ascertaining the presence of small or elusive species in a given environment. This method is based on “DNA barcoding”, that is, the identification of species by way of sequencing a small unique region of their respective genomes. Unlike DNA barcoding which commences with extracting a DNA sample from an individual, more or less whole, organism, the biodiversity soup does away with the traditional organismal unit. Instead, a soup of “homogenized” beings, mostly arthropods, becomes the elementary subject. With the biodiversity soup being promoted as an efficient means for doing biodiversity assessments—central components of environmental policies—puzzling and pressing questions emerge which I would like to discuss with you: How does the soup make nature accountable/countable? How does the soup sense? What relations of responsibility, what vulnerabilities are construed and how are they distributed? What kind of problem is biodiversity loss when biodiversity soup is seen as a response to it? If the soup is a way of accounting for biodiversity, what are the enumerated entities here? What becomes qualculable, what non-qualculable?

More details of the seminar series at http://itu.dk/tip/?p=3283