Cristi Rojas, Nicole A.; (2024) ¡Nosotros crecemos cosas! [‘We grow things!’] From Tecnología to Technodiversity, Technical Relations of ‘Growing Materials’ in Chile. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This research explores the modes of relations that emerge in the practices of the fabrication of biomaterials in Chile, a process known as ‘biofabrication’. It is based on a 16-month ethnography in biofabrication laboratories in Chile, during which an in-depth collaborative ethnography was conducted in a laboratory situated in Valdivia, in the south zone of the country. Taking the makers’ emic category of crecer materials [‘to grow materials’], through which they refer to their production process that integrates biological or biochemical processes and organic sources into human and machines’ technical activities, I explore the relation between ‘growing’ and ‘making’. Through the ethnography, I describe how the practice involves particular modes of relations with materiality, the milieu, the body, knowledge, rhythm and more-than-human agents; these relations emerge through and are mediated by the technical activities, involving moral and cosmological dimensions. The research concludes these technical relations are grounded in an ecological approach that places logics of care and the situated interrelation of diverse more-than- human agents and technical worlds at the forefront. This challenges a hegemonic ‘technological’ imagination around the category of tecnología in Chile, which is shaped by universal pretensions, apparent neutrality and Chilean neoliberalism. Guided by the perspectives of the pluriverse, cosmotechnics and technodiversity, the ethnography embraces and affirm the multiplicity and dynamism of the technics and the heterogeneity of the region, contributing to challenge a ‘mono-technological’ culture through alternative ways of relating to the environment in the face of the climate and ecological crisis and going beyond a Eurocentric and modern teleology of ‘progress’.

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