New Publications: What If Pandas Can Recognise Kin? Implications for Conservation

Giant pandas are protected as global ‘natural heritage’ and as China’s ‘national treasure.’ Christof Lammer shows how, behind the spotlight on panda diplomacy, cultural ideas about kinship – and the genealogical, genetic, and behavioural measurements built on them – redirect species conservation.

A recently published journal article and a working paper by Christof Lammer (Department of Society, Knowledge and Politics) examine how conservation scientists decide which pandas should breed; how a matchmaking algorithm based on genealogical calculations and genetic measurements draws criticism for resulting in ‘unsatisfying arranged marriages’, and how some researchers try to recognise panda agency, thereby granting animals more say in their own species’ protection. Yet these attempts reconfigure human–panda relations in unforeseen ways.

Instead of imposing human measurements of kinship on protected animals, several researchers study whether pandas themselves can recognise kin. While such efforts decentre the human, Lammer shows they also, inadvertently, reinforce human preoccupations with kinship – especially cultural imaginaries about heterosexuality, care, and incest – and rely on the very measurement practices that dominate panda conservation.

While kin recognition studies may promote panda‑led mating ex situ, they can tighten human control elsewhere, for example, by discouraging foster mothering or regulating which cubs share enclosures, both grounded in human measurements of panda kinship.

In contrast to sweeping blueprints for revolutionising conservation by decentring the human via market-oriented ‘new conservation,’ wilderness‑first neoprotectionism, or posthumanist ethics, Lammer argues for a modest, seemingly paradoxical move: moving beyond anthropocentrism also requires recentring the human, not to reassert control, but to make human knowledge practices visible and accountable. Humans remain implicated even in the very act of stepping aside in conservation. Understanding how human ways of knowing nonhuman agency produce specific effects in multispecies relations is therefore essential.

 

Lammer, Christof. 2025. Can Pandas Measure Kinship to Conserve the Species? Implications of Knowing More-Than-Human Heritage Making. tbc. working through heritage concepts 4. https://doi.org/10.18452/34379.

Lammer, Christof 2026. When Scientists Study Panda Kin Recognition: Decentring and Recentring the Human in Conserving China’s National Treasure. International Journal of Heritage Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2026.2655940.

 

These open-access publications emerged from Christof Lammer’s research project “Panda Heritage: Kinship Measurements and Life’s Value in Species Conservation” during a fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies | Käte Hamburger Kolleg inherit at Humboldt University of Berlin (2024–2025).

New Publication on Monitoring as Knowledge Practice in a National Park

As global conservation policy focuses primarily on the expansion of protected areas, one may ask if and how protected areas contribute to the conservation of endangered species and habitats. The usual way to answer this question in the context of conservation is to regularly survey, or monitor plants, animals and ecosystems.

In a recently published contribution in the journal Social Studies of Science, Erik Aarden describes monitoring as a distinct knowledge practice in conservation and biodiversity research and thereby develops a novel perspective on a specific form of scientific research. On the basis of ethnographic research on soda lake, botanical and geese monitoring in Neusiedler See-Seewinkel National Park, the article describes how the possibility of surveying nature is shaped by organisational conditions, data collection instruments and routines, as well as human and non-human behavior.

The article thereby demonstrates, how monitoring does not just represent the national park, but enacts it in space and time, and how this perspective is meaningful for both a social science perspective on “field” research and area-based conservation.

The article is accessible (open access) via: https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127261442140

A Calm Sea? New Book about Feminist Activism in Latin America

Are youth feminisms in Latin America in retreat, or are they simply transforming? This question runs through the collective volume co-edited by Camila Ponce Lara. The book brings together ten research studies on activist experiences in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.

¿Un mar en calma? Continuidades, transformaciones y desafíos de los activismos feministas jóvenes en América Latina (A Calm Sea? Continuities, Transformations and Challenges of Young Feminist Activisms in Latin America), edited by Camila Ponce Lara and Marina Larrondo, has just been published by CLACSO, The Latin American Council of Social Sciences.

The book examines young feminist activisms in the period following the fourth feminist wave, organizing its findings around three axes: the trajectories and internal tensions of these movements; educational spaces as territories of political dispute; and the intersections between youth activism and structures of inequality. Through qualitative methodologies, the studies address topics ranging from the biographical imprints of militant commitment to the emotional repertoires of activists, processes of political socialization, and the emergence of right-wing antifeminist counter-movements, including groups of women who claim a “true empowerment” from conservative frameworks.

Against readings that announce demobilization, the volume argues that feminist struggles are in a state of latency: their networks persist, their identities consolidate, and their political grammars continue to expand. This work is at once a contribution to academic debate and a tool for activists and educators. As a continuation of the volume published in 2019, it confirms the existence of a generation that maintains its transformative conviction and finds in feminisms a compass for navigating the complexities of the present.

The book is in Spanish and available online (open access).

New Book ‘Producing Citizenship in Medical Research Collections’

In his recently published book ‘Producing Citizenship in Medical Research Collections’ Erik Aarden addresses the question if and how tissue and data collections in medical resarch produces a public good, accessible to all. Studying examples of such collections in Europe, India, Singapore and the United States, he argues that particular forms of citizenship – individual and collective rights and responsibilities – are built into the collections, challenging the idea of a good for all. The book thereby provides a novel perspective on data infrastructures in the health domain. More information on the book can be found via: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-95-1707-7