“Managing Life’s Future: Species Essentialism & Evolutionary Normativity in Conservation Policy”

Katrina Maggiulli, PhD candidate, Environmental Studies, and 2021–22 OHC Dissertation Fellow. My dissertation seeks to better understand how popular essentialist understandings of species are operationalized through U.S. conservation policy to create materially specific species realities. I mark key foundations of these essentialist views on species in the eugenics-supported purity rhetoric of early U.S. conservation and show how contemporary debates over biotechnology as a conservation tool and speculative imaginaries of future species enable a rethinking of these restrictive and normative views on species being.