European research and funding policies have increasingly sought to orient research and innovation towards transformative change. A prominent expression of this agenda is the development of Nature-Based Solutions, which promote the idea of building with nature and challenge the conventional separation between construction and nature conservation.
In this talk, Lucas Brunet examines a specific type of technology, ecological infrastructures, which seek to transform existing infrastructures to accommodate more-than-human life, and turn inert material devices into living objects. The analysis draws on six months of ethnographic research in the Netherlands on the detection and identification of bats in buildings.
Brunet attends to the practices through which the built environment can be turned into ecological infrastructures through the construction of bat boxes and bat towers. The case of bats provides an opportunity to examine what is promised by transformative change, and how a technology presented as transformative is implemented in the messy and feral world of more-than-human life.
About the speaker
Lucas Brunet is a Research Assistant Professor at LISIS (Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés), in INRAE (France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment) and University Gustave Eiffel.
About the event
This is an in-person event part of the STS Department (TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology) Doctoral Colloquium Fall 2026. If you are not registered for the Colloquium but would like to attend the Seminar Series with Lucas Brunet, please email contact@trm.tum.de.
TransforM’s Seminar Series is a space for cross-disciplinary conversation on transformative technologies and their socio-economic impact. It brings leading academics and international experts for open, research-driven discussions on the technologies reshaping our economies, institutions and everyday lives.
