Feminist STS

The author takes up Karl Marx's and Herbert Marcuse's investigations into the characteristics of, and the conditions of possibility for, expanding the experience of freedom and play. The essay begins with an analysis of three possible approaches to resolving the labor question. Finding each approach ultimately unsatisfactory, the essay goes on to argue that theoretical and practical attempts to render necessary work superfluous in the interests of free play must reckon with the limits of Marx's original formulation of the possibility as well as the problematic aspects of Marcuse's attempts to fuse the spheres of work and play together. The political question of navigating necessity remains central to all investigations concerned with expanding the possibility of free play. Inverting Marcuse's reading of Freud through Marx, this essay concludes by speculating on the arational character of desire and the potentially risky and unpredictable consequences that could result from taking such an understanding of desire seriously. To what extent do particular social relations condition desire? Given non-repressive social conditions, does desire necessarily overcome irrational or socially destructive manifestations?

Focusing on the efforts of Nairobi’s water utility to reduce leakage in the city’s expansion of water infrastructure, this study offers an organizational assemblage perspective on infrastructure. Drawing on the concept of assemblage and its uptake in science and technology studies and cultural anthropology, infrastructure is the material form of emergent systems through which the flow of nature, goods, ideas, people and finance is organized over space and time. Nairobi’s water infrastructure brings together a diverse set of features, including pipes, meters, GPS technologies, smartphones, engineering reports, Excel spreadsheets, landlords, plumbers, African chiefs, thieves, foreign experts, politicians, accountants, engineers, the everyday lives and ethnicities of the people of Nairobi, climate conditions, hydraulics, urban topographies and the fluids sludge and water.
Based on a thick performative description of three praxiographic studies, condensed from a four-year ethnographic case study that included eight months of onsite fieldwork in Nairobi, I describe the engagement of Nairobi’s water utility in three technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. Through a creative non-fictional writing process, including ficto-critical storytelling, inspired by a postcolonial and feminist understanding in science and technology studies, I empirically and politically account for how a technoscientific intervention enacts the pacification, visibility, and formalization of infrastructure.
My practical ontology framework helps me to understand how the organizing of infrastructure enacts the recursive dynamic of ontological multiplicity and stabilizing, a key concern in assemblage thinking and actor-network-theory. This dynamic is not only experimental, but entangled in organizing practices of governing fluidity, managing invisibility, and operating messiness. I also give the uptake of the concept of assemblage thinking in the turn to infrastructure in social theory empirical depth. This study suggests an empirical and conceptual way forward for organizational research to deploy infrastructure thinking.

Across and between political, cultural, literary, and media theory; feminist, Black, queer/trans, and disability studies; neurohumanities; critical anthropologies and geographies; ethnographic or other compositional methods; performance pedagogies; and empiricist philosophies, the notion of “affect” shifts the impetus of study toward imbrications of body and world that move at the fringes of attention, overwhelm description, or have historically been neglected. The word “affect” holds a glut of meanings in generative drift: from emotion, feeling, mood, sensation, and vibe to action, atmosphere, capacity, force, intensity, potential, or relation. Affect studies attend to those near-imperceptible, too-intense, interstitial, or in-the-making visceral forces and feelings that accompany and broker the entangled material—especially bodily—and conceptual potentials of an emergent or historical phenomenon. Affect can be invoked in the singular to gesture at an indivisible field of affecting intensities or as plural affects to give contour to specificities of event or encounter and vectors of experience. It is a rangy term that resists any easy genealogical tack, with roots spanning philosophy, psychoanalysis, and later, cultural studies.

Instead of focusing on the genesis and expansion of sociotechnical assemblages, the book offers a radically new alternative to the study of visions. Building on literature from Science & Technology Studies, Science Communication, and Gender Studies, Göde Both investigates the ambivalence and fragility of technological visions , video demonstrations, and street trials in the hands of researchers invested in self-driving cars. Keeping autonomous driving alive will be of interest to sociologists and anthropologists of technology, gender, and mobility. It is essential reading for those concerned with uncertainty in technological research and with conflicting demands in communicating science. The book provides scholars within the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, and automotive engineering a means of reflecting on their involvement in self-driving cars. Keeping autonomous driving alive offers science, technology, mobility, and automotive journalists a unique perspective on the present realities of a futuristic technology. Author: Göde Both, computer scientist (university diploma), researcher, Centre for transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt-University Berlin Visit https://goede-both.info/ for more information

Mimicking pornographic stereotypes of femininity, current trends in sex robotics reinforce out-of-date gender stereotypes to the extreme. Feminism has taken this as an invitation to reject the very idea of robot sex as a sexist expression of toxic masculinity. Both proponents and adversaries of sex robots, however, built their arguments on questionable ontological premises. Arguing from a new materialist, sex positive, queer perspective, the article proposes a realignment of sex robotics towards post gender forms and materialities. Liberating sex robots from the obligation to imitate the human body as faithfully as possible, may also serve as an antidote to the eeriness and revulsion many people experience when having to deal with humanoid – but not quite human – replicants.

Participatory Design's focus on people comes from a social democratic vision. However, as climate and existential crises press us to consider wellbeing beyond humans alone, we ask what a pluriversal design agenda might include and what could be articulated as 'participatory'? Necessarily, this inquiry has limits, as participation usually implies human voice, rights, representation and structures of decision-making. This paper commits to these concerns while asking ethical, political and onto-epistemological questions regarding how worlds and futures are shaped when more-than-human entities-plants, animals, rocks, rivers and spirits-participate in our becoming? We offer a meeting of feminist techno-science with practices and philosophies from Japan and beyond to offer thought experiments in engaging with difference and plurality. And we give several examples of practice situated at ontological boundaries to offer some novel thoughts on 'participation otherwise', always-participating-with-many and the futures this could usher in. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centred computing • ~Interaction design • ~Interaction design process and methods • ~Participatory design KEYWORDS More-than-human ontologies, posthumanism, feminist STS, Japanese Shinto, Indigenous cosmology.

Short introduction to the film "Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival" delivered at the Environmental Film Festival Australia, October 17, 2017
http://www.effa.org.au/melbourne-program-2017/2017/10/17/donna-haraway-storytelling-for-earthly-survival

"Issues of territory and territorialization are germane to this essay. Its driving question is whether affect theory or theology can ever deterritorialize themselves fully from Western-citationality. Acutely attuned to the impossibility and importance of this challenge, the essay enjoins “sticking with the trouble” (a là Donna Haraway) represented by animisms and their indigenous territories: geographical, intellectual, and spiritual. Weaving together indigenous modes of knowing with feminist science studies, the essay resists the sovereignties of both affect theory and theology. Countering modes of thinking affect and theology that might stake out ground, it instead tracks what each does when they are invoked. It thereby seeks alternate routes for making a world and finds them most fruitfully in indigenous futurism. The essay adumbrates a hope for an animist-affect-theology that would create a storied world necessarily rooted in the colonial past/present but also open to indigenous futures and inclusive of other-than-human meanings."

En este texto abordamos cómo las prácticas forenses de investigación e identificación participan en la producción de ciertos tipos de víctimas y de perpetrador en el marco del conflicto armado colombiano. Argumentamos que la identificación forense, como cualquier otra práctica, produce aquello que estudia. Acá nos referimos al caso conocido como los “falsos positivos”: jóvenes civiles, sin nexos con grupos guerrilleros, que fueron engañados con falsas promesas de trabajo para luego ser encontrados muertos y presentados como bajas guerrilleras en combate. En cuanto a los perpetradores, fueron miembros de las Fuerzas Militares quienes realizaron las ejecuciones extrajudiciales de población civil con el fin de transmitir la idea de que la guerra contra el terrorismo se estaba ganando. Nuestro trabajo aborda el quehacer de expertos forenses de la Fiscalía General de la Nación de Colombia y nos basamos en datos recopilados a través de una combinación de conversaciones (auto)etnográficas ...

The construction of California’s large waterworks was inextricably entangled with a
discourse of progress through technoscientific control over unruly rivers. In recent
years, a turn towards decentralised governance and diversified infrastructure has
produced alternate discourses of human–ecological collaboration and water as a
commons. I investigate how water is understood by residents along Salmon Creek
(Sonoma Co., CA) engaged in efforts to increase streamflow and restore salmon runs.
Drawing on Barad’s theory of agential realism, I find that living with springs and
rainwater harvesting cisterns enacts intra-actions that increase residents’ sense of
interdependence with other human and nonhuman watershed residents. I argue that commons frameworks represent a coherent alternative to state and market frameworks
of water governance.

Dance has been studied by anthropologists primarily as either performance or ritual practice that symbolizes larger societal phenomena, or as semiotic practice that conveys meaning in a manner similar or parallel to language. The German history of what is categorized as contemporary dance today suggests, however, that the practice emerged as a mode of research that investigated human body movement in close collaboration with natural and social scientists. Today, there is a renaissance of this phenomenon. A growing number of contemporary dancers, dance workshops and dance institutions—again in collaboration with natural and social scientists—claim that the primary aim of their practice is experimental inquiry and not performance. Based on 15 months of ethnographic field work of research practice in contemporary dance in Germany and Austria, as well as research in German archives, this dissertation investigates contemporary dance as a form of research, a function that the practice has had since the early 20th century (Gehm et al 2007), but which cannot be accounted for when dance is theorized as performance or language-like. Like in the early 20th century, movement research dancers today argue that capitalism and society’s norms and values shape the techniques, patterns and possibilities for sensation and body movement (Little 2018). Hence, the dancer’s task is to recognize and change movement and perception habits on the basis of their expertise on the moving body. In this respect, movement research dancers understand their research practice to inform social and political change. But does movement research dance indeed impact wider society and if so, how?

The dissertation is part historical and part anthropological. Historically, it will sketch the emergence and development of contemporary dance as movement research practice throughout the 20th century on the basis of archival research. Anthropologically, and akin to social studies of scientific practice, it investigates the experimental practice, methods and concepts of movement research dance today. The dissertation extends the anthropology of dance beyond linguistic, semiotic and performance-oriented analyses and takes into view artistic and scientific practice from a unified historical perspective (Rheinberger 2012, 3), disclosing the peculiar proximities of the two throughout the 20th century and in the present moment.

As a reaction to typically dead-end debates on future human and robot collaboration that tend to be either dismissive or overly welcoming towards "cobot" technologies, this book provides a technofeminist intervention. Pat Treusch not only shows how both the fields of technofeminism and robotics can engage in a practical exchange through knitting, but also contributes a tangible example of coboting dynamics. Robotic Knitting re-negotiates the boundaries between formalisation and embodiment, craft and high-tech as well as useful and dysfunctional machines. It re-crafts the nature of collaboration between human and robot. This finally entails an alternative mode of relating – a mode that enables an account of careful coboting.
OA Publication: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5203-1/robotic-knitting/

The material conditions in which women provide breast milk range widely, on the basis of their class and geographical provenance. The commercialisation of breast milk provision throws up questions related to debates on the transnational reconfiguration of social reproduction as they intersect with discourses on motherhood and healthy child development as well as contemporary processes of commodification of the body and the emergence of new gendered forms of atypical work in the global economy. This article presents a study of the first commercial human milk processor in India, NeoLacta Lifesciences that obtained an export license for the Australian market in 2017. These practices may be seen to be part of a wider Reproductive Industrial Complex, in which women’s reproductive bodily capacities are enrolled in wider economic and financial processes, instantiating new relations between gender, race, economies and care. This article employs a feminist political economy framework that places into dialogue analyses of social reproduction and commodification with feminist science/technology studies and medical/political anthropology in order to analyse the social, political, and technical processes that transform breast milk into a commodity that is internationally traded and the implications of this for contemporary understandings of work and gender.

This short essay on digital assistants and accent regionalisation was written for the UQ Art Museum's online exhibition 'Conflict in My Outlook.' The exhibition and provocation essays are available to access online: https://www.conflictinmyoutlook.online/provocations

This commentary is part of Salter MB (ed) et al. (2019) Horizon Scan: Critical security studies for the next 50 years. Security Dialogue 50(4_suppl): 9-37.

Digital data matter for (in)security practice. And yet they remain ‘neglected things’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) in critical studies on security. Certainly, critical security studies regularly enquires into the deployment of data-driven systems and the power rationalities that they foster (Amoore, 2013; Bigo, 2014; De Goede, 2018). However, critical security studies remains primarily concerned with the diverse techniques for governing through data. Critical security studies scholars fail to explore the politics underpinning the becoming of data as (in)security things. We should further explore how data are objectified as (in)security data, and how this affects our own subjectification.

En este texto abordamos cómo las prácticas forenses de investigación e identificación participan en la producción de ciertos tipos de víctimas y de perpetrador en el marco del conflicto armado colombiano. Argumentamos que la identificación forense, como cualquier otra práctica, produce aquello que estudia. Acá nos referimos al caso conocido como los “falsos positivos”: jóvenes civiles, sin nexos con grupos guerrilleros, que fueron engañados con falsas promesas de trabajo para luego ser encontrados muertos y presentados como bajas guerrilleras en combate. En cuanto a los perpetradores, fueron miembros de las Fuerzas Militares quienes realizaron las ejecuciones extrajudiciales de población civil con el fin de transmitir la idea de que la guerra contra el terrorismo se estaba ganando. Nuestro trabajo aborda el quehacer de expertos forenses de la Fiscalía General de la Nación de Colombia y nos basamos en datos recopilados a través de una combinación de conversaciones (auto)etnográficas ...

En este texto abordamos cómo las prácticas forenses de investigación e identificación participan en la producción de ciertos tipos de víctimas y de perpetradores en el marco del conflicto armado colombiano. Argumentamos que la identificación forense, como cualquier otra práctica, produce aquello que estudia. Acá nos referimos al caso conocido como los «falsos positivos»: jóvenes civiles, sin nexos con grupos guerrilleros, que fueron engañados con falsas promesas de trabajo para luego ser encontrados muertos y presentados como bajas guerrilleras en combate. En cuanto a los perpetradores, fueron miembros de las Fuerzas Militares quienes realizaron las ejecuciones extrajudiciales de población civil con el fin de transmitir la idea de que la guerra contra el terrorismo se estaba ganando. Nuestro trabajo aborda el quehacer de expertos forenses de la Fiscalía General de la Nación de Colombia y nos basamos en datos recopilados a través de una combinación de conversaciones (auto)etnográficas y reflexivas sostenidas por los autores, entrevistas con cuatro peritos forenses de la Fiscalía e investigación de archivo. Esta manera de acercarse a la producción de conocimiento forense hace posible que podamos entender a estos expertos como actores activos (y no simples testigos) del conflicto armado, en la medida en que participan de la producción tanto de las víctimas como de los perpetradores.

Article usan Kazic (DK) : Au mois de juin 2020, les éditions La Découverte ont traduit un texte de votre collègue Carla Hustak et vous, intitulé Le Ravissement de Darwin. Vous nous faites voir comment Darwin pratique ce que vous appelez une « écologie des a fects » lorsqu'il s'intéresse aux plantes après avoir publié L'Origine des espèces. Dans la deuxième partie du texte, vous faites le prolongement en explorant la manière dont les écologistes chimiques abordent la question de la communication interspécifique. Pouvez-vous nous dire ce qui vous a motivé pour écrire cet essai ?

This article examines university researchers' capture of student images on US college campuses for training facial recognition technology, and situates this project within universities' broader historical alignment with militarism and racial injustice. It argues that feminist STS ethics provides a framework for not only challenging the ways that university research inquiry actively contributes to oppressive power structures, but also for reimagining university research ethics for a greater engagement with questions of justice. The article identifies the limitations of dominant institutional ethics and privacy rights discourses for centering justice considerations, and instead outlines an intersectional feminist approach to university research ethics that reimagines the relationship between research processes, power, and social impacts.

Bilimsel bilgi üretim süreçlerinin modern mekanlarından biri olan laboratuvarlar, kapitalist, ataerkil ve sömürgeci ilişkilerin yeniden üretildiği alanlardır. Bu makale, günümüzün hakim bilim dünyasının kıyısında kalarak bu dünyanın bir eleştirisini sunan feminist laboratuvarları bilim ve politika ilişkileri çerçevesinde inceleyerek bilimin feminist bir edim olarak yapılabileceğini ve feminist politikanın bilim alanından üretilebileceğini önermekte. Makalenin ilk bölümü, feminist bilim ve teknoloji çalışmaları literatüründe 1960’lardan bu yana süren tartışmaları izleyerek feminist bir laboratuvar fikri ve tasarısının bilim kadınlarının somut deneyimleri ve bilimin feminist eleştirileri ile nasıl ortaya çıktığını tartışmakta. İkinci bölümde, Kanada’da kurulan bir feminist deniz bilimi laboratuvarı –Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR)– incelenerek bu laboratuvarda bilim ve politika ilişkisinin feminist değerler üzerinden nasıl kurulduğu ve bu değerlerin farklı pratikler aracılığıyla nasıl hayata geçirilmeye çalışıldığı anlatılmakta. Bilimsel bilgi üretim süreçlerinin daha yoğun bir biçimde sermayenin tahakkümü altına alındığı bu dönemde CLEAR gibi feminist laboratuvarlar örneği üzerinden bilimsel emeği yeniden düşünürken, bu makale bilimin nasıl, kimler tarafından ve ne için yapıldığı üzerine sürekli düşünmenin önemini vurgulamakta ve laboratuvarları bilimin müşterek, toplum için yapılan bir pratik olduğu savunusunu somutlaştırmak için yeniden dizayn ederken feminist politikaya ihtiyacımız olduğunu göstermekte.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Feminist laboratuvarlar, feminist politika, bilimsel emek, müşterek bilim.

Laboratories are one of the modern spaces of scientific knowledge production processes as well as spaces where capitalist, patriarchal and colonial relations get reproduced. This article studies feminist laboratories that challenge and remain marginal in today’s dominant scientific world, and suggests that science can be done as a feminist practice and feminist politics can be produced within and through the field of science. The first section of this article discusses how the idea and design of feminist laboratories have emerged on the basis of the concrete experiences of women scientists and the feminist critiques of science through tracing the on-going discussion in the feminist science and technology studies literature since the 1960s. The second section focuses on a feminist marine science laboratory founded in Canada –Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), and explores how the relation between science and politics is constituted with reference to feminist values in this laboratory as well as the actualization of these values through several practices. While re-thinking about scientific labour together with feminist laboratories such as CLEAR in these times of the intensified capitalization of science, this article underlines the importance of constant questioning of how, by whom, and for what science is done, and shows the need for feminist politics towards redesigning laboratories to actualize the advocacy of the science as a collective practice for society.
Keywords: Feminist laboratories, feminist politics, scientific labour, civic science.

Body Parts stages a series of prompts to complicate the usual person/text/event citationality of knowledge moves. It asks: “how are civilities of knowledge practiced at the level of the body?” It charts the near-imperceptable register of affinities and attachments that shape more recognizable attributive conventions like footnotes and bibliographies.

Adapted from a roundtable presentation: “(un)building as (un)bodying: In the Alongside of Imperial Knowledge Formations and Anticolonial Body Makings,” American Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2019.

This article examines university researchers’ capture of student images on US college campuses for training facial recognition technology, and situates this project within universities’ broader historical alignment with militarism and racial injustice. It argues that feminist STS ethics provides a framework for not only challenging the ways that university research inquiry actively contributes to oppressive power structures, but also for reimagining university research ethics for a greater engagement with questions of justice. The article identifies the limitations of dominant institutional ethics and privacy rights discourses for centering justice considerations, and instead outlines an intersectional feminist approach to university research ethics that reimagines the relationship between research processes, power, and social impacts.

What happens when what a body is folded into wrecks you? This text is a hack at working through being inhabited by the hope and hopelessness of worlds (the tough glut of staying with everything that crops up in a place) and at giving shape to the reeling in my body when I’m bucked by the dissonance of what is caught-together here. By now, even the APA has let on that anxiety disorders—often chalked up to genetic and biochemical factors—are triggered in part by the entangled always-aftermaths of precarity and ecological ruin. Anxiety names what it means to be vulnerable to what worlds are being made. I want to try at thinking anxiety as a mode of attunement to one’s own body as both sovereign and nonsovereign—a being ordered into this or that world that catches on what a body is in or leaks into—to reclaim anxiety as an involvement that can dream off into anticolonial sovereignties predicated on the regeneration of Earth.

“Speculative Matters” is a public program with residents of Vancouver’s DTES/South. Each week we will read aloud together from a STS reading, then spend an hour making and writing zines using text, collage, popups, embroidery, etc. STS is the study of science, technology, and society. It shows that what the world is depends on how we practice knowing it. A zine is a short grassroots, independently published document. It has roots in sci-fi, punk, feminist, and queer movements.

In the 21st century, due to the rapid progress of the life sciences, new medical techniques and biotechnologies have burgeoned. This dissertation asks about how new biotechnologies emerge in life science laboratories. What kinds of care are required to manipulate and control “living technologies,” such as cells and laboratory animals? How do these technologies spread, influence, affect, and transform society, including its institutions, markets, policies, and laws? How are those societal transformations influenced by changing understandings of cells, genomes, and organisms in laboratories of life science? To tackle those questions, I rely upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a laboratory, here called the Murakami laboratory (a pseudonym), that specializes in medical and industrial applications of iPS (induced pluripotent stem) cell technologies in Japan. As a “translational research” laboratory, the members have been trying to build bridges connecting the science of iPS cells with the fields of medicine and industry.
In STS and the anthropology of science, there are two research trends that help to illuminate the significance of emerging biotechnologies in the neoliberal era. The first are “laboratory studies,” while the other body of literature focuses on the concept of “biocapital.” Both of these bodies of literature provide useful methods and perspectives to understand the production of knowledge, as well as broader social transformations resulting from the connections between the market and the life sciences. However, the laboratory practices that I observed during my fieldwork differ from those discussed in these two fields of research. First, since the Murakami laboratory aims at medical and industrial applications, its researchers and staff collaborate with fundamental biology laboratories, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and the government. As a result, their knowledge and technologies move between and across different contexts. Hence, I need perspectives from within and outside of the laboratory to understand the production of knowledge in this case. Second, the Murakami laboratory puts in considerable effort taking care of cells and arranging suitable environments for their thriving, which involves equipment, facilities, staff, and the organization as a whole, which goes against the notion that laboratories are solely focused on accumulating scientific knowledge and claiming future profits. I ask, what does it mean to arrange and intervene in cells through environments, in order to actualize the potentiality of cells for medical and industrial use?
To understand these specificities of translational research, inspired by feminist STS scholars, care studies, and the concept of the “experimental system” elaborated by Hans Jörg Rheinberger, I propose the concept of an “ecology of cells.” In the laboratory, cells are not just tools for scientific experiments or medical technology. They are “living technologies”: living beings who require care, and, at the same time, are instruments used for science. Through the development of this concept of the ecology of cells, I shed light on how cells oscillate, between living beings and instruments, in the process of translational research. Here, the “ecology” refers to the world in which the cells are kept alive as a living technology. It includes scientific, medical, economic and political environments that are created or managed for cells. More concretely, the ecology of cells includes tools, equipment, the broader environment, systems of organization, funding schemes, institutions, policies, and regulations that are connected with the laboratory. I look closely at how these heterogeneous elements are configured and managed, and how cells both transform and are transformed in the process. Importantly, what iPS cells are and what iPS cells can do is being gradually defined through the continual rearrangement of these elements. My concept of the ecology of cells sheds light on this ongoing, reciprocal relationship between the cells and their environments.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is emerging into public view in unprecedented ways. Foremost among these is the embodied form of elderly men and women appearing in commercial imagery for patient advocacy groups or pharmaceutical advertisements, but scientific imagery also seeps into the visual media cultures that surround us. The recent reconfiguration of Alzheimer's disease is due to expanding ageing populations, an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry becoming a fast-growing material-semiotic realm that is providing powerful images of both gendered and racialized embodiment. Such a visual, and yet highly material, realm is in need of feminist interventions, engaging with the images and ideas that circulate around ageing, medicine, human and non-human embodiment. From a non-representationalist (figural realist) and posthumanist perspective identified as feminist visual studies of technoscience, the authors seek to further the discussion in the direction of understanding the 'scattered ontologies' of Alzheimer's-in laboratory practice, the realm of medical media and in commercial appeals to coherent individuality and human cognition-as gendered domains of figural reality and performative matter.

"Faculty of Humanities Nicolas Copernicus University (Toruń, Poland) on 17th-19th September 2014 organizes international conference of European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) titled ‘Situating Solidarities: social challenges for science and technology studies’.

We would like to pass the information about this conference, with the details of its merits, calls for tracks, papers and other dead-lines which can be found at: www.easst.umk.pl

About the conference:

The EASST conference 2014 addresses the dynamics and interrelationships between science, technology and society. Contributors are invited to address the meeting’s theme of ‘Situating Solidarities’ though papers on any topic relevant to the wider field are also welcome.

The theme of ‚situating solidarities’ addresses asymmetries of power through a focus on material, situated sociotechnical configurations. Heterogeneous networks of actors are stabilised to different degrees through complex negotiations. Rather than seeking universal abstractions the theme asks questions such as: What do the chains and networks of asymmetries look like? How do they travel? What do they carry? Do asymmetries translate to inequalities? What are the solidarities that shape the practices, artifacts and ‚know-hows’ in situated material contexts?

Political and ethical engagement is a central concern for a view of science as changes in collective practice, rather than as individual contemplation. How should STS observe or influence the raising and erasing of social and technical asymmetries in everyday life? What do the ‚situated solidarities’ of dealing with asymmetries and inequalities look like? Can STS contribute to the work of solidarising to connect asymmetric agents, places, moves and networks to weaken inequalities and change hegemonic relations?"

This series at Duke explored the burgeoning of science studies in Asian and investigated the relation between non-Western area studies with STS analysis.  Our main question was, how does understanding Asia matter for understanding science? To what extent does an area-based analysis decenter European narratives about scientific modernity and biomedicine? Website at https://sites.duke.edu/stsasia/events/

Recent decades have seen the rapid development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and methods of prenatal diagnosis. As a result, there are now several ways to predict the genetic sex of embryos as well as visualizing the sex of fetuses. However, how, when and where these technologies may be used have become politicized questions, both internationally and in Sweden. By providing a close reading of the Swedish political debate about technologies for the determination of the sex of fetuses and embryos from the end of the 1980s onwards, this article shows how technologies of prenatal diagnosis are articulated as problematic in the context of sex-determination. By "staying with the trouble" of sex in the political debate about sex-determination, we discuss how the ability to identify fetal or chromosomic sex through prenatal diagnosis is articulated as an unwanted trouble warranting political and ethical concern. The article also highlights the "ethico-political" restrictions imposed on information about the unborn's sex. It shows that, rather than prenatal diagnosis enabling promissory or hopeful visions of the future, the political debate is preoccupied with feelings of concern about the potential misuses of these technologies.

In her seminal essay, "Race and/as Technology", Wendy H. K. Chun proposed that race could be understood as a technology-that is, as neither biological nor cultural, human nor machine, mediated nor environmental, visible nor invisible, but as a category that organises all of these dualisms and many more. Race, she argued, can be thought of as a "technique that one uses, even as one is used by it" (38). Using this essay and its concerns as a touchstone, this panel will ask how we might understand race and/as technology in the present. What is the relationship between visibility/ invisibility and race and how is it mediated? How are emergent technologies of control, such as facial recognition, racialised? How might we think categories-like race, person, or population-after Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and big data? How might these technologies be understood historically? What is the relationship to related categories, such as gender, class or ability, in the technologisation of race? How might analyses of culture help us to understand race and/as technology? If we adopt Chun's idea that this approach "displaces ontological questions of race" (56), what different things might race be made to do, in the present? We want to bring together scholars working in any discipline touched by these questions to think through what it might mean to consider race and/as technology today.