Disrupting Racial Formations in Science and Technology (Co-sponsored by Race and Ethnic Minorities Section)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This session is jointly sponsored by the Science, Knowledge & Technology (SKAT) and the Sociology of Racial & Ethnic Minorities (SREM) sections. This session explores the entanglements of race and scientific knowledge production, highlighting how racial logics shape and are shaped by technological and epistemic practices. Technological infrastructures—such as biometric surveillance, predictive analytics, and border enforcement systems—have intensified in the current moment, fueling new and old modes of racialized terror, especially against migrants, refugees, and other minoritized populations. These systems not only help inscribe and fix certain hierarchized “truths” about racialized groups but also actively produce harm under the guise of scientific neutrality, public health, and national security. Thus, in a moment acutely marked by increasing political polarization, genocide, attacks on democratic institutions, and the resurgence of eugenic rhetoric, it is crucial that sociologists confront how science and technology contribute to the justification and weaponization of racial violence, even as political attacks seek to undermine such knowledges as a source of public good in other areas health, education, and law.

This session aims to investigate the role of epistemic authority in the reproduction or disruption of racialized (and ethnic) hierarchies. We especially welcome work that teaches us how to better understand the value of racial theory for STS studies, and/or papers that demonstrate the value of STS methods and tools for the sociology of race and ethnicity. For example, papers that illuminate how scientific and technological systems are embedded in broader structures of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and global inequality—and how these systems can be reimagined through resistance and intervention.

This co-sponsored session between SKAT and SREM reflects a timely and necessary dialogue across the sections, aiming to foster interdisciplinary engagement and critical reflection. In putting sociology to work, we center solution-oriented research, theoretically engaged scholarship, and interdisciplinary dialogue, with the goal of fostering a future sociological blueprint that dismantles racial and ethnic formations in science and technology.

Sub Unit

• Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section / Disrupting Racial Formations in Science and Technology (Co-sponsored by Race and Ethnic Minorities Section)

Cosponsor

• Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section

Presider

• Oliver E. Rollins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Individual Presentations

• Federal Science under Anti-DEI Governance: Contemporary Organizational Struggles over the Inclusion-and-Difference Paradigm at the NIH - Jorge Ochoa, Northwestern University; Steven Epstein, Northwestern University

• Fixing Inequality in the Biosocial Era - Margaret Schmits-Earley, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Technologies of Immigration Enforcement: Understanding the Role of Private Industry - Eyako Heh, Northwestern University

• Technologies of Recognition: Making Up Caste People Through Toxic and Green Infrastructures - Anupriya Pandey, State University Of New York ,Buffalo

• Toxic Exposures: Resisting the Racialization of Latinidad in Precision Environmental Health Science - Emily Vasquez, Wesleyan University

Session Organizers

• Oliver E. Rollins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Claire Laurier Decoteau, University of Illinois-Chicago