Unsettling STS 1

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

How do contemporary forms of indigenous life, scholarship, and activism unsettle the political stakes and scholarly methods of STS? Recognizing that the 4S meeting of 2018 will be held on the historical and stolen lands of Australian indigenous peoples, this series of panels will explore the possibilities, the productive irritants, and inescapable problematics of thinking through the social study of science, medicine and technology in settler colonial societies. Settler colonialisms and technopolitics share long and complicated histories, histories which have only recently begun to receive critical attention within STS and related disciplines. Technoscience has pervaded indigenous engagements with the state, corporations, academics, and experts, generating paradoxical tests of legitimacy and new sites of wealth extraction, underscoring the entanglements between the nation, citizenship, knowledge claims, and land. Attending to specific sites of engagement and resistance demands new ways of doing (and undoing) STS scholarship. We seek papers that complicate the articulation and circulation of sociotechnical imaginaries; illuminate the ways archival and biomedical technologies shape claims to identity and belonging; and defy prevailing models whereby individual experts enroll allies and cultivate power. We are particularly interested in papers that speak to the legacy of colonial epistemologies in the history and philosophy of science and medicine, new innovative projects that work to decolonize medicine, science and technology (and science and technology studies itself), and speculative visions of an indigenous science studies. We also welcome submissions that subvert the conventional conference paper format, whether through video, audio, or literary productions or live performances.

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / Unsettling STS: Scaling up critical indigenous analytics

Chair

• Thomas De Pree, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Discussant

• David Turnbull, Deakin University

Individual Presentations

• Agencies of Weather in Promulgating and Defying Colonialism - Sarah Wright, The University of Newcastle

• Beyond Settler Genomes: Temporality, Genomic Indigeneity, and (De)Colonization - Jennifer Hamilton, Hampshire College

• Burning the Capital - Jessica Weir, Western Sydney University

• Guaral and Leishmaniasis: Violent Encounters between Indigenous Medicine and Biomedicine in Conflict-Ridden Colombia - Lina Beatriz Pinto Garcia, York University

• Hindcasting the Settler State - Jessica Cattelino, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Session Organizers

• denielle a elliott, York University

• Tom Ozden-Schilling, Johns Hopkins University