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The Master’s Tools: Innovation, Interruption, and Regeneration as Technologies of Whiteness

Sat, September 7, 9:45 to 11:15am, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Four, Oak Alley

Abstract

The papers in this panel aim to unsettle the settler common sense that haunts Science and Technology Studies. Taking the conference theme as an object of inquiry, the panel will interrogate the ways whiteness is at work in our understandings of innovation, interruption, and regeneration; understanding whiteness as habituated practices of anti-blackness and colonization. The panel draws inspiration from Audre Lorde’s essay on “the master’s tools,” first presented at a predominantly-white humanities conference, in which she asks: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” The papers in this panel each consider innovation, interruption, and/or regeneration both in their respective sites and within the conditions of academic production. As a collective that is paradoxically eager to hear from women of color on the cutting edge of questions that pertain to our very survival; and one that is fundamentally and predominantly white in membership and structure, 4S is a forum in which Lorde’s question is ripe for the re-asking. Lorde concludes her intervention at that 1979 conference by urging each attendee to “reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.” The papers in this panel seek to take seriously that call across generations, interrogating where the master’s tools might be found in the themes of innovation, interruption, and regeneration; and what other tools those terms might hold.

Chair

Discussant

Individual Presentations

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