“Antiracist Science”: Interrogating Knowledge Production, Interrupting Racism

Abstract

STS scholarship has been foundational for critiquing scientific racism, racial essentialism, and the social construction of race, as well as the role of science and technology in both challenging and reproducing racism. However, we have yet to adequately examine how race and science are operationalized in service of antiracist goals. Since the 1960s civil rights movements, institutional actors have generated knowledge about racism, innovative techniques to combat it, and plans to transform racist systems. This panel considers the dynamics and effects of this “antiracist knowledge production” in the context of resurging public discourse about race and racism in the United States, examining the scientific practices of well-meaning actors within and at the boundaries of institutions as they aim or claim to interrupt racism.

This panel brings together analyses of “antiracist science,” a term we use to highlight the co-constitution of race in science: both how science is mobilized to interrupt racism, as well as how anti-racism is deployed to transform the practices of science and knowledge production. How are race, racism, and antiracism defined and operationalized in scientific practice? How does “antiracism” circulate as a discourse and practice in a variety of social, institutional, and disciplinary contexts? How is it translated across actors, disciplines, institutions, and social domains? How are scientific methods, data, and discourses mobilized in service of antiracism, and to what effects? How can STS help us understand, critique, and amplify the antiracist potential of science and technology? What are the limitations and unintended consequences of antiracist science?

Discussant

• James Doucet-Battle, University of California, Santa Cruz

Individual Presentations

• Post-Racial Environmental Justice?: Articulating Disadvantage and Disparity in Southern California Air Monitoring Programs - Katie Cox, University of California, Irvine

• Corporate Antiracism: Statistics as Evidence of Systemic Racism and Doing Politics in the Corporation - Luzilda Carrillo, California State University, Long Beach

• Opportunities and Possible Challenges for Restorative Environmental J.E.D.I. (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Approaches within an Oakland, CA Public Park System - Chryl Natasha Elaine Corbin, UC Berkeley ESPM

• The Science of Equity - Nicole Ivy, The George Washington University

• Developing a Decolonial Praxis Within ICT: An Autoethnography on Organizing a Participant-led Workshop - Horatiu Halmaghi, McGill University

Session Organizers

• Luzilda Carrillo, California State University, Long Beach

• Katie Cox, University of California, Irvine