Ethnic Studies and STS: Connections, Interruptions, Innovations

Abstract

This panel aims to explore how ethnic studies and STS—two forms of academic inquiry that have typically remained locked in their own disciplinary silos—can mutually interrupt, regenerate, enrich, and inform the topics, conversations, and theories of each other’s fields in meaningful ways. Concerned primarily with United States-based ethnic studies, including but not limited to African-American Studies, Chicanx and Latinx Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Native American Studies, this panel asks what STS looks like when the questions and problematics central to US-based ethnic studies become key topics of investigation for STS, and vice-versa. What does STS look like—in its research questions, priorities, and theoretical interlocutors—when race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, migration, citizenship, indigeneity, and blackness, among others, become central problem spaces? Similarly, what does ethnic studies look like when science and technology become fundamental subjects and objects of investigation? This panel is looking for papers that attempt to link the problems, objects, questions, and theories of “ethnic studies” and “STS,” however constituted, through empirical research, theoretical explorations, and/or literary analysis. Such linkages might include but are not limited to: race and algorithmic governance; gentrification and technology; surveillance and migration; indigeneity and infrastructure; biomedicine and “alternative” medicine; race, gender, and science; race and environment; posthumanism and critical race theory.

Individual Presentations

• Checking the Second Box: The Missing History of Ethnicity - Yen Ji Julia Byeon, National Human Genome Research Institute; Chistopher Donohue, National Human Genome Research Institute; Vence L. Bonham, National Human Genome Research Institute

• Making Latinx Makers - Hector Beltran, MIT

• Posthuman Possibilities on Multiple Levels: A Black Queer Non/In/human Future - Teresa L Hoard-Jackson, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Radical Challenges to Racial Science - Bridget Harr, Bates College

Session Organizer

• Raymond Fang, University of California, Irvine