Spitballing STS: Millenial Tactics

Abstract

Spitballing is the act of dishing out inchoate ideas that can work against a norm; spitballing is also the youthful middle-school act of pelting one’s adversaries with tissue balls of spit. This panel is a rambunctious space to feature the work graduate students who are developing disruptive theoretical and methodological pathways that refuse, in part or in whole, classical STS and its popular canons. These papers explore unruly forms of STS, offering ways and means of doing and knowing beyond the North Atlantic academy and its norms. These include pieces on science, technology, and innovation from the global South; Indigenous futures; settler colonialism; challenges to the white, colonial, able-bodied, and heteronormative spaces of the academy; place-based, action-oriented, applied, interdisciplinary, and responsive forms of STS; theories and methods that privilege love, care, rage, and refusal; non- or speculative- fictions; and alternative/experimental pedagogy. This is a whimsical, mischievous, yet serious panel for the open and collaborative sharing of 'millennial tactics' in STS: strategies and practices for doing STS otherwise by challenging the generations before us and by advancing new modes of taking contemporary local and global challenges seriously.

Individual Presentations

• Excavating the Timeline: “Slow” Theoretical Development in a Digital Age - Liz Quinlan, UMass Boston

• Learn From My Mistakes: Some Pedagogical Experiments in STS and Speculative Fiction and How to Fail Better Than Me - Kristen Koopman

• Notes from St. John in Irmamaria's Wake: Rethinking Critical, Applied STS - Gabrielle Robbins, MIT HASTS

• Searching for Zero: Spitballing Hegemonic Modes of “Unseeing” and Conjuring the Big “O” Other - Samara Hayley Steele, University of California at Davis

Session Organizer

• Alex Rewegan, MIT