Technology and/in Racial Formations

Abstract

Technologies serve as the handmaiden for racial dominations, yet also create opportunities to upend existing racial hierarchies. Racial formations are the social and historical processes by which racial categories are created, transformed, and destroyed, processes that implicate technologies in the material cutting of categories. Race constitutes a global social structure that has unique articulations within national contexts with respect to the ways in which human populations are conceptualized, racialized and subordinated on the basis of racial distinction. The production of scientific knowledge needs to be understood within this broader global racial context that structures cultural processes of racialization and material process of racial inequality. Science and technology studies (STS) scholarship has interrogated racial knowledge within a broad range of sciences from genomics and biomedicine to engineering and computer science. And yet, how do technologies continue to facilitate and challenge racial formations that produce and maintain racial hierarchy? Are there histories of technologies, yet to be unearthed, that were central to the establishment of racism? What future-oriented technologies can we reasonably expect to structure racial formations going forward? This open session calls for papers that broadly examine the relationships between technologies and racial formations, specifically in ways that illuminate the role of technology in innovating, interrupting, and or generating racisms and/or anti-racisms.

Individual Presentations

• Capital, State Power, and Racialization in 18th Century Information Systems - Melissa Adler, Western University

• Drownproofing: Technology, Race, and Gender in Understanding the Conceptualization of Bodies - Amanda Almeida Domingues, Cornell University

• “Everything is a Recommendation”: Netflix and the Construction of Blackness Through Algorithms - Daniel Meyerend, University of Michigan

• Racial Mixing and Matching: Gamete Donation, Family Formation, and Reproductive Choice - Alyssa Marie Newman, Harvey Mudd College

• Tracing Change in Scientific Consensus: Testosterone, Race and Controversy in Prostate Cancer Research - Brandon Kramer, University of Virginia

Session Organizer

• Renee Shelby, Georgia Institute of Technology