Plenary II: Interruptions

Abstract

As a scholarly field premised on the inseparability of science, technology and society, STS has interrupted important meta-narratives. Sometimes, those interruptions have had extensive worldly consequences, other times the effects have been felt mainly among scholarly and educational communities. This plenary revisits the practice of interruption as a generative analytic tactic and also as a social practice that sometimes replicates dominant structures of power and knowledge—such as who is entitled to speak and where, whose bodies can move and whose are kept locked up, whose epistemics are dominant and whose are marginal. Plenary participants will reflect on their own encounters with interruption as a social process and will reflect on how the future of STS scholarship challenges and comes to terms with our current condition, one where the subsurface agreement on distinct certainties—the power of science to make sense of worlds, the potential of technology to organize collective life—has been interrupted once again.

Chair

• Andrea Ballestero, Rice University

Speakers

• Kaya Williams

• Samer Alatout, University Of Wisconsin, Madison

• Manuel Tironi, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

• Hsin-Hsing Chen, Shih-Hsin University Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies