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Critical Disability Studies Caucus: Cripping the Study of Science, Technology, and Medicine (co-sponsored by the Science, Technology and Medicine Caucus)

Fri, November 9, 12:00 to 1:45pm, Westin Peachtree, Floor: Seventh, Augusta C (Seventh)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

In every register—personal, political, scientific—stories of modern existence frequently rely upon a shared concept of progress. Within these narratives, science and technology often serve as the privileged conduit by which that progress might be attained; synchronically, disability often serves to epitomize the precarity and degradation to be vanquished. This narrative doubling is but one of the multiple intersections between Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and the Study of Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) that this roundtable seeks to explore. By considering the ways in which each of these fields might be brought to bear on the temporalities, methodologies, and political implications of the other, its panelists will interrogate the allied emergences that are, have been, and might be, in the future.

The roundtable seeks to underscore a multiplicity of intersections and entry points. As such, several of the participants will offer broad theoretical frameworks as ruminations through which to address the fields’ sometimes-allied, sometimes-competing emergences, while others will draw upon case studies to illustrate what might be possible as a result of sustained engagement. These brief presentations will be followed by abundant space for dialogic engagement between participants, as well as between participants and attendees. A number of central interrogatives will animate the roundtable as a whole: how, when, and why have these fields functioned alongside one another, whether cooperatively or combatively? What happens to scientific and medical narratives when we take seriously the queer and crip call to acknowledge alternate forms of change, as well as the stubborn phenomena of stagnation, repetition, and regression? How might the study of science, technology, and medicine complicate the willful, resistant subject at the heart of critical disability studies? Finally, and perhaps quixotically, is an allied emergence--crip science--possible? How might we study it if it was?

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