Social Studies of Politics II

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

In STS, governance is conceptualized as a special kind of infrastructure crafted by science and poured into technology. What else are we to make of Max Weber’s foundational claim about the legitimate use of state violence without the bureaucratic regimes crafted in economics and jurisprudence? What is a population without a census and statistics, without techniques of defining, measuring, and counting people? Over the last decade a growing body of research in what we might call the Social Studies of Politics has unpacked the technoscientific assemblages of governing. But there is still so much more. Voting machines and census construction, official statistics and diplomatic training handbooks, data politics and state modeling -- a few of the banner cases for this STS approach to politics and governance -- are NOT just the cold, rational nuts and bolts of modern politics. They are loved and hated; cared for and rallied against; encountered and rendered familiar or hostile by citizens, diplomats, policy makers, bureaucrats and, of course, even us as scholars. These affective, aesthetic, and sensible dimension of our technoscientific assemblages of governance seem to become increasingly important to understand in today’s world of post-truth politics and its growing reliance on appeals to emotion and affect. For this year´s sessions on the Social Studies of Politics we invite contributions that explore the multiple ways in which we sense and make sense-able our contemporary machineries of governance: How do we care for files, how do we make borders visible, how to we love the technoscientific details of modern statehood?

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Nicholas James Rowland, The Pennsylvania State University

Individual Presentations

• Machineries of Health Governance at Work: An Exploration of Invisible Work and Sensemaking in a Dutch Health Funding Agency - Rik Wehrens, Erasmus University (Institute of Health Policy & Management); Lieke Oldenhof, Erasmus University, Institute of Health Policy and Management; Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Tactis of Colonization Within Some Brazilian Antarctic Cosmopolitics - Luis Guilherme Resende de Assis, Instituto Federal de Educação Ciência e Tecnologia de Goiás

• Science Based Standards and Governance: Opening the “Black Box” of Regulation Making for Bottled Water Quality in India - Aviram Sharma, Nalanda University

• Calculating National Income with the Others - Kyunghwan Lee, University Southern Califonia

• Performing a Platform State: Ethnography of a State Identification Device - Marie Alauzen, CSi, I3, PSL Research Universitu, CNRS UMR 9217 (France)