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Captivating Technology: Race, Technoscience, and the Carceral Imagination

Sat, September 2, 2:00 to 3:30pm, Sheraton Boston, Floor: 3, Beacon B

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

From crime prediction software, to financial algorithms, to precision medicine, science and technology reflect and reproduce social inequality. This session examines the relationship between innovation and inequity and asks, who and what are fixed in place to enable technoscientific advances? What notions of progress are coded into novel technologies? And how are such techniques deployed in carceral approaches to governing life well beyond the domain of policing? In addressing these questions, panelists employ an expansive understanding of “the carceral” with attention to the institutional and imaginative underpinnings of social containment. The papers build upon Jasanoff and Kim’s notion of “sociotechnical imaginaries” – collective imaginations of the future that “encode not only visions of what is attainable through science and technology, but also of how life ought, or ought not, to be lived; in this respect they express a society’s shared understandings of good and evil” (2015, 4). Each paper discusses specific forms of discriminatory design that reproduce and even deepen social hierarchies, illustrating how the tentacles of the carceral state embrace schools, hospitals, workplaces, and other arenas attempting to “fix” – help and hold in place – poor and racialized people. Finally, this session traces how technoscience is appropriated and reimagined for more liberatory ends and, in conjunction with the annual meeting theme, used to expand our sense of the worlds we inhabit.

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