Racial Mattering and Scientific (In)Sensibilities

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

The conference theme, “STS (In)Sensibilities,” invites us to consider the production of scientific knowledge, both empirical and critical, at the level of the sensorium. To ask, in what ways does sensitization precede investigation and knowledge-production? From Donna Haraway’s early work on primates to Anna Tsing’s work on geopolitical “frictions” to Alondra Nelson’s 'Social Life of DNA,' anti-racist, feminist STS scholars have been engaged in tracing the racialized and colonial sensibilities central to the production of scientific knowledge, demonstrating that racist sensibilities have shaped the history and meaning of scientific fact. Deepening these insights, this session seeks to place researchers and reality on the same plane – coeval and co-constituting – by asking not simply how racial sensitization structures knowledge of reality, but how racialization structures both scientific sensibility and reality. Through individual case studies, the panelists argue that race is not only an element of the researcher’s sensorium (something she can train or think herself out of) but also materialized within matter itself. Scientific investigation, then, is itself a training of the racial sensorium of the scholar in part because it opens her to the materialization of race – its factualization. In doing so, this session asks, how is the very substance of the factual and the empirical materialized by race and what forms of sensibility are needed to attend to this mattering? If race is installed within matter as matter itself, then how does critical attention to racial mattering require a retraining of scientific (in)sensibilities?

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chairs

• Eva Hayward, University of Arizona

• Adam M Geary, University of Arizona

Individual Presentations

• Ape Motherhood as Counter-Science in a Colonial Home: Orangutan Rehabilitation in Sarawak - Juno Salazar Parrenas, The Ohio State University

• Sense of Things: Zoonosis, Xenotransplantation, and the Mattering of Race in Nalo Hopkinson's 'Brown Girl in the Ring' - Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, George Mason University

• HIV is Racist - Adam M Geary, University of Arizona

• Medusa, Colonial Racism, and Coral Bleaching - Eva Hayward, University of Arizona

• Analyzing “race” as a scientific object: circulating "race" through time (1927-1970) and space (Berlin-Pune) - Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient