Engaging Material Insensibilities and their Political Effects I: What Feminist Materialisms Can Contribute

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

Feminist materialisms provide a theoretical-empirical framework for accounting for the intra-actions of material becomings and meaning making, e.g. of bodily, technological and social forces, technoscientific research practices and their constitutive apparatuses, including normalizing discourses in the constituting of phenomena. These entanglements suggest that ‘we’ are always implicated in a web of ‘ongoing responsiveness’ (Barad 2007). Material feminisms thereby complicate ethico-political agency and responsibility whose epistemic purchase has also been queried in STS (e.g. Latour 2011). They show that sensing and attending to something also involves disengaging from other agencies to render phenomena sensible; importantly, they focus on the spacetimematterings of the nonrelational, nonparticipative, insensible and inhuman within relationality (e.g. Barad 2012; Yusoff 2013; Schrader 2015). This panel invites contributions informed by feminist materialisms that engage what the sensible-insensible conundrum might mean for our research, teaching and political efforts within the productivist timescapes of technoscience, and how STS researchers become response-able and accountable for their interventions. What research and teaching encounters – even forms of nonparticipation – might be created? When do insensibility and indifference become graspable? And how might they also link to ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ (Tuana 2006) or ‘regimes of imperceptibility’ (Murphy 2004)? How might an attentiveness to the insensible ‘help us think between natures to promote a noncontemporaneous ethics of apprehension’ (Yusoff 2013)? And how can such material agential contributions within intra-actions be made communicable within the STS community and wider publics?

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chairs

• Sigrid Schmitz, HU Berlin

• Patricia Treusch, Center for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies, Technical University Berlin, Germany

Individual Presentations

• Bleaching Cells: Locations of Disavowal as Sites for Further Ethical Affection - Mara Dicenta-Vilker, RPI

• Contested Sonic Space: Settler Territoriality and Sonographic Visualization at Celilo Falls - Ashton Wesner, UC Berkeley

• Materializing Identity: Navigating, Mapping and Modeling the Terrain of Social Interaction - Marisabel Marratt, Georgia Institute of Technology

• On the In/Sensibilities of Solar Energy - Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Department of Gender Studies, Charles University in Prague

• Toward a Marine Microbiopolitics with Microbial Hauntings - Astrid Schrader, University of Exeter