Biotechnologies and Body Interventions: Reorienting Research with Indigenous STS

Abstract

Settler colonialism, its material and epistemological processes and consequences, has been channeled through and determined by notions of the body. The characteristics, capacities, and (dis)similarities ascribed to bodies by disciplinary experts—scientific, medical, and otherwise—has often provided the justification for pathologized, commercialized, and medicalized interventions in human (especially Indigenous) lives and determined the manner in which these interventions would be carried out. It is with this in mind that we in the RELAB and Indigenous STS research lab consider how Indigenous STS, particularly due to its relational methodological approaches to research, can reframe the ways in which bodies are understood and implicated in a capitalist system that governs bodies through the standardization of health data. In this roundtable, we will consider questions such as: how does Indigenous STS reorient our research of bodies that are co-constituted by disciplinary biotechnologies? How does Indigenous STS inform how we understand bodies and our relations to bodies, land, and health, in our varying technoscientific and biomedical research contexts? Further, how might Indigenous STS function to illuminate the body’s place in neoliberal processes, what interventions might Indigenous STS demand in this endeavor, and also, what might this approach obscure? We contend that Indigenous STS produces nuanced and productive understandings of the ways in which the body factors in settler-colonial processes as they exist within, and are extended by technoscientific research and its products.

Chair

• Jessica Kolopenuk, University of Alberta, RELAB

Presenter

• Wyatt Schiefelbein, University of Alberta, RELAB

Session Organizers

• Hined A Rafeh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Merissa Daborn, University of Manitoba