Fredy Mora Gamez, University of Vienna; Julia Morales Fontanilla, Rutgers University - New Jersey, USA; oriana bernasconi, Universidad Alberto Hurtado; Paola DIAZ-LIZE
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
Studies on human rights have focused on understanding violence, particularly exerted by states, and the faces those violences take —be it internal armed conflicts, anti-terrorist efforts, the war on drugs, border attacks against migrants, violence towards indigenous populations, and police violence. Interdisciplinarity characterizes these efforts, nonetheless we consider there is further need to put in conversation the heuristic commitments of STS with conceptualizations of human rights. We wonder, what can STS scholarship do when engaging with concerns on violence and human rights? And, what potential has STS to transform studies on human rights and violences? We are interested in opening up these sites of inquiry and reconfigure an encounter among them. Anchored in the global south and in the spirit of the conference theme on reunion, recuperation, and reconfiguration we welcome contributions that engage these questions. We suggest a threefold axis of reflection: a. the multiplication of human rights violations agents that make use of human and non-human technoscience, e.g., drones usage in Afghanistan or the lethal digital hypervigilance of borders in the global north; b. the co-constitution of “nature” and “social” within human rights violences, which incorporates ideas of (in)justice, prosecution, and reparation of wounds and hurts between human and no-human and/or more-than-human entities in their analysis of human rights violations; c. the interrogation of conceptualizations of institution, state, and regime through the tools afforded by STS and that put stress on the heterogeneous beings and agents that are part of those orders
