Noah Tamarkin, Cornell University; Saida Hod?i?, Cornell University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
What conceptions and technologies of care and collaboration can transcend reigning imperialisms and inequalities? This open panel takes the logics and technologies of humanitarianism as a site for examining questions of recuperation and reconfiguration of care, responsibility, and collaboration in technoscience and in science and technology studies. Ethics of care, responsibility and action are at the core of humanitarian projects. Yet as critiques of humanitarianism have shown, these projects entangle care with harm, further entrenching inequality, colonial legacies and neocolonialisms, and ongoing imperialisms. Technoscientific projects and collaborative knowledge practices with this same ethos of care, responsibility, and action can fall into some of the same epistemological and political traps. This open panel calls for papers that bring humanitarianism’s questions, practices, and critiques into conversation with STS concerns. We are interested in thinking together about technologies of care and towards care, humanitarianism as a set of knowledge practices and ruling technologies, and technoscience framed in ways that resonate with humanitarian action. We suggest that humanitarianism is particularly useful to think with regarding the potentiality of care and responsibility because it shows both limits and potential for connecting across difference in an unequal world. We therefore ask: how might science and technology studies invested in an ethos of care, responsibility, and action avoid the traps of entangling care and harm in humanitarianism? What, if anything, from humanitarianism might be recuperated?
