Jerome Whitington, New York University; Zeynep Oguz, Northwestern University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
Indeterminacy, uncertainty and potentiality have proliferated as concept terms bringing science and technology to bear on problems of ecology, toxicity, geology, health, infrastructure and others. This panel seeks to sort out the tensions and overlap among these terms especially with respect to how they help define emergent problems. We take up the themes of the conference by emphasizing connections between vernacular and expert knowledge while exploring key modes of living together during difficult times. We emphasize the positive content of terms like uncertainty and indeterminacy that risk denoting a vague absence of knowledge or lack of unidirectional predictability. How does uncertainty inhere not only in the limits of understanding or the techniques of risk management but also as an inherent quality of relations themselves? Among the people we study and learn with, how do their capacities for grappling with indeterminacy force a reckoning with our desires for clean arguments, narrative closure and uncompromised politics? How does the potentiality of certain problems such as climate change add depth to their temporal texture and latent capacities for action (or inaction)? Taking up the work of Michelle Murphy, Kim Fortun, Karen Barad, Adele Clarke and others, we seek to underscore the constructive tension between vernacular and technical knowledge around unstable sociopolitical and technical zones. (The panel is organized by an anthropologist of Southeast Asia who has published on uncertainty, climate change and ecology, and an anthropologist of Turkey who has published on energy extraction, geology and indeterminacy.)
