Tiago Saraiva, Drexel University; Mara Dicenta, William & Mary
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
What does it mean reunion and reconfiguration in more-than-human worlds? How can STS think and design less oppressive more-than-human assemblages? And how can we address racialized asymmetries that cut cross not-only human forms of life? How can STS address this question without flattening differences and technoscientifically produced injustices?
This panel engages racialized not only human relations. In particular, we interrogate the production of whiteness and the modes of reunion and reconfiguration it imposes and represses in technoscientific worlds. How is whiteness (re)produced with infrastructures, animals, microorganisms, or plants? How do technoscientifically mediated non-humans participate in white ontologies?
Animals, plants, and infrastructures have materially enacted nations and empires (Duarte 2006; Saraiva 2016; Shukin 2009). Including nonhumans in our analysis promises to shed new light on the intersectional production of whiteness of race and ethnicity, unveiling its modes of existence in the world, its pervasiveness, and persistence. How do racial orders shape more-than-human worlds and how does the nonhuman secure those orders?
We do this with caution, as the study of whiteness and the nonhuman cannot come at the expense of others, that is, it cannot come by capitalizing on situated histories of race, resistance, and injustice to flatten human and nonhuman worlds. Rather, this panel moves beyond questions of agency to ask the intersectional production of whiteness to, ultimately, encourage less destructive antiracist ontological orders in technoscientific worlds.
