Steven Jackson, Cornell University; Matt Ratto, University of Toronto; Fernando Dominguez, UC San Diego; Olivia Doggett, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
This open panel invites contributions that speak to the complex relations between hope and technoscience. It welcomes investigations of hope in technoscience – the myriad hopes that sustain the ordinary work and commitment of actors in the field(s); hopes for technoscience – the hopes placed by others (whether misguided or well-founded) on the efficacy and potentialities of science and technology for addressing the threats and troubles we face; and hopes against technoscience – instances in which individual and community well-being and survival demand alternative forms and practices of hope that run against how hope is routinely coopted by dominant interests and discourses in technoscience. Drawing on work from the philosophy of hope by scholars like Benjamin and Bloch, and more recent work in anthropology, STS, and indigenous studies, we are especially interested to take hope seriously: as a formative force in human affairs, as an anchor and organizer of individual and collective action, and as a means of reimagining our material and temporal relations to the world. We particularly invite reflections on the relation between hope, engagement, thought, and critique, and how hope might (re)condition the practice of STS research and teaching: in short, the value of hope as a method that might stand in relation to other current interests in the field such as care, repair, futurity, and justice. Thus beyond its operations in the world, we seek to apply the ‘not yet-ness’ of hope to STS scholarship itself, asking where the field might yet go, and what it might yet become.
