135. The Colonial Legacies of Biosciences and Big Data: Nativism, marginalisation, and biocoloniality in the era of surveillance capitalism
Ernesto Schwartz Marin, Exeter University; Arely Cruz Santiago, Exeter University; Matthias Wienroth, Northumbria University; Rafaela Granja, Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS)
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
This panel seeks to address the colonial legacies inherent to surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), specifically in relation to the biosciences and big data: We seek STS post- and decolonial accounts challenging liberal imaginaries that presuppose democratic participation, equality, and inclusion as in-built to sociotechnical developments here.
This panel builds on—and expands—the growing scholarship that has critically engaged with bio specimens and data governance, including massive sequencing and big data analytics (e.g. Radin & Kowal 2015, Reardon & Tallbear 2014). We invite contributions critically exploring, e.g., how
nativist ideas permeate and shape the scientific and ethical design of large genetic databases that target and/or overrepresent minority ethnic populations (e.g. Lipphardt et al. 2021);
racialised topographies are detected, contested, and incorporated into the technoscientific infrastructure of surveillance capitalism (e.g. Benjamin 2019, Browne 2015);
genetic ancestry testing engages with histories and legacies of slavery and racial politics (Abel 2021, Nelson 2016);
we can delineate the process through which biocoloniality (Schwartz-Marin & Restrepo 2013) reinstates, forecloses, or opens colonial legacies, e.g. in the way in which biomedical patents are disputed in the UK (Hilberg 2021) or when indigenous communities, NGOs and activists seek to avoid the pitfalls of biopiracy and oppression.
We welcome contributions addressing biomedical and security domains, and their intersection, that engage with how race, nativism, marginalisation, and biocoloniality feature in the era of surveillance capitalism.
