March 8, 2021 | Reflections
Iván Chaar López is professor at the Department of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching examine the politics and aesthetics of digital technologies. He is especially interested in the place of Latina/o/xs as targets, users, and developers of digital lifeworlds. He is currently working on a book, under contract with Duke University Press, about the intersecting histories of electronic technology, unmanned aerial systems, and boundary making along the U.S.-Mexico border. In this post, Amanda Domingues interviews Iván Chaar López on the connections of his work with contemporary issues faced by Latina/o/xs in the United States.
How does your work contribute to current debates in STS?
I am interested in thinking about information technologies and politics through space and place. How might we trace relations carefully, situate them to pick up variations of intensity and treatment? From other STS scholars we know that political objectives are coded into artifacts (Winner, Gillespie, Hecht). So, for me it’s an issue not just of tracing a network of relations but of accounting for differential processes, differential treatments. One way I do this kind of work is by describing the articulation of webs of significance and their embedding in contextualized sociotechnical processes. This line of inquiry has led me to examine the borderlands (with special focus on US-Mexico) in relation to technology, both as a site of technological development and as a technology itself–an artifact drawing out relations. This approach is part of a growing push to think technoscience through critical race theory (Agard-Jones, R. Benjamin), feminist practices (Atanasoski and Vora, P. Collins, Haraway, Nakamura, C. Sandoval), and imperial formations (Stoler).
In your article published at American Quarterly, you address the role of cybernetics in regulating Latino’s bodies in the United States. How was this regulation fundamental to the US nation-making project in the 1960s and 1970s? And how is it fundamental today?
US nation-making in the 1960s and 1970s was deeply informed by the discursive treatment of some migrants as threats. In part, this was the result of World War II’s racial politics of immigration with ethnic Japanese (both US citizens and non-US citizens) who were treated as disloyal subjects. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and other federal agencies developed techniques for identifying seemingly loyal non-citizens from disloyal ones with such artifacts as loyalty questionnaires and immigration identification cards. In treating specific racial constructs as a threat to the nation, INS normalized a politics of enmity as a governing framework for immigration enforcement. By the 1960s and 1970s, ethnic Mexicans (and Latin Americans more broadly) were the “threat” to control (Leo Chavez). Cybernetics and information theory together were leveraged by INS to help reorganize old and develop new mechanisms through which racial control could be exerted. This was in part the product of growing collaborations between the Department of Defense, defense industries and think tanks, and the INS.
These collaborations led to the development of what I call the cybernetic border, a sociotechnical arrangement centered on data capture, management, and processing meant to institute racial order on the borderlands and, consequently, produce the border. The cybernetic border that emerged in the mid-twentieth century continues to this day through the entanglement of a range of information technologies construed as central to border and immigration enforcement: from drones and CCTV systems to facial recognition technologies at ports of entry and OCR-readable identity documents. The book I’m working on, preliminarily titled The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion, examines this history to interrogate our contemporary moment. By tracing the co-production of technoscience and differential treatments, it shows how imperial formations are infrastructural arrangements.
You are currently engaged in the work of two very interesting labs: the Precarity Lab at University of Michigan and the Border Tech Lab at University of Texas at Austin. How does your work engage with the missions of these two labs?
The Precarity Lab and the Border Tech Lab have distinct origin stories with different relations to my work. The former was started in 2016 while I was a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan. Led by Lisa Nakamura and comprising a range of scholars (i.e., full, associate, and assistant professors, and graduate students), this lab seeks to understand digital technologies in a context of intensifying precarization and capitalist crisis. Because my work engages the politics of information technologies, I was naturally interested in collaborating with the members of the lab. I also had experience with co-writing from my years as a student activist at the University of Puerto Rico and was intrigued by the prospect of doing it again in a different context. The result of our collaboration are two co-written pieces, one in Social Text (2019) and the book Technoprecarious (2020).
The influence of the Precarity Lab on my current work is palpable. While I was a postdoc at Cornell University’s Department of Science & Technology Studies and the Latina/o Studies Program, I began a new research group under the name of the Border Tech Lab. As the principal investigator of the BTL, I work with an interdisciplinary group of undergraduate and graduate students tracing the entanglements between technologies and boundary production. We examine how the boundaries of imagination and of the possible are articulated by/through technology and knowledge communities. We’re currently working on two projects. The first deals with the place of nativist paramilitary organizations in the development and use of sensor technologies for border and immigration enforcement. The second project contributes to the history of electronics and computing by studying manufacturing along the US-Mexico borderlands since the 1960s. Our goal is to interrogate the technopolitics of special economic zones, “non-essential knowledge” (García Peña), and disposability. This lab is now part of my research practice at the University of Texas at Austin.
How can the labs contribute (or have they been contributing) to reflect on issues inaugurated by the pandemic?
Thinking carefully about differential treatments and impacts is a cornerstone for both the Precarity Lab and the Border Tech Lab. Precarity Lab proposes consideration of what it calls the undergig. This is the sociotechnical infrastructure making precarious gig work and digital lifeworlds possible. While gig workers often receive plenty of attention, in part because they’re imagined as vulnerable White male creatives, we contend there’s a part of the whole infrastructure that is forgotten or left unaddressed. The undergig are, for example, all those manufacturing jobs that make use of the toxic materials with which computer and other information technologies are produced. In the context of the pandemic, there’s no better example of the undergig than the “essential workers” in the maquila system forced to continue producing technologies for US markets and the US military. The work I’m doing with BTL involves studying the paradoxical articulation of “essential workers” as “non-essential knowledge,” and their treatment as disposable labor.
Amanda Domingues is a PhD student at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. Her current research focuses on race and gender in field and laboratory practices of bioarchaeologists.
Image courtesy of Iván Chaar-López
Published: 03/08/2021