Machines are central artifacts in the study of science and technology. As both the products and producers of ways of being, machines play an important role in the making and unmaking of lifeworlds. The borderlands needs to be thought of as a machine and a site of machines. The development of converging technologies that make computing power possible is often described in frontier language. Silicon Valley and its network of engineers, technicians, and companies take on the roles of pioneers demarcating new territory for others to inhabit. This territory is positioned as a zone of encounters between various forces, a space from where human creativity takes flight and that is slowly populated by natives who produce new ways of thinking and of being. The language of frontiers, pioneers, and natives in technoscience brings into consideration imperial formations, that is practices, concepts, and bodies that produce ambiguous rules and spaces of inclusion/exclusion.

This panel brings together concepts and ways of tracing relations from the fields of Feminist STS, Latina/o Studies, and Critical Ethnic Studies to think about technoscience and the borderlands in the making of unequal and uncertain worlds. We invite papers from a range of contexts about:

– Comparative racial formations & technical infrastructures
– Black, Indigenous, and People of Color as critical actors in technoscience
– Technoscience in the/as a borderlands
– Concepts emerging from “border thinkers” as ways to bridge social and technical domains
– Borderlands theory as a way to rethink STS