Ros Williams, The University of Sheffield; Anne Pollock, King's College London;
STS scholarship needs no prompt to take racialisation, race and racism as central features of enquiry. Increasingly geographically expansive, this work accommodates diverse racial formations across different (post)colonial modalities and an impressive empirical breadth. Concern with industry-driven environmental destruction and its effects on local minoritised communities might be pulled up alongside excavations of exclusionary built infrastructure design; from biomedicine and the genomic platform of ancestry testing that captured much of the intellectual energy in the first decades of the 2000s, to the digital platforms of the contemporary media ecology that take up a great deal of our attention today. This wide-ranging field, at the intersection of race and technology, is still dilating, and this open panel is an invitation for papers that join and extend this rich and growing field of enquiry, to situate its current contours and clarify the substantive problematics that are shaping its onwards trajectory.
We invite papers that:
- centre the interface of race and technology, broadly speaking (from artificial intelligence through to zoonotics);
- consider this interface at both its most exclusionary and its most hypervisibilising moments for differently racialised individuals, groups and communities;
- cast a critical eye backwards to histories of technoscientific racialisation, and forward through speculative interventions on future collisions of race and technology;
- provoke a consideration of how technologically-mediated or -enabled racism buttresses against other modalities of oppression;
- spark critical imaginings of how it might be otherwise by envisioning alternative, generative technoracial relations and entanglements.
