181. Solidarity in Critical STS: Can Productive Tensions Create Sustainable Collaboration?
Cora Olson, Virginia Tech/Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine; Liora Goldensher, Virginia Tech; John Aggrey, Virginia Tech; Christine Labuski, Virginia Tech;
What is solidarity in the critical STS classroom and what might it enable? Climate justice scholar and activist Farhana Sultana (2021) defines solidarity as 'attending to how [social problems] impact people differently, unevenly, and disproportionately, as well as redressing the resultant injustices in fair and equitable ways.' This open panel invites scholars to think with this mode of solidarity (i.e., recognizing and redressing the burdens of disparaged difference) in the context of the critical STS classroom and other teaching and learning spaces. What role(s) can critical STS pedagogy and praxis play in enacting, imagining and interrogating epistemic solidarity? What does solidarity look like across difference(s) in knowledge access, production, and dissemination?
Building from our 2022 4S panel, 'Productive Tensions between Critical STS Pedagogy and Critical STS,' we are attuned to the role of such tensions in creating and maintaining spaces of solidarity. Can productive tensions engender collaborations and, if so, can these collaborations be rendered sustainable? How can we create space through productive tensions for collective knowledge production across feminist, Indigenous, queer, post/anti-colonialist, anti-racist, and other uniquely marginalized critical STS pedagogy? We are further attuned to how solidarity organized around recognition and redress might be enacted by and between students, rather than between student and professor. Few critical STS pedagogy researchers have looked at this facet of praxis as a location for interrogation.
What does or could that collaboration and support look like? By focusing on solidarity, we shift the critical STS pedagogy dialogue towards student-to-student interactions.
