192. Care and Complicity: Global Governance and Technologies of Reproduction
Emily Yates-Doerr, University of Amsterdam/Oregon State University; Jenna Grant, University of Washington;
The panel explores care technologies implicated in the reproduction of harm, adding theorization of complicity to a robust tradition of care studies in STS (Mol, Poser, & Pols 2010; Martin et al 2015; Lindén and Lydahl 2021). We are interested in relational discernment practices surrounding care and global governance: How do global experts know if their work is doing good, not damage? We also want to discuss what happens when experts learn they are complicit in harm: (How) do they respond to change their ways? While we consider global actors and techniques of global governance, we also unpack the relation between care and complicity in STS. Scholarly critique easily becomes non-performative: reproducing the system it claims to challenge (Ahmed 2006). What are techniques for addressing our involvement in harmful systems in ways that work to transform-not reinforce-these systems? We seek examples of how academics and/or the communities we study have cared for complicity. Prompts for conversation include: how can we work with and against complicity; does complicity connect to fugitive practice; how can engagement with complicity help to reproduce worlds otherwise (Dominguez 1994; Murphy 2016; Berry et al 2017)? As we gather in Hawai'i to nourish our academic and intellectual communities-flying great distances to speak of climatic crisis; theorizing decolonization on colonized land-we want to consider relations of care and complicity in a way that attends to our limits, and which may even do so as a possible pathway toward change.
Keywords: Feminist STS, Governance and Public Policy, Medicine and Healthcare, Care Studies; Method and Practice; Social Reproduction Theory; Anthropology;
