cfP - Connection, Sharing, and Entanglement in Postcolonial Studies of Technoscience
Dear colleagues,
We are looking for submissions for a special issue of Tecnoscienza on
“Reconsidering Assumptions about ‘Conjugated Subjects’: Connection,
Sharing, and Entanglement in Postcolonial Studies of Technoscience”
(see CfP below and in attachment).
Please spread the word and don’t hesitate to contact the guest editors
if you have any further questions.
All the best, The editorial team of TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of
Science & Technology Studies
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Reconsidering Assumptions about ‘Conjugated Subjects’: Connection,
Sharing, and Entanglement in Postcolonial Studies of Technoscience
Deadline for abstract submissions: September 20^th , 2019.
This special thematic issue of /Tecnoscienza/ aims to provide a forum to
revisit concerns raised by Warwick Anderson (2009: 389) about what he
perceived to be the ‘minor postcolonial agenda in STS’ becoming subsumed
‘as scholars choose now to fetishise “globalisation”.’ At that time, as
Maureen McNeil (2005: 106, 111) observed, the term ‘postcolonial’ was ‘a
rather ambiguous term’ touching on ‘both the impact and legacies of
formally deposed imperial regimes and to new forms of exploitative
global relations,’ noting that ‘colonial legacies are never simply
“leftover” from the past, they are reanimated, recast and reappropriated
in new forms and new ways, with new resistances.’ Anderson, in turn,
described the uneven and unexpected consequences produced by two
overlapping directions within postcolonial STS, one concerned with
‘subjugated knowledges’ and the other with ‘conjugated subjects.’ The
critical study of subjugated knowledges placed emphasis on
understandings of power, history, identity, and epistemology that have
been marginalised or made invisible within Western society (cf.
Palladino and Worboys, 1993; Hess, 1995; Visvanathan, 1997; Harding,
1998). Anderson (2009: 389) created the term ‘conjugated subjects,’ on
the other hand, to ‘hint at postcolonial hybridity and heterogeneity.’
His aim was to reveal ‘a more complicated and entangled state of
affairs’ (2009: 389-390). He also noted that ‘postcolonial theory and
insight rarely have been mobilised explicitly in attempts to explain the
transaction, translation and transformation of science and technology’
(2009: 390). The critical study of conjugated subjects raised doubt
about the comprehensiveness and efficacy of prevailing narratives in
which social, cultural, and political formations of technological
imperialism are depicted as one-way relationships of ‘sending’
colonisers and ‘receiving’ colonial subjects (e.g., Watson-Verran and
Turnbull, 1995; Abraham, 2006; Seth, 2009). Moreover, it established
grounds for a challenge to what Anderson (2009: 392, 397) described as
global (or universalist) claims about patterns of local transactions
that seem ‘quite abstract, strangely depopulated, and depleted of
historical and social content’ brought into being by a ‘[r]eluctance to
recognise and engage directly with the postcolonial spectre haunting
globalisation.’
Ongoing consideration and review of what Anderson originally described
as the ‘hybrid, partial and conflicted’ conjugated subjects of
postcolonial STS, we submit, provides opportunities to come to terms
with what Suman Seth (2017: 77) has recently called ‘the socially
imbricated, tentative, and complex coming-into-being of the categories
and binaries [that have been taken to characterise colonial modes of
thought and governance].’ What have since been called, variously,
‘connected,’ ‘shared,’ and ‘entangled’ histories of technoscientific
co-production permit, we believe, a foretaste of what can be achieved by
untangling and reconnecting local histories of technoscience in ways
that stress processes of mutual influencing across borders (cf. Philip,
Irani, and Dourish, 2012; Kowal, Radin, and Reardon, 2013; Brandt,
2014). Accordingly, we propose to open up and develop the discussion
surrounding conjugated subjects of postcolonial STS by soliciting papers
that include (but are not limited to) studies of the ‘connected,’
‘shared,’ and ‘entangled’ relationships of technoscience that:
have occurred between colonial powers and independent former colonies;
have occurred under (pre- or post-1989) first-second-third world
international relationships;
have occurred in the course of supranational and/or international
technoscientific projects involving collaborations between so-called
developing and developed nations (e.g., Human Genome Projects, LIGO
Scientific Collaboration, UN Convention on Biological Diversity,
Millennium Seed Bank Partnership).
Abstracts (in English) with a maximum length of 500 words should be sent
as email attachments to redazione@tecnoscienza.net
and copied to the guest editors.
Notification of acceptance will be communicated by October 2019. Full
papers (in English with a maximum length of 8,000 words including notes
and references) will be due on March 30^th 2020 *and will be subject to
a double blind peer review process.
For information and questions, please do not hesitate to contact the
guest editors:
William Leeming, bleeming@faculty.ocadu.ca
Ana Barahona, ana.barahona@ciencias.unam.mx
--
[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pdf which had a name of Call for papers_SI 2019.pdf]
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