Paper short abstract:

Investigating the making and the consequences of technosciences outside the old industrial metropoles allows new insights into the possibilities of decolonization. This requires us to revisit the notions of colonization and technicisation.

Paper long abstract:

The Study of Science and Technology within the humanities and social sciences (sociology, history, philosophy, and much later also anthropology and geography) has been largely shaped by scholarship that focused on issues within the highly technicised, industrialised countries of the West. However, the circulation of technoscience and also the development of it are not contained within those countries but include the entire globe. Investigating the making and the consequences of technosciences outside the old industrial metropoles allows new insights into the possibilities of decolonization. This requires us to revisit the notions of colonization and technicisation.

Paper short abstract:

Everyday lives around the world are increasingly shaped by global articulations of technocience. This paper draws on case studies from East Asia to call for a new anthropology of everyday technocience capable of moving beyond simplistic modernist ideologies of progress and freedom.

Paper long abstract:

In Beijing, a mother just started to use a smartwatch to track the movements of her young child in the context of an increasingly hectic regime of intensive education. In Tokyo, a filial son visits his 90-year old mother and watches her interact with a humanoid robot called Pepper on trial in many nursing homes in Japan. These are some of the ways in which TECHNOSCIENCE is shaping everyday lives in the 21st century, and as these various examples imply, this dynamics of technoscientific world-making is not taking place in a vacuum but is mediated by complex social and political negotiations.

Anthropology and STS have developed strong synergies since the 1980s when it was argued that science labs, hospitals, and engineering companies could be studied ethnographically like "exotic societies." Twenty years later, in the age of digital capitalism and globalization, it is time to come out of the lab, the hospital, and the engineering company to reflect on the increasing centrality of global articulations of technoscience in the governance of everyday life practices. Instead of thinking of technoscience as something that will shape the future (for good or for bad), we need to ask critical questions about how technoscience is actually shaping everyday lives in the present. Here I draw on examples from my work and the work of my graduate students in East Asian contexts to show how technocience is aligning with larger political forces to participate in the construction of new forms of automated inequality.

Paper short abstract:

The productivity of the cooperation between STS and anthropology recently seems to slow down. In my comment to the roundtable I suggest, that new combinations of "old" anthropological themes can contribute a new momentum into debates about power, inequality and marginalisation.

Paper long abstract:

The cooperation between STS and anthropology has been very productive during the last decades. Anthropology as a discipline has gained a lot by reflecting its in-build assumptions in many of its disciplinary fields of interest through insights into the construction of scientific facts. However, it seems that the pace of this productivity has recently slowed down. In my comment to the roundtable I will suggest, that new combinations of "old" anthropological themes with STS can contribute a new momentum into debates about power, inequality and marginalisation. The foundational issue of kinship, where reproductive technologies have called into questions western assumption about reproduction and personhood, shows this dynamic. STS helped overthrowing "old kinship", yet the shift in focus has also contributed to a loss of insights. For example, the relation between property and kinship receded, so that it needed someone like Piketty to remind us of inheritance as major source of inequality. Thus, in order to stir the conversation again, a turn to seemingly old-fashioned insights in the reproduction of structures of inequality can be fruitful. New technologies of measuring "proper" kinship as descent (like paternity and genomic testing) become structurally important if translated into laws of inheritance or exclusionary if connected to bans of specific forms of marriage (like for example cousin marriage).

Paper short abstract:

Could anthropology consider translating the citizen science model to democratize our methods and inquiries by working alongside citizen anthropologists?

Paper long abstract:

As we consider ways anthropology might contribute to the interruption of what seems like an inevitable march towards a future determined by technoscience, this presentation asks whether citizen anthropologists might contribute to disrupting or reshaping the paths that neoliberal forces perpetuate. Not without its problems, citizen science can and has provided data and direction from outside the technoscientific community to shape futures, especially in the case of ecological research. While avoiding a direct translation of the citizen science model, anthropology could consider loosening its grip on the role of the solo researcher as a collector of data and information. How can anthropology contribute to the democratizing of knowledge? What particularities about our disciplinary frameworks and research practices might contribute to a meaningful breakdown between the expert researcher and the research subjects. In considering these questions I will offer some insights from citizen science projects about the possibilities and pitfalls that arise from this research model. Moving to models that are frequently used in social science research I reflect on the Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) model where researchers collaborate with local groups and communities with the aim of developing solutions and actions. I then turn to the work of anthropologists like Kim TallBear that draw on indigenous knowledge systems, situated knowledges, and feminist approaches that centralize "care of the subject" as a way to counter some of the problems with CBPR. From these reflections we can begin a conversation about the possibilities and problems we might find in rethinking anthropology.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages the growing body of scholarship on automatic society, biometric citizenship, technologized e-/border and life world, and non/human placing a renewed emphasis on algorithmic reduction.

Paper long abstract:

It was not only "Hitler [who] thought war in the air was a particularly Germanic form of battle" (Edgerton 2008: 104). The scholarly and political episteme of techno-nationalism in France, Britain, United States of America, and Soviet Union assembled each nation, as opposed to the Other, as the nation "best fitted for the technological age (Ibid.). This episteme immediately rendered the rest of the world as futureless non-nations.

In this paper I turn to how the algorithmic reduction of human into faceprint at technologically automated airports point us at an unprecedented turn for the re-making of the nation and guarding and compromising of sovereign state borders. Algorithmic calculations control human movements as handling large quantities of data unknown in human experience, making sure that the identifiable, "self-identical," sovereign nation-state is not under attack. Human subject as bodily movement has become an effect of algorithmic identification and verification, dismantling the difference between non/human. I discuss how as a neoliberal digitized object human's reality is expressed in mathematical terms and processed and controlled with the computerized machines that act without reference to the human world. And how the faceprint itself as a technology of control of human body as a "non-state" or "trans-state" entity, is connected with the current worldwide use of drones in "targeted killings," reducing the Otherized human to an image to be erased from the computer screen, the Earth.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on Jasanoff and Kim's idea of "sociotechnical imaginaries," I propose that we shall explore technology as an ideological force, embedded in political economy, through which a sense of history is imagined, negotiated and understood, and ethnography provides the apt tool to do so.

Paper long abstract:

In social studies of technology, scholar often study how a specific technology is socially and culturally constructed, or to examine how a technology reshapes or reproduce socio-political relations. Drawing on Jasanoff and Kim's idea of "sociotechnical imaginaries," I propose that we shall also explore technology as a symbolic or ideological force, embedded in a specific form of political economy, through which a sense of history is imagined, negotiated and understood, and ethnography provides the apt tool to do so. I try to think about this possibility through the case study of technological nationalism in China in the age of the gig economy. Technology, as understood through the rise of the gig economy, is pitted against labor as the measurement of progress. For many people with or without actual technological literacy, technology shapes an imagination of historical time. Such perception of time pivots on the ideological contrast between high technology-progress and low technology-backwardness, through which a new kind of national community can be imagined.