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- Convenors:
-
Jennifer Denbow
(California Polytechnic State University)
Coleen Carrigan (University of Virginia)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- HG-05A16
- Sessions:
- Friday 19 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
This panel combines feminist STS theories of care with theories on reproductive labor. Papers will map connections among technological developments of late capitalism, the degradation and commodification of reproductive labor, and the racialized gender politics of scientific knowledge production.
Long Abstract:
Whether the focus is on the flows of care workers from the global south to the global north or on the dismantling of the welfare state, reproductive labor has increasingly become a site of extraction under neoliberalism. Although reproductive labor underpins the economy, it is often naturalized and made invisible through material, cultural, epistemic and ideological relations of power. These same power relations enthrone digital commodities, aggrandizing tools useful to the intensification of value extraction from labor markets around the globe.
Care is a critical analytical category to uncover the oppressive norms of knowledge production in science and technological worksites. In feminist STS, care is taken up as both a conceptual concern (what do we care about?) and a methodological one (why do we care?) to excavate and investigate hidden labors that are deleted from the individualistic, androcentric myth-building of technoscientific work.
This panel will generate insights from joining feminist STS theories of care together with political economic theories on caring labor. Panelists will explore questions such as: What are the connections between neoliberalism’s fetishization of technology and its novel modes of extraction and degradation of reproductive labor? How are these linked to gendered and racialized constructions of whose work matters and whose knowledge matters in science? How is the virtualization of society connected to the devaluation of reproductive labor? How does the fetishization of technoscience act as an ideological solvent for care about the social?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 19 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
I will present preliminary findings from an ethnography of the "Age Tech" sector in the US. Through interviews, observation, and analysis of company documents, public-facing materials, and publications I investigate competing visions within the sector for the future of care, work, and aging.
Paper long abstract:
The US, like many nations, is in a “crisis of care;” due to aging cohorts, a frayed social safety net, high costs of in-home care, and an underpaid, undervalued homecare workforce, eldercare is increasingly inaccessible (e.g., Abelson & Rios, 2023; Glenn, 2000). The eldercare technology, or “Age Tech,” industry has introduced myriad new technologies – positioning these developments as urgent solutions to the “care crisis.” Existing scholarship has examined how care workers and families navigate surveillant systems that mediate eldercare in the US (e.g., Glaser, 2021; Berridge et al., 2019) and how technologists in Japan envision caring technologies as vehicles for family and state futures (Robertson, 2017; Wright, 2023), but there has been limited research on how professionals within the American “Age Tech” sector envision “the future of care work.” This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork with doctors, technologists, researchers, and entrepreneurs in the industry and analysis of extant materials to answer the following questions: How do these professionals envision the future of care, work, and aging? When and how do these visions come into conflict with one another? And finally, how do they speak about the gendered, racialized homecare workforce who they seek to augment, replace, and/or aid? In my preliminary findings, I argue that competing visions are often at play, even within the same organizations and within individual narratives – members of the “Age Tech” industry alternate between presenting themselves as savvy entrepreneurs tapping into the “longevity economy” and do-gooders providing a necessary service for a social ill.
Paper short abstract:
NIPT in Belgium is based on the premise of equity in access to testing. However, gender, race and class inequalities materialize at various stages of the test’s trajectory. Analyzed through the lens of care, these inequalities result from the valuation of some reproductive bodies over others.
Paper long abstract:
In 2017, Belgium became the first European country to offer first-tier noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) to all pregnant women for free. Without much public scrutiny, NIPT replaced long-standing and routinized screening practices for Down syndrome. The goal of the offer is to ‘enhance reproductive autonomy’ by informing women on the fetus’ health. Fetal DNA is accessed through maternal blood and then compared to a ‘normal’ data set of reference (the 'general population') to assess the risk of aneuploidies. The reproductive body thus plays a crucial role in the production of knowledge on the population, as well as its management.
Unlike commercial offers, NIPT in Belgium is based on the premise of equity in access to testing. However, I argue that various inequalities materialize at different stages of the test’s trajectory. Analyzed through the lens of care, these inequalities result from the valuation of some reproductive bodies and the negligence of others.
To illustrate this, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in a genetic center. First, I turn to the laboratory to show how some marginalized populations were not included in the establishment of the set of reference. Second, I turn to genetic counselling to show how the test fails to address women’s material conditions of life and the gendered division of reproductive labor. The test perpetuates an individualist discourse on choice that does not always align with practitioners’ notions of a ‘good care’. The implementation of NIPT is underpinned by gender, race and class biases in a neoliberalized healthcare setting.