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- Convenors:
-
Britt Paris
(Rutgers University)
Owen Marshall (Cornell University)
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- Chair:
-
Britt Paris
(Rutgers University)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Historical materialist analyses of technoscience reveal the world as a complex configuration of processes entwined with political and economic forces. We invite work around scientific and technological concepts and practices situated within and/or challenging dominant political economic processes.
Long Abstract:
Historical materialist approaches to science and technoculture see the world as complex configurations of overlapping and interconnected processes embedded within a tangle of political and economic forces. Even as technoscience is tightly intertwined with neoliberalism, these forces are negotiated and negated through a variety of underrecognized strategies and practices by people seeking to endure crisis and precarity. Political economic analysis of science and technology render social systems and structures as more than subjective value-laden processes. Rather political economic analyses rooted in historical materialism render these systems and structures traceable, contextualized activities. These analyses expose how explicit and implicit policies privilege those who already have the most at the expense of those who have the least. In so doing, they show how these structures and processes might be upended to make life not merely liveable under capitalism, but to build a future that encourages human flourishing.
STS work that places technoscientific culture and practices in direct relation with historical materialism and political economy exists, but is far from normalized. This panel seeks to expand such discussions. We invite political economic analyses of science and technoculture, including but not limited to critiques of scientific discourse and practice, the commercialization and of education systems, the indebting of technoscientific subjects, grounded anti-capitalist projects, or using science and technical infrastructure as an organizing tool to mobilize against the harms of financial accumulation. We are interested in surfacing examples and approaches to the following questions: What are obstacles and avenues to meaningfully incorporating historical materialism into STS work? How are political economic relations reified or contested in science and technical projects? How can we transform the dominant mode of political economic reification in scientific and technological assemblages to bring about a people-centered future?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Daniel Greene (University of Maryland)
Long abstract:
Historical materialism pursues a "ruthless criticism of all that exists." Ruthless, Marx explained, not just in its hostility to existing power structures but in its deconstruction of power's operation--no matter how much the critic and their social position may be indicted by the process. The globalization that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union was, in many quarters, hailed as itself revolutionary: breaking the rule of value through weightless communications networks and allowing a disaffected--but always connected--precariat to organize outside the hierarchy of the party form.
But neither Hardt nor Fukuyama could end history. Indeed, a closer inspection of the political economy of contemporary communications--the exchange points and data centers at the base of the internet--reveals the planetary scale of contemporary capitalism. Far from revolutionary, the firms controlling these choke points are simple landlords, fortifying some of the most valuable real estate in human history. Drawing from recent work in communization theory, this talk works backwards from the utopian prospect of a communist internet to examine what would have to change in the ownership, operation, and design of internet infrastructure to make it a true commons. Such a thing may be no more possible than a communist Wal-Mart, since we are dealing not with logical premises or neutral technical capacity, but fossilized social forms. But asking after it reveals the class conflicts embedded both in this infrastructure and in our own desires for connection.
Emma May (Rutgers University)
Long abstract:
This paper develops the concept of “poor information,” which builds upon Steyerl (2009) and Milan and Treré (2020) to describe the alignment of information and capital. The concept underscores how information is devalued as a result of its circulation, as its connections to economic, political and social structures are revealed through its travel. The study extends feminist media studies and critical data studies literature to examine the role of information within radical health activism, with attention to the ways that it is simultaneously understood as a means of survival and limited in its capacity to create change. More specifically, the paper explores how systems of value take shape in health information. Often gatekept and in the form of directives, health information in its common configurations is symptomatic of both the violence of the healthcare system and broader inequities. The study uses semistructured interviews combined with discourse analysis methods to investigate how an online community of disabled and chronically ill podcast listeners conceptualize information as a form of political and economic power. Through interviews with members, the study confronts the tensions between the inequities embedded in the values we place on information, and the role of information in movements for social change.
Nate Beard (University of Maryland)
Long abstract:
Human resource management (HRM) is a long-institutionalized employer practice, professional occupation, and academic field of study in the US. Historically, HRM receives investment when employers see a rise in labor problems—from New Deal legislation codifying collective bargaining rights and workplace protections to increased labor organizing, newly proposed "AI" and algorithm legislation, and threats to employer legitimacy in making employment-related decisions, such as the growth of contract and algorithmically mediated gig labor today. Over the past 20 years, and especially since the 2008 recession, HRM technologies and "people analytics" platforms and products have received immense investment and is now used by the vast majority of employers in the US to make hiring and performance evaluation decisions.
This paper is a part of my dissertation research that examines the "future of work" according to the networks of people and organizations seeking to manage it. How is management, as opposed to labor, being automated? How do workforce and workplace surveillance and analytics seek to reshape what workers and work? What is technoscience and managerial commonsenses employed to justify the design and implementation of automated hiring and performance evaluation systems? This project seeks to examine the political economy of "top performers" and "ideal candidates" by tracing assemblages of HRM technologies, vendors, consultants, and discourses. Through historical and ethnographic research, I hope to contribute to discussions of how we can meaningfully incorporate historical materialism into the sociology of knowledge and work as they relate to AI and automated management systems.
Sebastian Nähr-Wagener (FernUniversität Hagen) Orsolya Friedrich (Fernuniversität in Hagen)
Long abstract:
In the context of so called ‘smart homes’, especially smart household devices (e.g. ‘smart’ fridges, ovens, dishwashers or washing machines), the time savings for users and the ecological benefits are usually emphasized in addition to the increased convenience. And there's no doubt about it: smart homes can not only make running a household more convenient, but also more efficient and, to a certain extent, more environmentally friendly. But in what sense are smart household devices actually 'smart' in this context? Because they automate or connect certain activities or processes in the household – i.e. ultimately only because of their state of technological development? Or isn’t it rather the case that there are also some other 'smart' effects, which are important here? This assumption is particularly plausible if one dares to take a 'critical perspective' on technology (c.f. e.g. Feenberg 1991): From this perspective, both the promise of increased efficiency regarding housework but also the valorization of ecological and moral convictions are to be seen under the given socio-historical conditions as components of certain neoliberal regimes of governmentality and corresponding processes of subjectivation (cf. fundamentally Foucault 2007, 2008) – in short, smart homes are also very smart places for the subtle production and regulation of certain subject forms (e.g. the quantified, the optimized, the entrepreneurial, the valorized etc. self) in late capitalism. The talk addresses these ways of subjectivation and thus ultimately shows in what sense smart homes also function as ‘ideological agents’.
Charles Hahn (University of Washington)
Long abstract:
Questions of science, technology, and bureaucracy in Indigenous contexts tend towards discussions of cultural alterity. Traditional Indigenous knowledges are imagined to be relational and place-based, in contrast to Western science which is seen as universalizing and cosmopolitan. Related, frameworks of “coloniality” aim to demonstrate how Western science is valued over Indigenous ways of knowing in different colonial institutions (Quijano and Ennis 2000). All these discussions are ultimately idealist because they are premised on culture, values, and knowledge as preceding rather than reflecting social relations. This paper asks how a historical-materialist approach shifts how we imagine technoscience in Indigenous contexts. Marx’s materialism in The German Ideology, the “Theses on Feuerbach” and Capital takes what and how we know to be outcomes of human agency and creativity in concrete social contexts. If Indigeneity is a social relation that emerges out of Indigenous experience of and opposition to settler colonial dispossession (Nichols 2020), then what defines “Indigenous knowledge” is not an abstract opposition to “Western science” but instead the practical and historical consciousness of Indigenous people in that context. The paper briefly turns to the author’s fieldwork in the U.S. state of Alaska, where Alaska Native groups have long taken up diverse forms of knowledge, including “scientific” forms, to advocate for their interests and articulate critiques of dispossession. Such “Indigenous knowledge” reflects the concrete and sometimes diverse experience and consciousness of Alaska Native groups in opposition to the various dimensions of settler colonialism.