Short Abstract:

Calls for “Recovery” abound in biomedicine, pandemic politics, climate change, economics, and other fields of governance. Against this nostalgia, how might feminist/intersectional STS and transformative justice spur new imaginings of social justice, embodiment, health, well-being, and dis-ease?

Long Abstract:

The theme for our proposed roundtable is recovery, in which we critically consider the circulations of this term in arenas such as biomedicine, pandemic politics, climate change, economics, and other fields of governance. What histories have given rise to the concept of “recovery,” and explain the apparent fungibility of this concept across such broad domains of social life? Aligned with current scholarly and activist efforts to think through the transformations in social relations required for meaningful versions of repair and recuperation, we are particularly interested in challenging presumptions of the feasibility/desirability of a return to a prior normative state. Instead, we aim to consider how the dual lenses of feminist/intersectional STS and transformative justice might spur new imaginations of not only social justice but also embodiment, health, individual well-being, and collective dis-ease. Consistent with a feminist/intersectional STS approach, we will pay close attention to the reciprocal relations between techno-scientific practices and knowledges, on the one hand, and multiple intersecting axes of power on the other. As distinct from the restoration and occlusion of underlying social fissures that is implied by the term re-covery, the transformative justice frame directs us away from nostalgia for an imagined just and healthy past, and towards the challenge of confronting the causes and conditions that brought us to the current state of disease, distress, and disorder in the first place. (Note that this roundtable was accepted for the 2022 conference in Cholula, but was canceled because 3 of our panelists were ill with COVID. Our “Recovery Working Group” has now met for nearly 2 years, and we are eager to pull others into the conversation.) Contributors: Rebecca Jordan-Young, Elizabeth Bernstein, Marisa Solomon (Barnard College, NY USA); Kerwin Kaye (Wesleyan University, CT USA); Miriam Ticktin (CUNY Graduate Center, NY USA).