Short Abstract:

Science and technology continue to be shaped by colonial legacies, even as competing worldviews within technoscience emphasize other means than colonial ways of understanding the world. As postcoloniality becomes important in STS, what might decolonial scholarship and decolonization contribute?

Long Abstract:

Science and technology continue to be shaped by colonial legacies, even as competing worldviews within technoscientific knowledge production challenge colonial ways of understanding the world. As postcolonialism becomes increasingly important in science and technology studies (Harding 2011), what challenges and possibilities might decoloniality and decolonization contribute to these ongoing conversations? Taking up several historical and geopolitical commitments, our roundtable asks: What other means of world-making possibilities are being enacted, or become imaginable, when we think through decolonization and decoloniality?

Multiple genealogies inform the current use of decolonization, postcolonialism, and decoloniality as analytical frames: from global incitement for decolonization after World War II (Tsing 2005; Fanon 1961) to contemporary calls for decoloniality from scholars committed to the modernity/coloniality research program in Latin America and its diaspora (Escobar 2002; Lugones 2010; Mignolo 2007) to postcolonial critique that colonialism continues social, economic, and ecological violence (Chakrabarty 2000; Cooper 2001; Stoler 2013). Additionally, our roundtable thinks with peoples, communities, ecologies, beings, and things that that may be engaged in decolonizing practices and struggle. We explore how these works interface with technoscientific production of knowledge and institutions in ways that may (or may not) grant modern sciences authoritative position over other knowledges and practices. Each panelist addresses two questions: "What does the lens of decoloniality or decolonization render imaginable in the worlds and world-making processes you study? What term(s) speak to the worlds and the world-making relations that concern you and what gets generated in the tensions between postcolonialism, decolonization, and decoloniality?