Short Abstract

Across healthcare, agriculture and warfare, precision promises to replace uncertainty with accuracy, waste with efficiency and threat with defense. This panel explores the meanings, practices and politics of technologies of precision employed to render futures knowable, predictable and governable.

Description

Across fields such as healthcare, agriculture, and warfare, the pursuit of precision has gained significant traction.

Precision medicine has evolved as a dominant paradigm, aiming to target prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to the individual patient through technological innovations such as genomic analysis, AI-driven risk-prediction tools, organoids, and Advanced Therapeutic Medicinal Products (ATMPs). Precision agriculture has emerged as a new mode of intervention, using technologies such as gene editing and gene modification (e.g., CRISPR) to make plants genetically fit for and resilient to specific environments. Precision warfare has developed as a military strategy that relies on accurate weaponry (e.g., drones), advanced guidance systems like GPS and lasers, and information technology to strike specific targets while minimizing collateral damage.

Across these three domains, precision functions as a technopolitical ideal that promises to replace uncertainty with accuracy, waste with efficiency, and geopolitical threat with defense. Whether the object is a disease, a field, or an enemy, precision shares the epistemic logic that complex, living systems and their futures can be rendered knowable, predictable, and governable through big data analysis.

This panel explores the meanings, practices, and politics of precision across healthcare, agriculture, and warfare: what specific meanings of precision do different technologies bring about, and what values do they draw upon and mobilize? How is precision practiced in time and space, and what spatio-temporalities do technologies of precision enact? Which processes of prediction do enactments of precision entail?

Interrogating technologies of precision aimed at forecasting, preparing for, and managing the future, this panel contributes to STS by exploring how frontier scientific innovations enact particular futures—making some futures possible, desirable, or inevitable—while foreclosing others. Central to our investigations is an attention to who benefits, who is rendered vulnerable, and what forms of life and knowledge are sustained or displaced by technologies of precision.

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