Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Saurabh Arora
(University of Sussex)
Misha Velthuis (Amsterdam University College)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
What political relations are observable (or obscured) between racial supremacy movements and techno-scientific practices as well as associated public policy processes, aimed at realising resilient, sustainable and just futures through modern sciences and technologies in the Global South and North?
Description
In recent decades, the world has witnessed the clamorous rise of white supremacy and resonating political movements like Hindutva and Bolsonarismo. Often addressed using terms such as authoritarian populism, the far-right, or even fascism, many of those movements have managed to win elections through associated political parties. They have been running some of the world’s most powerful national and regional governments, while building alliances with corporate behemoths. Yet, beyond some discussions of border security, social media and post-truth politics, the co-constitution of modern scientific and technological innovations with movements for racial supremacy has been neglected in STS.
Many critical questions thus require further attention, particularly in relation to the building of ostensibly resilient and just futures in the face of today’s daunting sustainability challenges. We welcome conceptual-empirical contributions addressing the following questions (but definitely not limited to them):
What relations are observable (or obscured) between racial supremacy movements and public policy practices aiming to realise resilient and sustainable futures through modern sciences and technologies in the Global South and North?
How are modern techno-sciences for building resilient futures constituted by entanglements between state power, masculinist movements (eg: the online manosphere) and/or religious extremism (eg: evangelicals behind Bolsonaro, violent Hindu nationalist groups supporting Modi)?
How is intensifying (digital) securitisation of European and North American borders, being coproduced with anti-migration movements attached to Trumpism, French National Rally, Reform UK, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the like?
What kinds of (military) sciences and (surveillance) technologies are being developed and deployed to crush dissent and control protest movements against alignments between state security apparatuses and racial supremacy movements?
In what ways are societal polarisations associated with racial supremacies, being enacted/negotiated in gendered practices of techno-scientific development for building resilience, across laboratories, design studios, makerspaces, users’ associations, hospitals, and so on?
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
The paper will explore how twentieth century Indian elite intellectuals relocated ideas of racial inferiority within gender hierarchies and tribal identities even as they sought to challenge European claims about Indian racial inferiority and resist the pitfalls of race science.
Paper long abstract
In 20th century British India, despite rejecting some of the colonial theories of race science, Indian anthropologists and statisticians strove to develop it as a modern Indian and anticolonial practice. Their aim was to use certain theories and methods of European race science to ultimately challenge the racial epistemology of the colonial state, especially the European claim about Indian racial inferiority. By analyzing some primary studies on reproductive and biological features and practices of ethnic communities, this paper shows how those attempts unfolded. In particular, it shows how Indian intellectuals resisted the pitfalls of that European race science had failed to avoid, foregrounding in some cases more progressive ideas about race and the purpose of race science. The paper however also shows how even as Indian elites managed to carve out a different space for race science and forged a place for themselves as scientific experts at par with their global counterparts in Anglo-America, Indian elites also naturalized ideas and presumptions about social hierarchy, gender inequality and Adivasi “primitivity” in the way they deployed categories and measures of biological practices, reproductive trends and physical features. The paper aims to show how racial inferiority came to be challenged in an anticolonial context but only at the expense of entrenching hierarchies of gender and indigeneity.
Paper short abstract
In this article, we scrutinise policy proposals from Europe's major 'far‑right' parties, using the concept of colonial modernity - conceived as white supremacy, toxic extraction, and nationalist control - to trace the connections between their anti‑migrant and anti‑sustainability positions.
Paper long abstract
In 21st century Europe, racially and religiously charged xenophobic and nationalist movements have become normalised. This normalisation has involved significant growth in popular support for ‘far-right’ political voices and parties. In this paper, rather than focusing on reasons behind the rise of the ‘far-right’, we scrutinise the policy proposals of dominant ‘far-right’ political parties in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France and Spain. In particular, we trace connections between anti-migrant and anti-sustainability positions adopted in the parties’ policies. For this analysis, we use the overarching concept of colonial modernity (Arora and Stirling 2023), focusing particularly on its three co-constitutive dimensions of white supremacy, toxic extraction and nationalist control. We find that ‘far-right’ policies across the six focal countries are strongly aligned in militating against the wellbeing of racialised migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, while also opposing ecological flourishing of even the more conservative kinds in relation to wider climates, global biodiversities, and international cooperation for peace. Exceptions to anti-sustainability positions are restricted to nationalist concerns for local soils, waters and lands. Where it pertains to global justice-related concerns of sustainability, for instance in terms of climate justice, European ‘far-right’ parties are near unanimous in their opposition. We conclude that grasping relations between ‘far-right’ policies across different political-ecological contexts, might enable the interweaving of disparate struggles for migrant justice and environmental and climate justice. Interweaving struggles of these kinds may in turn be crucial for confronting, transforming or dismantling deeper colonial foundations of today’s Europe and the wider modern world.