Short Abstract

This panel invites feminist, embodied, and institutional ethnographies of state technocracies, that engage technical expertise as it is lived, learned, maintained, and negotiated within governance institutions.

Description

Technocratic institutions are here to stay, and they continue to shape governance in powerful ways. If that is the case, then understanding how technical expertise operates internally and persists despite critique is crucial. This panel will explore the possibilities of engaging ethnographically with technocracies situated within the state. The endeavor is to "stay with the technocracy," in a similar vein as Haraway's "staying with the trouble," not to defend them, but not to dismiss them as already discredited either, and to take seriously what happens inside them.

Thus, this panel approaches technocracy as a set of everyday practices: a form of expertise that is lived, learned, inhabited, and held together through everyday institutional work. Building on STS traditions that treat knowledge as co-produced through infrastructures, routines, and subjectivities, the panel invites papers that study how “technical” expertise is actually carried through every mundane practice, in meetings, documents, models, training spaces, and bureaucratic relations. What happens when authority is questioned, contested, and when care or doubt enters practice, when moral unease surfaces without leading to a rupture. By sitting with these moments, we seek to move beyond critique alone, toward a more grounded understanding of how technical expertise continues to function (or flourish) under strain, and what it might mean to engage technocracies as they are, rather than as we might wish them to be.

Propose contribution