Short Abstract

This panel traces the life and afterlife of technocracy to reflect on how technocratic subjectivities are made, maintained and loosened. Inviting feminist, embodied, institutional ethnographies that attune to the quiet re-compositions of expertise within power’s fading certainties.

Description

Technocracies have never been purely technical. Designed as instruments of control and power consolidation, they embody depoliticized logics that have deeply political effects. Their inhabitants--“technical” experts--have been historically shaped and sustained by evolving yet durable discursive formations of hierarchy, expertise, gender, and class. They learned to speak in idioms of precision and composure, of grand schemes and numbers, to build and to endure, focused on the future. With time, such modes condense into a quiet pride of neutrality, precision, and control.

This panel lingers with both the becoming and the potential re-becoming of the technocrat--how such subject-effects are co-produced within modernist and masculinist regimes of expertise, and how they live and adapt through their slow unravelling. Technocracies have possessed a peculiar ingenuity for adaptation: absorbing critique and re-articulating the moral vocabularies of inclusion, resilience, and participation without necessarily redistributing power. Some consolidate authority through digitalization, greening and AI; others fracture under new demands for accountability.

Ecological uncertainty, institutional fatigue, and moral strain make it increasingly difficult to sustain authority and relevance. Studying technocracy in this moment therefore means tracing its mutations--how critique, care, and affect circulate unevenly within, sometimes deepening control and sometimes opening small spaces for re-composition--its afterlives and continuities. We turn, then, from critique to re-composition--treating feminizing expertise as a speculative and humanizing practice of unlearning mastery and cultivating care, doubt, and attunement as forms of knowing and practices of sensing, repair, and retrofitting rather than overthrowing; to reimagine expertise otherwise from within its own infrastructures.

These modes of enacting and embodying expertise may not sit comfortably within the term technocracy, yet we use it provisionally--to name a formation simultaneously hardening and re-composing, consolidating and softening, as new ethical and affective possibilities flicker within its frame. The panel invites feminist, embodied, institutional ethnographies that treat technocracy as an affective infrastructure in transition, to reimaginemore responsive and resilient futures.

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