Llamado para contribuciones para la sesión “Ecologies and Material Politics of the Inorganic” co-organizada por Manuel Tironi para la conferencia conjunta entre Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) y la Sociedad Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología (ESOCITE) que se llevará a cabo entre el 20 y 23 de agosto 2014 en Buenos Aires.
Cfp_ “Ecologies and Material Politics of the Inorganic”
Organizers: Manuel Tironi (Goldsmiths, University of London/Universidad Católica de Chile), Nerea Calvillo (Goldsmiths, University of London) & Max Liboiron (Northeastern University)
Minerals, chemicals, aerosols and other inorganic entities sustain, expand and interfere with life on Earth. Their incessant activity shapes – and disrupts – ecosystems, atmospheres and landscapes. STS scholars have studied how different devices spark these entities into being, but less attention has been paid to the systematic way such materials exceed, sometimes with harmful and even lethal results, the structures set up for their measurement, valuation and management. Recognizing the permanence and recalcitrance of these materials means imagining new regimes of co-habitation, provoking new experimental modes of material/human engagement, and intervention. It also entails redefining our understandings of hazards, harm, contamination, risks and uncertainties. Chemical and geological things open up questions about the materiality of political life that, despite the recent turn to the Anthropocene, STS has not fully addressed. In this open panel we are interested in thinking about the agency of inorganic entities, and the political configurations they unbound, create, and necessitate. We seek to go beyond analyses of performativity to speculate about the autonomy of materials, even as they are entangled in multiple wider systems, and their role configuring public life and politics: we look beyond mere descriptions of the activities of these materials, towards how they operate on the ground, and how we, as STS scholars, can use our research to intervene into the processes, politics, and social lives they engender. We are interested in experiments and applications that articulate mineral-chemical/human relations in novel ways so that new vocabularies, imaginaries and modes of action become possible. We invite papers working on, but not limited to, the following issues:
• Chemical and geological unpredictability and harm.
• New modes of mineral-chemical/human conviviality.
• Affects and effects of chemicals.
• Cosmopolitics of/with the geological.
• Political experiments in/for the Anthropocene.
• Temporal and spatial organizations of 21st century materials.
• Alternative schema and practices for apprehending and knowing the inorganic.
Deadline for submissions March 3, 2014.
Submission abstracts should be up to 250 words. Paper titles should not exceed 10 words.
Languages accepted: English/Spanish/Portuguese
To apply, submit an “individual abstract” via the 4S portal at http://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s14/
Once you have a user name and password, go to submit proposal > submit new proposal > paper abstract. After entering your details, check the box beside Open Session #54 Ecologies and Material Politics of the Inorganic.
More information: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting
Contact: Manuel Tironi (metironi@uc.cl), Nerea Calvillo (n.calvillo@gold.ac.uk) or Max Liboiron (m.liboiron@neu.edu)
Estudios de la Economía 