Ecologies and Material Politics of the Inorganic

Open Session CFP for the Joint Meeting of Society for Social Studies of
Science (4S) and Sociedad Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la
Ciencia y la Tecnología (ESOCITE)
August 20 – 23, 2014 | Buenos Aires, Argentina
Organizers: Manuel Tironi, Nerea Calvillo & Max Liboiron

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

-- 
Dvera I. Saxton, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Researcher, Northeastern University
Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute