cfp for 4s 2018 open panel: Revisiting Feminist Technoscience

CFP: Please consider submitting a paper abstract for our open panel #71 to be held at the 4S Conference, 29 August–1 Sept 2018 at Sydney, Australia https://4s2018sydney.org/ Submissions should be in the form of abstracts of up to 250 words and they should include the paper’s main arguments, methods, and contributions to STS. The deadline is Thursday 1 February 2018. See more information at https://4s2018sydney.org/accepted-open-panels-4s/ Submit panel #71 paper abstracts at https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s18/ Open Panel #71: Revisiting feminist technoscience: Exploring disciplinary diversity and translocal issues in/of gender in/of academia Feminist technoscience studies have developed alongside STS for at least four decades, generating critical accounts of the making and doing of gender in technoscience, including post-colonial and intersectional issues. This panel invites papers that go further, exploring diversities, disunities, and translocal aspects of gender in/of academia and that transcend the dominant focus on biosciences and computer science, to investigate empirically and theoretically the doing of gender in physical sciences, engineering, and human sciences. For a long time STS has been concerned with diversities in/of the technosciences through concepts like epistemic cultures and cultures of evaluation. This panel will explore how such insights may be brought to bear on feminist analyses while critically reflecting on its own concepts and theoretical strategies. For example, most feminist technoscience has invoked biomedical metaphors in the construction of social theory, running the risk of all such theories: essentialism, binaries, anthropomorphism, etc. To expose the limits of that work we invite contributions * that explore the building of feminist technoscience theoretical work first with physical and chemical concepts like equilibrium, spectra, acceleration, catalyst, scale, and branes, and * secondly by thinking technoscience outside the conventional 18-20c strategies for building social theory. An empirical grounding will be appreciated in addressing the dynamics of multi-dimensional and translocal gender balances and gender articulations across disciplines, professions, organizations, and infrastructures, such as: * What kind of subpolitics and catalyst actors are introduced in gender reforms in/of academic institutions? * How do migrations and diasporas make a difference? Organizers: Knut H. Sørensen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) knut.sorensen@ntnu.no http://www.ntnu.edu/employees/knut.sorensen Sharon Traweek, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) traweek@history.ucla.edu http://www.genderstudies.ucla.edu/faculty/sharon-traweek