[Air-L] CFP 4S New Orleans Open Panel // Race and/as technology today

[Thao Phan]

*4S 2019 Open Panel Call for Papers*
September 4 -7, 2019
New Orleans

*Race and/as technology today*
Thao Phan, University of Melbourne
Scott Wark, University of Warwick

In her seminal essay, “Race and/as Technology”, Wendy H. K. Chun proposed
that race could be understood as a technology—that is, as neither
biological nor cultural, human nor machine, mediated nor environmental,
visible nor invisible, but as a category that organises all of these
dualisms and many more. Race, she argued, can be thought of as a “technique
that one uses, even as one is used by it” (38). Using this essay and its
concerns as a touchstone, this panel will ask how we might understand race
and/as technology in the present. What is the relationship between
visibility/invisibility and race and how is it mediated? How are emergent
technologies of control, such as facial recognition, racialised? How might
we think categories—like race, person, or population—after Artificial
Intelligence, machine learning, and big data? How might these technologies
be understood historically? What is the relationship to related categories,
such as gender, class or ability, in the technologisation of race? How
might analyses of culture help us to understand race and/as technology? If
we adopt Chun’s idea that this approach “displaces ontological questions of
race” (56), what different things might race be made to do, in the present?
We want to bring together scholars working in any discipline touched by
these questions to think through what it might mean to consider race and/as
technology today.

Please feel free to pass on to your colleagues.

*Deadline:* Feb 1, 2019
*Submissions:* https://www.4s2019.org/accepted-open-panels/
<https://www.4s2019.org/accepted-open-panels/>
*Conference details: *https://www.4s2019.org/