[Air-L] Call for Papers: Blackness as Onto-Epistemological Departure and Arrival (4S 2025 Seattle)

[Seyi Olojo]

Dear all,

Apologies for cross posting. We invite submissions to our panel at 4S 2025
in Seattle. Please see details below:


*192. Blackness as Onto-Epistemological Departure and Arrival*
Black feminist scholarship in STS and science studies have done
field-defining work of articulating the various kinds of harms accumulated
by Black communities and other communities of color (Wynter 2003, Benjamin
2016). They situate such violence within existing patterns of
anti-blackness, exploring how legacies of slavery and colonialism shape the
epistemologies that produce technology today (Browne 2015, Noble 2018).
Furthermore, the iterations of race-based harm they identify illustrate the
ways in which Blackness works as a flexible tool illuminating how harm
manifests within scientific knowledge production across time. Yet, thinking
with Beth Coleman (2009), Jayna Brown (2021) and Kattherine McKittrick
(2021), blackness is also a technology charting pathways toward alternative
and speculative ways of understanding and interacting with our world, if
not other worlds entirely. Blackness is therefore both a site of departure
from the violent dialectic of positivist thinking and an arrival into a
speculative escape. In light of this, we seek to bring together emergent
methods and frameworks addressing how anti/blackness reverberates within
scientific knowledge production, especially those grounded in Black
feminist thought. We invite contributions that explore Blackness as method
and/or as an analytical framework for breaking down the norms that exist
within scientific knowledge production, and also for articulating the
material impact of the current constructions of race within science
practice.

There will be two panel sessions. The first session will feature panelists'
presentations. In the second session, panelists will receive the
opportunity to workshop methods and methodologies reflected in their
scholarship, culminating in a collective reading list to aid in the
exploration of the onto-epistemologies of Blackness that stand to shape and
reform scientific knowledge production.

Panel Organizers: Kristen Reynolds, PhD (Brown University), Seyi Olojo (UC
Berkeley)

Abstract Deadline*: January 31st *(250 words max)
Submission Page: https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_seattle.php

Contact: Seyi Olojo oolojo at berkeley.edu
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*Seyi Olojo *
PhD Candidate, School of Information <https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/> at
UC, Berkeley
Fellow, Center on Race & Digital Justice
<https://www.raceanddigitaljustice.org/> at UCLA