[Air-L] Call for abstracts (4S 2025) - Thinking with skin: surface, depth, and porous media

[Newmark, Rebecca]

Please consider submitting an abstract to our open panel for the 2025 4S Conference (Society for Social Studies of Science), which will take place in Seattle on September 3-7.



Thinking with skin: surface, depth, and porous media

Scholars in Science and Technology Studies have productively interrogated the gut, using concepts such as porosity, metabolism, and excretion to explore the fluid boundaries between inside and outside and their scientific and medical management (Cohen 2013, Landecker 2013, Solomon 2016, Wilson 2015). The skin shares many properties with the gut, including its troubling permeability, its boundary function, and the many ways in which it has the potential to become dysfunctional, letting “too much” or “too little” pass within. Yet the skin also reverses prevailing ontologies of surface/depth, brings attention to visual regimes linked to new and old media, foregrounds questions of race, and brings in questions of intimacy, pleasure, and pain through touch.

In Experiments in Skin, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu challenges us to see skin “as a connective tissue...not as the final boundary between self and other, but rather the record of our collective imbrication” (2021:9). We see media as integral to the process through which skin becomes a connective tissue, not only in the ways the skin as an object is refracted through digital and print media, but also the ways that skin acts as a medium for racialized regimes of bodily (self-)management and a mediator of competing forms of expertise.

This panel seeks to bring together and inspire many-layered theorizations of skin in both historic and contemporary perspective. We are particularly excited about papers that explore skin in relation to concepts of porousness, surface, and depth, as well as explorations of media and skin (including notions of skin-as-media(tor)). What theoretical horizons might be offered by a sustained engagement with the body’s surface? What role do media play in shaping understandings and experiences of skin? How might skin embody and make visible contemporary and/or historic anxieties about changing social and built environments?

Deadline of the call for abstracts:

January 31, 2025

Notification of acceptance:

March 15, 2025

4S 2025 in-person conference:

September 3-7, 2025



Abstracts (250 words max) should be submitted on the 4S website: https://bit.ly/3BtgXPh<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/bit.ly/3BtgXPh__;!!LQC6Cpwp!oGUxOVMc6pnR3js747rukZH3BOUOfNBzOjZYajvELJQlqdTRBkMur2XxmT5ELZlAo4tzaCjo_3flXIejnnb42ZjGrQ$>



Title: Thinking with skin: surface, depth, and porous media

Organizers:

Molly Hales, Northwestern University - molly.hales at northwestern.edu<mailto:molly.hales at northwestern.edu>

Rebecca Newmark, UCSF/UC Berkeley - rebecca.newmark at ucsf.edu<mailto:rebecca.newmark at ucsf.edu>


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Rebecca Newmark (she/her)
MD-PhD Candidate
Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP)
University of California, San Francisco
847-644-5248 (mobile)