[Air-L] Call for 4S abstracts - Back to Black Marxism: Convening racial capitalism theories and STS

[Anoolia Gakhokidze]

Dear colleagues,

We are soliciting abstracts for panels at the upcoming 4S conference in
Seattle. Here is the call in its entirety:

Back to Black Marxism: Convening racial capitalism theories and STS


It’s been more than 4 decades since the original publication of Cedric J.
Robinson’s monumental work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical
Tradition in 1983. In it, Robinson challenges the framing often present in
Western critical theory wherein capitalism is seen as a departure from
feudalism. Instead, his theory of racial capitalism invites us to see
capitalism as a configuration of world order that requires racialized forms
of control and domination including imperialism, slavery, and genocide as a
precondition. Previous discourse in STS has considered what new insights
the field can gain from Black studies, critical race and ethnic studies,
Marxist, and other critical approaches. We are interested in deepening
existing engagements to attend to the ways STS can benefit from dialogue
with theories of racial capitalism.

The following questions are meant to offer a starting point:

   -

   How can STS approaches be expanded through an analytical lens that views
   capitalism as being co-constructed with race, racism, and racialism?
   -

   How can STS learn from insights of racial capitalism including but not
   limited to difference, racialized labor hierarchies and wage scales,
   racialized regimes of property?
   -

   What are, if any, the disciplinary limitations and knowledge politics in
   STS that potentially preclude it from meaningfully engaging with theories
   of racial capitalism?


We welcome contributions from community researchers, academics, independent
scholars, and others with similar commitments to interrogating and
expanding ways of researching how science and technology are tied up with
logics of capital, race and racialism, and empire.

In this panel we seek to convene scholars and practitioners across a
variety of disciplines and knowledge-making practices in a conversation on
expanding the repertoire of approaches to studying science and technology.
This conversation will be moderated by scholars who work across disciplines
of geography, anthropology, feminist studies, and human-computer
interaction.

Anoolia Gakhokidze, University of Washington annygakhokidze at gmail.com

Diego Martinez-Lugo, University of Washington diegoml at uw.edu

Sucheta Ghoshal, University of Washington sghoshal at uw.edu (discussant)

Erin McElroy, University of Washington erinmcel at uw.edu (discussant)


This panel is intended to be in-person

Thank you,
-Anoolia