[Air-L] 4S Panel - CFA: Taking Back Technopower: STS and strategic interventions for the fight against technofascism

[Nathan Kim]

Hi all,


Are you engaged in political struggle against technofascism? Do you have
things to share: strategic reflections, organizing artifacts, etc? Do you
have thoughts about how we will win?

If so, you should submit an abstract to our open panel at 4S this year: Taking
Back Technopower: STS and strategic interventions for the fight against
technofascism! The Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of
Science (4S) to be held in Toronto October 7-10, 2026. You can submit a
potential abstract via the portal:
www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php by April 30th (we are
#138).

See our full panel abstract below:

138 Taking Back Technopower: STS and strategic interventions for the fight
against technofascism

Kevin Zheng, University of Michigan; Linda Huber, Swarthmore College;
Alicia DeVrio, Carnegie Mellon University; Cella Sum, Carnegie Mellon
University; Nathan Kim, University of Michigan; Ember McCoy, Pennsylvania
State University; Gena Kim, University of Michigan; Nasanbayar
Ulzii-Orshikh, University of Michigan; Justine Zhang, University of
Michigan

Social Movements and STS Information, Computing and Media Technology

The current moment is characterized by resurgent struggles against
technofascism. These struggles include community resistance against data
centers, strategic actions against tech companies complicit in genocidal
violence, and organizing efforts across many sectors against the
proliferation of AI in the workplace. This open panel gathers people
engaged in these sites of struggle to collectively consider the following
question: how can STS approaches advance these struggles against fascist
technopower, and work towards constructing more liberatory futures?

In addressing this question, we seek to surface the incipient militant
potential of STS, often submerged under scholarship that muddies strategic
analysis and disarms political action through the register of subversive
critique. Through close attention to relationality and sociality, STS may
help build solidarities while unsettling the sedimented categories that
impede movement building (Breymen et al, 2017). By incorporating
materialist, political economic accounts of technology, STS may help push
beyond the boundaries of "ethical tech” by revealing the imbrications of
economic and financial processes with technoscience (Birch, 2013). And as a
roving, interdisciplinary field attuned to embodied and situated practices
(Haraway, 1988), an STS lens may help ensure that analyses are constantly
attentive to the lively contingencies of on-the-ground struggles.

We seek to explore theories born through political struggle, and examples
of how STS theory informs praxis. Submissions may include, but are not
limited to: strategic reflections from organizers and activists; historical
accounts that can inform future organizing and activism; or the analysis of
organizing artefacts (e.g., propaganda, slogans, campaigns) and their role
in advancing political struggle. We will facilitate this panel as an open
discussion among folks situated across different sites of struggle, aiming
to provide a space for advancing the struggle against technofascism through
the development of relationships, theories, and strategic insights.
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