[Air-L] 4S Open Panel: Reworking TechnoPower: Everyday Digital Practices in Marginalized Worlds

[Nemer, David (dn6nn)]

Hello everyone,

Ashleigh Wade and I are organizing the following 4S open panel and would like to invite you to submit your work. Abstracts (250 words) are due by April 30. For submissions and additional details, please visit: https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php

234 Reworking TechnoPower: Everyday Digital Practices in Marginalized Worlds

This open panel explores how marginalized communities creatively negotiate and contest technoscientific power in everyday digital life. Across distinct geopolitical contexts, this open panel aims to reveal how racialized and gendered subjects confront platforms structured by extractive capitalism, surveillance, and harassment; while simultaneously inventing tactical forms of survival, self-representation, and political participation. The panel foregrounds everyday practices, such as gender masking, women-only online groups, vernacular archives, and smartphone-based documentation, as sites where technoscience is reworked from below. These practices illuminate how hypervisibility and erasure operate together under contemporary regimes of datafication and platform governance, and how users convert mundane tools into infrastructures of care, pedagogy, and counter-public formation. Contributing to STS debates on TechnoPower, the panel reframes technoscientific capitalism not only as a system dominated by wealthy elites and platform monopolies, but also as a terrain of ongoing struggle in which alternative futures are continually prototyped by those most exposed to harm. The papers examine grassroots digital tactics, community infrastructures, feminist and decolonial reappropriations of technology, and methodological innovations for studying technoscience from marginalized standpoints. By centering everyday, mundane acts of digital world-making, this panel advances STS commitments to justice-oriented scholarship and seeks to accelerate interventions in public and policy debates about whose knowledge, labor, and lives shape technoscientific futures.

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David Nemer, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Media Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Department of Anthropology
Director, Latin American Studies Program
University of Virginia

Faculty Associate, Berkman Klein Center
Harvard University

http://dnemer.com
http://favela-digital.com<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__favela-2Ddigital.com_&d=DwMGaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=YiuGtJJD3zrZhYvlO8RyU_SP7LgxPWQd3lg64IowrfE&m=tWQFWF9kBH-tCTWiqCFxj7r2-pUFjJlOJknMUOBGctfBWdBj6-5cXqxlKeCN2LwW&s=fkLBQ8JysvT9-35LOU1rGmSjaH4Ur1kL-QBXokc7IjA&e=>

Books:
Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022), winner of the 2024 Sally Hacker Prize and 2022 Marcel Roche Award.
Tecnologia do Oprimido (Editora Milfontes, 2021)
Favela Digital: The other side of technology (GSA, 2013)