4S Toronto ‘Good relations’ conference 6 – 10 October 2021: Deakin STS Diary


Deakin 4s Toronto Diary 

Photo: Leni Murphy (2011) ‘Bats over the city’ (Melbourne). Flickr. CC. 

This year’s 4S conference ‘Good relations’ based in Toronto is reaching the global east STS community roughly between sunset and sunrise in the second week of October. Deakin University researchers are presenting across 12 panels and sessions. Our papers range from augmented reality, epigenetics, acoustic surveillance, hotel quarantine, flamingo care, bushfires, gender clinics, and prisons. Consequently, all yawns will be related to the hour, never the content.

Below we have collected Deakin colleagues’ panels and timeslots. For those attending, please leave a trail for the sleepers on Twitter by tagging @SSNdeakin and #DeakinSTS. We’ll also keep on eye on #AusSTS over on Twitter! 

We recommend setting up the Midspace platform prior to the conference if you haven’t used it before, as in the conference meeting notes

Thursday 7 October 

1.) Michelle Lobo presents Suspension in the virosphere: Breathing in hotel quarantine with Kaya Berry in the panel “Pandemic Breathing – Air as Matter of Dis/Connection II”.

This paper introduces and develops the concept of the virosphere by focusing on Australian cities during the Covid-19 pandemic. We draw on interviews, photographs, videos, sketches and journal reflections from returning travellers in 2020/2021 who spent a fortnight in mandatory hotel quarantine. Their encounters with airflow, light, dust, noise, cityscape views, material objects, masked bodies and the invisible SARS-CoV-2 provides insights into distributed agency and the affective dimensions of the virosphere. Rather than merely diagrams of ‘command and control’, quarantine hotels emerge as places with co-existing atmospheres that facilitate as well hamper pandemic breathing. The paper draws attention to this sociomateriality of breathing regulated by biopolitical frameworks that attempt to govern human-virus encounters but often fails because of anthropocentric frames. We argue that these pandemic border infrastructures and places of governed containment are disrupted by body–viral–spheres in an impasse or ‘a space of time lived without a narrative genre’ (Berlant, 2011). We show that it is shared suspension in the virosphere that produces dis/connections with the materiality of the air amid bioinsecurities of the pandemic.

2.) Our SSN co-founder, Healthy Streams convener, the new 4S President Emma Kowal is part of a panel session STS in/from/and Asia. You can learn more about TransAsiaSTS here 

  • AEDT 9:00 – 10:00 PM, virtual room 4 
Since Daiwie Fu first asked ‘how far can East Asian STS go?’ in the inaugural issue of East Asian Science, Technology and Society in 2007, many scholars have considered the limits and possibilities of STS in the Asian region. This open panel seeks to build on these conversations, drawing on empirical studies of technoscience within, across and beyond Asia.

3.) Luke Heemsbergen presents A tale of two realities via multi-method comparison of Augmented Reality research and consumer product engagement: The best and worst of times in the AR present in panel he helped organise,  “Critical Augmented Reality Studies: newly material forms of digital formations of identity, surveillance, and publics” 

  • AEDT 9:40 PM – 11:10 PM, virtual room 10, speaker 1 
  • @parrotluke
Although the majority of Augmented Reality (AR) scholarship is based in Computer Science disciplines, it is nevertheless important to consider emergent trends in the AR discourse as research and development shifts from technology labs to media markets. Our argument is that while technical understandings of AR are necessary, they are insufficient to understand how spatial computing augments everyday life and we hope to document how STS can inform such shifts. This paper maps the AR discourse for nodes of power and authority in two ways. First, it systematically reviews and the ways in which AR research citations are shifting from science and technical foci to applied uses of AR, building from work of Cipresso et al. (2018). To do so it employs a discursive analysis of quantitative research citation patterns made visible via CiteSpace to identify emerging trends in AR research up to the year 2020 (n:12,328 Web of Science), to comment on how disciplinary boundaries shape how AR is understood and innovated. The paper then compares these patterns and themes to evolving public consumer perceptions of AR by systematically mapping phone-based AR apps available on the iOS app store and Google Play market. Here we employ open coding of top available “AR” apps until saturation points. We conclude by charting future research directions based on our findings that speak to the patterns of authority and power in this rapidly growing techno-media industry. 

4.) SSN coordinator Carina Truyts presents Lesser Flamingo Life and Death: Nourishing Toxicity, ‘Generous’ Mines and Metabolic Transitions in Kimberley, South Africa on the panel “Toxic Goodness: Harmful Legacies, Hopeful Futures – II” co-organised by SSN convener Tim Neale. 

  • AEDT 11pm – 12:30 AM, virtual room 5, speaker 1 
  • @foodanthrop
What makes a worthwhile object of care? Early in 2019 lesser Flamingo chick euphoria took hold of the small historical diamond mining city of Kimberley in central South Africa. A rapid, publicly driven rescue operation mobilized in response to the plight of thousands of baby flamingos, abandoned by their flock due to drought. Hundreds of volunteers streamed to the SPCA on the edge of the city where we cradled soft, quaking, chicks in our hands, tenderly forcing beaks open for syringes loaded with prawns and baby cereal, depleting these stocks from city supermarkets. The plight of the flamingoes was broadcast as far as the CNN, and donations solicited and sent from across the globe. Prominent among these was a local diamond mining company. The narrative around the plight of the chicks suggested the local municipality was to shoulder the blame for what was assumed to be a native flock crucial for species survival. However, the flock only settled there in 2005, and lesser flamingo regularly experience successive failed breeding seasons. Regarding municipal negligence, it was the most likely the very presence of effluent in water run-off that attracted them in the first instance due to its role in the production of nutritious algae. The same effluent is used in mining operations. This paper takes a cue from Hannah Landecker to “recount the remaking of nutritive and toxic relations between plants, animals, microbes, minerals and humans” (2019:551). Drawing on ethnography, interviews and media analysis I trace the value of sewerage in a complex web of care and value anchored in colonial and Apartheid norms of personhood. The analysis is scaled from minutiae (algae and mineral), across geological time, and geopolitical space (including Apartheid infrastructures, and bird and human guts). This metabolic approach conducted in the city famous for “the Big Hole” (the world’s largest open-pit mine) helps us glimpse the stakes in fashioning environments in the name of care.

Friday 8 October

1.) Emma Kowal takes part in the session “4S Council Affiliations Committee Meet-up”

This meet-up will provide a venue for discussing the work of the 4S Affiliations Committee, which is creating a process through which departments, research groups, regional networks, journals and events can apply to affiliate with the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), bringing into visibility the transnational scope and diversity of STS and 4S. We will discuss how 4S organizational affiliation can serve affiliated organizations, and how these organizations can support and vitalize 4

Saturday 9 October

1.) Emma Kowal presents Inclusive genomics, or, don’t mention the (race) war in panel she co-organised “Same Same but Different: Race and Racializations across National, Disciplinary and Temporal Contexts” 

  • AEDT 12:40 AM – 2:10 AM, speaker 1 virtual room 27 
  • @profemmakowal
In national and regional efforts to build genomic reference databases that are inclusive of genomic population diversity, race is an absent presence. In Australia, the primary group requiring inclusion are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Large investments in precision medicine are accompanied by various efforts to engage and include Indigenous leaders and research participants. This presentation considers two large laboratories, one in the US and one in Australia, who are building ‘inclusive’ national reference genome databases that will overcome existing ‘translational’ barriers to the implementation of precision medicine. I show that their efforts to generate inclusive databases work (intentionally or unintentionally) to marginalize social science expertise. The work of engaging with Indigenous and other non-white communities falls either to scientists with an ‘interest’ in qualitative methods, or to social scientists who must declare they have no interest in academic publication and are content to apply their technical expertise to increase minority recruitment. My goal in this presentation is not to chide genome scientists for excluding social scientists or including them only as technical experts. I take a step back from this phenomenon to ask why genome scientists see critical social science as incompatible with ‘good’ science. I propose that critical social scientists are perceived as a portal to histories and legacies that are viewed as ‘not constructive’: race, eugenics, justice. I conclude by reflecting on my own attempts to engage ‘constructively’ with genomic inclusion in Australia by supporting Indigenous scientists: a different approach but not without its own problems.

2.) Will Smith presents Criminal Sounds: Hearing Illegality Through Acoustic Surveillance in Philippine Forests in the panel he co-organised “Sense ecologies: new technologies and strategies of environmental surveillance – II”, with Tim Neale, below. 

 Drones and mounted cameras monitoring wildfire ignitions. Satellites detecting areas of deforestation and reforestation or the transport of agents through ocean currents. Weather stations tracking humidity and rainfall surrounding monocrops. Video cameras poised to capture evidence of rare or threatened species, while bodies and wearable medical devices register the presence and passage of industrial pollutants. Sensors and modes of sensing are part of infrastructures that monitor and mobilize environments, constituting atmospheres of data, knowledge production, and world-making (Gabrys 2019). These ‘sense ecologies’ are differentially charged with promise when imagined and enacted (Spackman and Burlingame 2018), sometimes with expectations that they might deliver a world without surprises (Masco 2014). In practice, the promise of recent and new environmental sensing technologies are highly ambivalent. Their proliferation has been crucial to projects that hold powerful state and non-state actors to account, while (often concurrently) being enlisted as vectors for state securitization, targeted discrimination, corporatization and neoliberal intrusion (Mansfield 2008). Whatever their use, new sensing technologies are powerful, often compromised (Liboiron 2017), and are increasingly widespread means for imagining, constituting and intervening in environments. This open panel seeks contributions that examine new techno-imaginaries of environmental surveillance, including (but not limited to) analyses of sense ecologies and their ‘good’ or ‘bad’ relations, sites and practices of sensing, the promises of sensing technologies, ecologies of attuned sensing, distributed sensing networks, and the privatisation of sense ecologies.

3.) Tim Neale presents Playing along with the carpetbaggers, boondoggles and time-wasters in the search for a bushfire fix in the panel he co-organised “Sense ecologies: new technologies and strategies of environmental surveillance – II”. 

  • AEDT 8:00 – 9:30 AM speaker 3, virtual room 8
  • @tdneale 
Southern Australia is one of the world’s worst areas for intense landscape fires, and for several number decades the management of its temperate and highly flammable forests and grasslands have been the almost exclusive domain of large public land and fire agencies. Institutionally, these agencies have been preserved from some of the trends that have reshaped the wider public service, and similar public services internationally, in that: their employees are often “lifers”; they are frequently audited but have few clear quantitative markers of success; and, their budgets have grown in recent decades. Technologically, these agencies are also arguably unusual, in that the many tasks of detecting, analysing and predicting combustible environments tend to occur without shared standards, using some mix of bespoke regional infrastructures and free global ones. Following the landmark 2019-2020 “Black Summer” fires, which affected over 12 million hectares of southeast Australia, a number of enterprising companies have attempted to step in and “disrupt” this sedimented socio-technical system with “new” remote sensing and machine-learning technologies. In this paper, I will reflect on fieldwork amongst fire risk analysts within land and fire management agencies, their responses to such encounters with “carpetbaggers”, “boondoggles”, and “time-wasters” offering technical solutions, and how the reception of these alleged “fixes” reveal political contests within these agencies regarding their role in an increasingly flammable world.

4.) Jaya Keaney presents with Henrietta Byrne “We Can’t Wait That Long”: Risk, Refusal and Indigenous Epigenetics in panel she co-organised “Unpacking biosocial approaches to stress and trauma”. The panel is linked to this project on epigenetics and Indigenous Australia 

  • AEDT 11PM – 12:30 AM Sunday speaker 1, virtual room 16 
  • @JJKeaney
Environmental epigenetics is increasingly employed to understand the health outcomes of communities who have experienced historical trauma and structural violence. Framing embodiment as inseparable from our social environments, epigenetics provides a way to think about traumatic events as biological “exposures” which lead to poor wellbeing across generations. In Australia, some Indigenous researchers and clinicians are embracing epigenetic science as a framework for theorising the slow violence of colonialism, citing its resonance with Indigenous understandings of personhood (Warin, Kowal & Meloni 2019). However, there is also dispute, contention, and caution among these research communities. This paper traces contention and ambivalence in relation to epigenetics in Indigenous contexts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Australia with researchers and clinicians working in epigenetics and/or Indigenous health, we explore how epigenetics is positioned as risky knowledge with the potential to function as a distraction or an obstacle, particularly at the level of service delivery and primary care. In its supposed novelty and wide public appeal, an emphasis on epigenetics in these contexts risks getting in the way of the deep structural change needed to address the material legacies of colonisation. In the words of one informant, although epigenetics might one day prove useful to front line service delivery, “we can’t wait that long.” Approaching such sentiments as sites of contest over the politics of epigenetic knowledge, we explore how some participants engage in strategies of refusal (Simpson 2014) when navigating epigenetics and its growing purchase in constructions of Indigeneity, trauma, and healing in Australia.

Sunday 10 October 

1.) Elizabeth Lara presents Today’s prisons as future heritage in panel she co-organised “Abolitionist environmentalism” 

  • AEDT 2:30 – 4:00 AM, speaker 5, virtual room 8 
Correlations between disease, premature death, and incarceration have defined carceral regimes throughout history. Carceral heritage sites in California (e.g. Spanish Missions and a WW2 Japanese incarceration camp) offer precedents for understanding contemporary state prisons and envisioning their eventual closure. What happens when we think about today’s prisons as future heritage? In 2020, California Governor Newsom announced plans to close two prisons by 2023, an unprecedented move in a state infamous for having perhaps the world’s most expansive and densely populated prison system. Newsom and CDCR, the agency in charge of prison and parole operations, eventually announced that the first facility to close was chosen in part based on operation costs and “prioritization of public safety.” Missing from CDCR’s official news release was any explicit mention of the toxic, deadly conditions plaguing this and many other prison facilities across the state. As fiscal and policy advisors make the case for closing eight facilities, activists and advocates argue that these changes must come with reduced prison populations and budgets, investments in social services, and solutions for prison staff impacted by closures. In the struggle for abolition, it is not enough to close a prison. What are the relations and values we need to ensure when archiving these violent infrastructures?

2.) Elsher Lawson-Boyd presents Semantic mining and tinkering: neuroepigenetic figurations of trauma in “Unpacking biosocial approaches to stress & trauma – III”

  • AEDT 2:30 – 4:00 AM, speaker 1, virtual room 16
Correlations between disease, premature death, and incarceration have defined carceral regimes throughout history. Carceral heritage sites in California (e.g. Spanish Missions and a WW2 Japanese incarceration camp) offer precedents for understanding contemporary state prisons and envisioning their eventual closure. What happens when we think about today’s prisons as future heritage? In 2020, California Governor Newsom announced plans to close two prisons by 2023, an unprecedented move in a state infamous for having perhaps the world’s most expansive and densely populated prison system. Newsom and CDCR, the agency in charge of prison and parole operations, eventually announced that the first facility to close was chosen in part based on operation costs and “prioritization of public safety.” Missing from CDCR’s official news release was any explicit mention of the toxic, deadly conditions plaguing this and many other prison facilities across the state. As fiscal and policy advisors make the case for closing eight facilities, activists and advocates argue that these changes must come with reduced prison populations and budgets, investments in social services, and solutions for prison staff impacted by closures. In the struggle for abolition, it is not enough to close a prison. What are the relations and values we need to ensure when archiving these violent infrastructures?

3.) J R Latham presents Experiencing Experience: Re-turning to the Gender Clinic in “Author-Meets-Critics: Anaesthetics of Existence and Beautyscapes”

  • AEDT 6:00 AM – 7:40 AM, speaker 3 virtual room 7 
  • @DrJrLatham
How do medical processes take account of “experience” and its own constitutive exclusions in the context of changing sex? Long has it been argued by trans scholars that medicine misunderstands “the complexities and ambiguities of [trans people’s] lived experience” (Stone, 1991), yet medical rhetoric and practices continue to ignore – or make absent – constitutive elements of trans people’s subjectivity, especially related to sexuality. Inspired by the oeuvre of Heyes and Jones, I consider how medical practices and practitioners might better make space for the complexities and ambiguities of the diverse material and political conditions trans people live under, and hence improve quality of patient care and accessibility to medical services. Engaging analysis of institutionalized technologies and personal narratives, I think through how trans people’s own accounts of crossing between and liminality are both made absent and might be made present in current political climates of seeking transgender medical interventions, and to what effects

4.) Tim Neale presents with Kirsty Howey Divisible Governance: making gas-fired futures inevitable amid climate collapse in “Governing Environmental Inequalities: Towards a New Research-Action Framework on Agency, Power & Multispecies Justice – II: Energy Governance, Resistance & Conflict” 

  • AEDT 6:00 AM – 7:40 AM, speaker 2 virtual room 5 
  • @tdneale 
This paper examines how new fossil fuel projects are entrenched today, despite the wide acceptance that they will accelerate ecological collapse caused by climate change, and the promise of alternative renewable energy sources that should render such projects obsolete. Using a combination of legal/policy analysis and interviews, we analyse reforms to regulate a proposed new shale gas industry in the hot (and heating) remote Northern Territory of Australia, using “fracking” techniques. The paper introduces the concept of “divisible governance” – produced through the technical manoeuvres of risk fragmentation, temporal fragmentation, and jurisdictional fragmentation. Divisible governance is coproduced (Jasanoff, 2004) by these time-honoured legal-scientific practices to not only entrench new fossil fuel projects, but also to sustain ignorance about the nature and extent of their risks. Divisible environmental governance is thus deceptive governance, despite its central claim of achieving transparency and accountability.
S. Jasanoff (2004). States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order. Routledge

 

Our alarms are set to see you there!