Reimagining the future with liminal agents: critical interdisciplinary STS as manifestos for anti-essentialist solidarities

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the recent trend in interdisciplinary Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially those of the Black feminist tradition, to make an argument for how its critical scholarship on data, science and knowledge production can be interpreted as manifesto-istic texts advocating for anti-essentialist solidarities. Dorothy E. Roberts’ work demonstrates how debunking essentialist categories backed by the foundationalist veneer of science must be situated at the heart of anti-racist and anti-ablest politics of co-liberation. Ruha Benjamin’s work, meanwhile, not only analyses the technologies/knowledge production practices designed to maintain the status quo, but projects a new vision of ‘retooling’ science as a means of reimagining justice in the rapidly shifting technological climate of the twenty-first century. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick discuss human subjects often trapped in between orthodox discourses, who must then strive to reimagine/redefine their collective future through intersubjective creativity. What remains, in the end, are embodied narratives that escape reductionist logic through their welcoming of new perspectives, experiences and innovations—all of which are constantly being renewed through the arrival of new generations and diasporic traversements of ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-essentialism
• Black feminism
• truths of solidarities
• sciences and technology studies (STS)
• Sylvia Wynter

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Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 McKittrick (2021, 103–121) continues a similar dialogue on how the unquestioned, positivistic urge to ‘solve problems’ can lead to dehumanisation of Black life and livingness. For instance, predictive algorithms often fail to acknowledge the sociopolitical processes of differentiation and discrimination. Behind the claims of codifying (or ‘algorithming’) the mirror of objective reality, what gets obscured is the historically contingent processes of legitimising why certain ‘differences’ are currently perceived as more distinctive than others.

2 Gaskins (2019), for instance, proposes a framework of ‘Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation (TVC)’ through which the African diaspora can be expressed as continually evolving cultural practices. Gaskins (2019) TVC—cultural art, science and technology of African and indigenous cultures—sheds a light on the agency of ‘bricolage’, i.e. improvisation and spontaneous mix of materials and cultural practices for everyday use. Gaskins (2019) examples include a variety of innovations: Culturally situated design tools (CSDTs) that provide computer/web-based engagement with heritage artifacts; a music system (‘Beatjazz’) that uses handheld controllers, smartphone apps and a mouthpiece to combine and repeat the movement of entire body; a ‘FabLab’, a fabrication lab in Benin to help people get accustomed to the use of technology. Further, ‘OX4D Plays’ program in Oxford Place (a Houston Housing Authority (HHA) community) helps youth to redesign their common areas/streets into more colourful and playful spaces, using circular motives (from Kongo cosmogram) and hip-hop culture; Learn 2 Teach/Teach 2 Learn program in Boston’s South End Technology Center helps youth explore new interactive technologies.

3 It could be cautiously noted that the question of ‘who is the most marginalised’ requires a moving, contextually-dependent debate; several identity politics writers (Young 1995; Butler 2015) take on a historicist perspective to highlight that a collective moral decision on who should be heard first (more than others) depends on the sociopolitical conditions of a specific time and place (Jon 2020).

4 By ‘humanistic’, this paper refers to Wynter’s prioritization of plural sociogenic cultures over the overrepresented Western culture of Economic Men (homo oeconomicus). In essence, I argue that the continual volition to regenerate intersubjective narratives and creative storytelling is what makes humans ‘humanistic’—hence the paper’s focus on interpreting liminal agents’ discourses as manifesto-istic texts that reinvent how we perceive and experience the world. The contribution of Wynter is substantial here. For instance, Wynter notes how cultural norms (e.g., languages, expected social behaviours) can govern our biological reaction (or what Wynter calls ‘neutral firings’); the continuing existence of customary habits and logics (that function outside of Western modernity), albeit many have altered and adapted to the changing world, proves that humans need much more than meeting the utilitarian needs. Wynter’s decolonial humanism therefore asks us to revive the ‘narrative side’ of humans.

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Ihnji Jon

Ihnji Jon is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, where she explores how to link political ecology and environment planning with feminist relational approach to identity, politics and space. She completed her interdisciplinary PhD at University of Washington (Seattle), and master’s degree at Sciences Po Paris. Previously she was a Chateaubriand Fellow at École Normale Supérieure (Paris Ulm).