Science & Dissent: Alternative Temporalities, Geographies, Epistemologies

Abstract

The analysis of dissent, or the mobilization of scientific claims to challenge existing political arrangements, has a long history in STS and was central to the formation of the field of STS itself and its current contours. Based on a conference that sought to bring together analysts and activists from around the world and from varied disciplines, this collection illuminates new temporal, geographic, and epistemological lenses through which scientists and other people have creatively challenged relationships of power. First, by attending to long-past practices and to the long-term development of styles and forms of dissent and resistance in Latin America, South Asia, Africa, Europe, and the USA, contributors show how geography and situated forms of politics are mobilized in scientific dissent. Second, contributors also examine how political arrangements shape the ways that the movement of bodies, as well as their sensory qualities, is central to many forms of technoscientific dissent. A third focus, on epistemic politics, demonstrates how building parallel or alternative structures and systems of knowledge pose challenges to power arrangements, even when those systems are not mobilized to make formal legal or administrative challenges.