La médecine à l'intersection de la race et du colonialisme

Science, Medicine, and Technology at the Intersections of Race and Colonialism

Call for Abstracts

An Invited Speakers Panel at the Intercollegiate STS Program at the Claremont Colleges

To be held over Zoom on Friday, September 17, 2021 1pm - 3:30pm Pacific Time 

Globalized forms of science, technology, and medicine have been profoundly shaped by the intertwined histories of colonialism and slavery, which laid the groundwork for the emergence of particular scientific disciplines, framed ways of asking questions, and shaped modes of intervention. The legacies of this shaping are visible today -- for example: in funding disparities in disease research and public health; the construction of race in scientific research and medical diagnosis; who is assumed to “produce” knowledge versus who is the “object” of study; the commodification of knowledge, bodies, and matter (e.g., cell lines, genes, bioprospecting); ongoing logics of salvage and collection; as well as the persistence of racial health disparities. Without simply conflating past and present, these examples and others highlight uneven ways that racializing processes continue to be reinscribed in contemporary fields of knowledge. The persistence of these processes also raises questions about how they are challenged or refused, as well as what possibilities exist for alternative worldbuilding and knowledge production. The unequal burdens of the global pandemic and the collective uprising against racial violence have newly brought to the fore the urgency of these questions. 

The Science, Technology and Society program at the Claremont Colleges aims to bring together a small, interdisciplinary collection of scholars working on intersections of science, technology, and medicine with race and colonialism, as well as gender, sexuality, class, and disability. We invite submissions to a panel that consider topics including, but not limited to, the following: 

• Structural violence, vulnerability, and racial health disparities 
• Technologies of power, surveillance, and control
• The construction of race in medical, scientific and technological knowledge production
• Racialized matter, hierarchies of life, and constructions of human and nonhuman
• Efforts to decolonize or otherwise transform the conditions of knowledge production and circulation

The panel will take place virtually via Zoom on Friday, September 17, 2021 1pm - 3:30pm PST in front of an audience of faculty members and undergraduate students. Each invited participant will give a twenty-minute paper and receive a stipend of $200. We encourage submissions from those who are interested in collaborative knowledge building and new forms of knowledge transmission, and particularly encourage late-stage grad students, postdocs, and other early career scholars to apply. Submit abstracts of between 100 and 250 words in .doc format to stsclaremont@gmail.com by May 20, 2021. Please forward this call for abstracts to any potentially interested parties.