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At any rate, our session about STS, infrastructure, and the state is secured for EASST — please consider submitting an abstract.

STS and “the state”

Convenors

Nicholas Rowland (The Pennsylvania State University) email
Jan-Hendrik Passoth (Technische Universität Berlin) email
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Long Abstract

For “Situating Solidarities,” let’s return to classic issues of science, technology and politics. Normative answer exist: of how science, technology and politics should be related. However, we have seen a rising interest on how the practices of governing and “the state” are interwoven with science and technology. We would like to see:

 

1. Empirical cases of “the state” as manifest in infrastructure and everyday life: Recent work on

infrastructural developments offers cases to reconsider theoretical approaches to understanding what the state is. “The state in everyday life” offers a perspective that gets at mundane experiences and routine activities that either bring us closer to the state or fend us off from it.

2. Empirical cases of “the state” as manifest materially in institutional arrangements: State formation has been a perennial question in state theory. However, as scholarship develops, the old theories of the state, which emphasize war-making and international treaties, have given way to new research on the practical aspects of state formation and transformation.

3. Where is the state and where is not the state? State absense/state presence: This topic emerged organically from the last 4S meeting in San Diego, and while it is new to us and is far more experimental than the above themes, we consider it of vast potential.

Chair: Jan-H. Passoth, Nicholas J. Rowland

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