About this event

HDR students and ECRs are invited to apply for this in-person workshop with Assistant Professor Canay Özden-Schilling (National University of Singapore) and Assistant Professor Tom Özden-Schilling (John Hopkins University), hosted by the Deakin Science and Society Network (SSN) and the Melbourne STS Lab. The workshop is sponsored by the Alfred Deakin Institute’s (ADI) Culture, Environment and Science (CES) stream. Please note that registration on Eventbrite only signals intent to apply.

Places are very limited. To apply send a 100 word bio and 100 word summary of your current research to ssn-info@deakin.edu.au by 4th April 2022.

Abstract

Critical studies of technoscience demand new terms for theorizing mobility. Whether through attention to trans-border special economic zones, new patterns of labour migration, or the continual reorganization of global supply chains, scholarship on contemporary capitalism has long emphasized how emergent systems of administration facilitate flows of some people and things while restricting the movements of others. Yet the evolving design and operation of the sites of extraction, design, transportation, and consumption through which technoscientific objects act on the world also rely upon movements of concepts. As they are dug up from the ground, circulate between ports, move between labs, and take shape within infrastructures, these objects call forth specific configurations of knowledge and social life that may persist long after a specific commodity has fallen out of use.

In this workshop, we invite participants to think critically about how specific movements of concepts – both the scientific and managerial concepts that guide concrete technical procedures, as well as the diverse modes of theorizing through which scholars and others apprehend meanings amidst these processes – give form to their spaces and objects of study. We further ask participants to consider how a more carefully coordinated attention to the interrelated mobilities of people, things, and ideas across sites relevant to technoscientific transitions might foster new kinds of engagement between disparate intellectual traditions.

Speakers

Canay Özden-Schilling is an anthropologist of technology and capitalism. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Her first book, The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economics, was published by Stanford University Press in June 2021. Her second project explores global supply chain logistics, as seen from the port cities of Mersin (Turkey) and Singapore.

Tom Özden-Schilling is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at John Hopkins University. His current book project, Science, Survivance, and the War in the Woods (forthcoming from Duke University Press), is a historical ethnography of twenty-first century environmental deregulation in British Columbia, Canada, and its effects on both Indigenous and settler cultures of expertise. Focusing on different researchers’ struggles to maintain long-term forestry experiments and sovereignty projects in the wake of government downsizing, the book examines how anthropological studies of expertise might learn to track rural experts and the artifacts of their work as governance institutions unravel.

Details

Date/time: 22 April 2022, 10:00 -12:00

Location: Deakin Downtown, Tower 2 Level 12, 727 Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3008

Places are very limited. To apply send a 100 word bio and 100 word summary of your current research to ssn-info@deakin.edu.au by 4th April 2022.

The workshop is made possible thanks to the support of the Culture, Environment and Science stream at Deakin University’s Alfred Deakin Institute.