Dear Science and Other Stories
Abstract
In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.
... These acts of apparent generosity included introducing various forms of Western science and medicine to colonized countries and peoples. Today a great deal of scholarship demonstrates unequivocally how far from beneficial these acts of white saviourism were for colonized people (McKittrick 2020;Hartman 2007;Brockway 2002;Schneider 2009). The medical collection moved to the more prominent first floor of the Science Museum and re-opened in 2019, taking up a much larger exhibition space spanning five galleries. ...
... What about those other stories? Scholars in Black Studies have long argued for reaching beyond the archive to pursue counter-stories that decentre dominant perspectives (Sharpe 2016;Hartman 2007;McKittrick 2020). Let's zoom out one last time, to think about what's missing. ...
Based on research in two exhibitions in a science museum in the UK, this paper explores how science and society relationships are constructed through the display of one specific object, a WHO leaflet about smallpox. I trace the display of this leaflet through two exhibitions about medicine, 40 years apart. Drawing on the concept of the authorised heritage discourse and work in Black studies and Science and Technology Studies, I analyse the display of the leaflet, the stories it is used to tell and the modes of relation these stories contribute to. Rather than trying to evaluate which exhibition does a better (or worse) job displaying the leaflet, in this paper I argue that both displays were enmeshed with and reproduce an authorised science heritage discourse. I show how nationalistic, celebratory stories about science set up racialised and colonial modes of relation, and suggest counter-stories, not least critically engaging with the ever-present shadow of colonialism, present museums with valuable opportunities for change.
... Racism, for instance, is understood as a form of structural inequality. Research shows that forms of racialised discrimination are more or less explicitly encoded into all sorts of practices, from institutional policies, the law, and school science curricula to day-to-day assumptions and behaviours (McIntosh, 1989;McKittrick, 2020). This is not to say there are no bad actors or personal responsibilities (Bhopal, 2018;Gilroy, 2002). ...
... For instance, modern biomedical research has created multiple forms of the normative, or standardised, body (cis, white, heterosexual, male, able-bodied) (Cipolla et al., 2017). This normative body has acted as the reference point against which everyone else is measured and often found wanting (McKittrick, 2020;Martin, 1991). As a result, some bodies and identities are constructed, and subsequently policed, as unnatural and or 'other', whether via racialisation, gender norms, heterosexism, ideas of neurotypicality, and this list goes on (Benjamin, 2019). ...
Concerns about social justice are long standing across many fields. In this article, we outline key social justice concepts in relation to science communication, before examining the politics of science and science communication in more detail. We argue more focus is needed on how certain forms of politics and power travel through science and science communication in ways that have created, reinforced and/or ameliorated structural inequities. We argue that foregrounding social justice perspectives helps make explicit the power dynamics involved in creating and communicating knowledge. For us, this is a purposeful move that resists the urge to tidy away, ‘naturalise’ or otherwise hide politics and power. We invite readers to collectively interrogate our existing science communication theories and practices with a view to transforming them to be more just and meaningfully improve people’s lives and ecosystems.
... Whether it is the insipid creep of naturalisation (McKittrick, 2020) or outright totalitarianism (Arendt, 1973), the absolutism of one-world ontology undermines the possibility of ako with more-than-Western worlds grounded in political ontology, as monontological forces derive their authority from excluding otherness (Britzman, 1995). This diminishes response-ability as it refuses to engage with otherness (Barad, 2017). ...
This paper explores a series of conundra that arose about koha, kaupapa whānau and wānanga in an ethics application for a study on trans and irawhiti takatāpui youth-led sexuality education. Thinking with policy documents, Indigenisation and decolonising approaches to tertiary education, the paper illustrates the issues that arise when Indigenous concepts are forced to operate on settler terms. Rather than rejecting Western approaches outright, accountability is sought where the university's appropriation of Indigenous concepts proves disingenuous, and strategies for acknowledging the multiplicitous constituents of the university are explored. Integrally, the paper provides clear examples where the institution has facilitated its own decolonisation, demonstrating how the possibility of a more just university is already in our grasp.
For colonial domination, reflexive practices within qualitative methodologies encompass autoethnography and researchers using static identity categories to reflect how researchers’ social positions shape their practice and field site experiences. Yet, such approaches can maintain researchers’ position as the subjects doing colonial research rather than as researchers negotiating their positions as subject-object of research. Taking the case of a queer, trans, non-binary researcher who had to cisify themselves for an ethnography, this paper conducts an autoethnography in relation to gender conformity. The paper does so by bringing together ideas of relationality and subjectivity formation to consider faith embodiment. It offers negotiating utopia as a three-part affective, autoethnographic framework for analyzing researcher subjectivity formation, enabling researchers to account for the colonial roots of ethnography. Using the case of a trans, non-binary Sikh, negotiating utopia shows how they confronted a U.S. settler veil and developed a type of ethnographic double consciousness.
This forum is in response to Paula Magee and Craig Willey’s (2024) article, Towards a framework of culturally relevant science and mathematics pedagogy: A pedagogical and analytical tool for teacher education. The researchers use culturally relevant mathematics and science pedagogy (CRSMP) as a framework for assisting science and mathematics teachers in using culture in their teaching. Reflecting on their teaching, it was challenging for their preservice and inservice teachers to identify what they were doing in practice that was evidence of culturally relevant teaching. We introduce historically relevant science pedagogy as a “robust” pedagogical approach that emerged from interviews and Sista Circles with Black women science teachers. Science educators have several tools to challenge how we shape curricular materials, make instructional decisions, and address teacher dispositions. We need to purposefully create a curriculum that allows culture to excite the learning environment toward full engagement and humanity in learning and practice.
Our experience of the world is deeply shaped by concepts of space. From territorial borders, to distinctions between public and private space, to the way we dwell in a building or move between rooms, space is central to how we inhabit our environment and make sense of our place within it. Literature explores and gives expression to the ways in which space impacts human experience. It also powerfully shapes the construction and experience of space. Literary studies has increasingly turned to space and, fuelled by feminist and postcolonial insights, the interconnections between material spaces and power relations. This book treats foundational theories in spatial literary studies alongside exciting new areas of research, providing a dual emphasis on origins and innovative approaches while maintaining constant attention to how the production and experience of space is intertwined with the production and circulation of power.
Collage is a practice with particular feminist resonances that has both touched and been touched by many feminist hands for varied feminist means. Figures such as Mary Delany, Claude Cahun and Wangechi Mutu have all practised collage as a strategy for subversive and disruptive world-making. As feminist art critic Lucy Lippard describes, collage is ‘born of interruption’. This article traces some of these interruptive, feminist uses of collage and asks what it might mean to use collage as a feminist research and (hi)storytelling strategy. Drawing on Karen Barad’s theorisations of the agential cut as a boundary-making practice, I propose a collage-based feminist research strategy wherein archival materials, knowledges, bodies, subjects and things are agentially cut, arranged and pasted together/apart in unexpected ways to produce unexpected dis/connections, attachments and relationships. A collage-based approach to feminist materials and knowledge disrupts hegemonic understandings of materiality, linearity, clarity and coherency, and opens up alternative ways of knowing feminisms and their things. I argue that collage locates the feminist researcher and (hi)storyteller as actively response-able to and for their research, its gestures, its narratives and its results, and ask what kinds of visions and versions of response-ability emerge from this. What kinds of structures are our cuts supporting? Whose histories are our cuts re-membering? In short, who lives and who dies in our feminist research and (hi)storytelling? With collage, these questions are felt and touched by the researcher, the cutter and the paster, and therefore felt as embodied questions that matter ethically, ontologically and epistemologically.
The 2024 U.S. election has resulted in an outpouring of public mourning among those who believed they could ‘fix’ the country through policy or government interventions. Yet, we have been watching a systematic dismantling of rights‐based citizenship since the mid‐twentieth century. Using a Black geographies framework, in conversation with feminist geographies, Black feminisms, and environmental justice scholarship, the paper addresses the present predicament in terms of barriers to reproducing life for Black people. We also explore the liberatory possibilities in this moment as informed by Black spatial histories. We use the example of traditional midwifery practices to show we might re‐imagine Black futures and a world built on relationality over spatial fixes.
Geography's history includes a diverse range of ontological orientations (from positivism to postmodernism) and epistemological and methodological approaches (both quantitative and qualitative). Consequently, definitions and constructions of science within the discipline have been equally extensive. In this chapter we trace some of the widely divergent approaches to explanation that social and cultural geographers have applied and/or critically engaged in the past century. We limit this discussion to four key ways that social and cultural geographers understand science: a process of knowledge formation that is spatially situated and embedded, a collective social practice, value ridden and political, and productive of reality. This conception of science highlights the value of thinking beyond traditional divisions between science and cultural practice to explore multiple ways of knowing the world. Throughout the chapter, we integrate discussion of Clyde Woods’ theorization of blues epistemology – and the extensive scholarship building on this approach, particularly in Black geographies – as a powerful form of knowledge production that exemplifies our four key points. We end with a reflection on the need to create, validate, and disseminate scientific knowledge beyond the confines of geography and the academy.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
With a particular view to the workings of intergenerational time and postmemory within (and against) hegemonic power formations, Larissa Sansour’s sci-fi short film In Vitro (2019) examines the biopolitics of temporality under conditions of occupation. Starting from the premise of a post-apocalyptic Palestine, the film stages postmemory as a form of inversed futurity or speculative futurism that provides insight into the enduring repercussions of political world-breaking and world-making. In Vitro thereby highlights the affective operations of political violence by tapping into a wider biopolitical project of feeling, but it also draws attention to the role of technological mediation though narrative, memory and visual culture in maintaining, and also resisting, specific regimes of control. Adding to a discussion about the biopolitics of feeling and temporality more broadly by introducing the notion of apocalyptic affect, the author demonstrates that the film’s poignant illustration of displacement, trauma and nostalgia identifies the temporal unfolding that crafts exclusionary spaces and walled lives, while also attempting a politically vital piecing together of intergenerational time. In Vitro ’s invocation of mnemonic futurity thus provides an emotional and temporal politics of worlding that reanimates the present as presence. Ultimately, such forms of speculative worlding provide insight into how power and violence organize space, temporality and feeling towards taken-for-granted forms of political embodiment that are central to the biopolitical project, but they also matter politically precisely because they challenge the choreography of hegemonic experience in favour of complicating configurations of imaginative futurity.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.
This article reconstructs a recent historical geography of the late 1990s genre of British Asian dance music that became known as “New Asian Kool” or Asian Underground. Most synonymous with the musician Talvin Singh, whose album OK won the Mercury Music Prize in 1999, this music genre is identified as deeply contested from its very inception by an emergent seam of second-generation British Asian musicians and bands, such as Joi, Nitin Sawhney, Fun>Da>Mental, and the Asian Dub Foundation. Central to their concerns around the term Asian Underground were, first, a sense of its inadequacy to capture the diversity of dance and popular music being produced by British-born South Asians in the late 1990s, and second, a fear that a generic category placing these musicians in the subterranean holding space of the “underground” would prevent mainstream commercial success. Taking this brief moment in late modern British popular culture seriously, and engaging with debates around generic classification and with the music itself, the article argues that, in these fractal British Asian soundscapes, at stake were contested experiences of British Asian expression, belonging and the politics of representation, and ultimately the articulation of South Asianness with Britishness. Understanding the almost immediate disavowal of Asian Underground as a music genre is key to understanding the emergence of new constitutions of Britishness and British public culture at the turn of the last millennium.
This article introduces the special issue of Social Text titled “Sound Carries,” which hears how sound carries across geographies, histories, and disciplines—carries meanings, struggles, and creative ways of being and knowing. The editors of this special issue stress that, both politically and poetically, sound and space cannot easily be parsed, and they argue for the value of thinking sound and space together in order to make sense of the worlds that people make together. The article begins by locating the intellectual work of this special issue in London—a London intractably positioned as postimperial metropolis, a city animated by ongoing colonialities, anticolonial echoes, and postcolonial potentials. It then outlines some thoughts around cartographies that echo, before tuning in to some of the specific frequencies that constitute forms of world making and presencing in the diasporic city. Next, this introduction frames the city as a “mixing desk” in order to foreground the political and spatial potential of thinking the city through sound. Finally, it outlines the multidisciplinary methodologies and approaches that comprise this special issue. In toto, the article gestures to an emergent, and interdisciplinary, field of decolonial sound studies.
This coda begins with a commentary on the ethical and philosophical dynamics that inspired this special issue, emerging from two conversations around the ridiculousness of navigating ethics approval processes that are detached from the research itself. In what follows, rather than rehearsing the arguments from the special issue, the contributors respond to a provocation about the difference that was rendered possible through a process of writing with and against academic non/sense. What emerges from their responses is a sense that ethico-onto-epistemological ‘response-ability’ to academic non/sense takes in a multitude of forms by which scholars have endeavoured to make sense of the academic systems we have inherited and bequeath them to future scholars in the service of more just approaches to knowing and being with/in the world.
As a ubiquitous term, intersectionality has circulated across disciplinary, linguistic and national borders. However, circulation is not a passive process but is influenced and structured by intellectual and institutional contexts. As a concept rooted in US Black feminist tradition and adopted transnationally, intersectionality stands as a relevant case to illuminate the complex process of the reception of concepts. In this article, I focus on the reception of intersectionality in French women’s and gender studies literature. Using a mixed method citation analysis, I explore the reception of intersectionality in the French context and reflect on the particular citation practices that facilitated the reception of intersectionality and transformed French women’s studies and understandings of intersectionality. Heavily reliant on English literature, French intersectionality research bridges two intellectual contexts. Specific citation practices such as co-citation illustrate the translation and reception work developed in this French citation network. These practices can help us understand how the reception of intersectionality by French women’s studies transformed women and gender studies in France while also creating a distinct intersectional space in the French gender studies literature. Through a mixed method citation network analysis, I confirm the citational centrality of US Black feminist, but also highlight the importance of the co-citation of US Black feminist and French materialist feminist and introduced scholars from Quebec and other Europeans countries as important actors in the circulation of intersectionality through critique.
This article considers the historical relationship between the production of scale and Blackness in the visual archives of slavery. Building on recent work in Black geographies that intervenes in debates over the horizontal versus hierarchical perspectives on scale, I argue that “Black scale” attends to the co-constitution of race and scale. Working through the critical frameworks of speculation and visual analysis, I explore the ways in which two visual artifacts mediated and produced scale and Blackness in the 19th century. The first, price current newspapers, visually abstracts and obscures the labor power of enslaved laborers on 19th century sugar plantations. The other, an amateur watercolor depicting an enslaved man carrying a torch, depicts the visual technology of illumination used to produce Blackness and surveil Black people. In both cases, the visual artifacts under investigation functioned to (1) trace the geographic arc of economic relationships that were founded and reproduced through racialized dispossession and enslavement, and (2) represent visual technologies that worked to produce Blackness. As a hermeneutical practice, “Black scale” engages with speculative methods and visual analysis as critical approaches to better understand the relationship between race, visuality, uneven development, and spatial production in historical terms.
This essay poses a series of stories, drawn from Renee Gladman's Ravicka novels and accounts of social amoebas/slime molds in feminist science studies and science fiction. The author aims to respond to Sylvia Wynter's call for a new science from a queer vantage. Given Wynter's understanding of the centrality of stories to human autopoeisis, the author considers how queer stories take new forms, beyond the norms of narrative closure as detailed in Peter Brooks's reading of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Returning to Freud, the author discerns how the life drive (which he identifies with “animalcules”) inspires queer narrative modes. The author argues that Gladman's queer experimental novels exemplify the life drive as a narrative form that aims for divergence and proliferation rather than closure. The article compares the epistemic challenges and opportunities that social amoebas have presented to the science of Man with Gladman's life-drive innovations; the author turns Freud's description of the animalcules as narcissistic in a queer direction, via Bersani, whose idea of small n narcissism resonates with social amoebas’ being. The article concludes that Gladman's series demonstrates—through form and language but also its imagined spaces and relations—how Wynter's new science manifests in queer stories.
This article examines the implications of two provocative scholarly slogans—Donna Haraway’s “Make Kin Not Babies” and Sophie Lewis’s “Abolish the Family”—for children, childhoods, and ecopedagogies in the early years. Engaging critically with these concepts, the article highlights their potential to disrupt entrenched norms while acknowledging the discomfort and uncertainty they may evoke. It begins by interrogating the normalized centrality of “the family” in early childhood teacher education and childhood studies, arguing that this focus constrains alternative imaginaries of care and justice. The discussion situates Haraway’s and Lewis’s slogans within broader debates, critiquing how idealized family structures often align with humanist stewardship pedagogy, which presumes humanity’s exceptional capacity to save both children and the planet. By contrast, speculative narratives, such as Netflix’s Sweet Tooth , offer opportunities to reimagine the child, family, and future by emphasizing interconnections between humans and the more-than-human world. These stories open space for counter-imaginaries, inspiring alternative communal formations and transformative practices. Ultimately, the article advocates for a pedagogy of discomfort and generous suspicion as ecopedagogical strategies to interrogate existing care structures and envision more equitable and interconnected futures.
If language plays a powerful role in shaping how we see and think about the world and structuring material practices, then the language that is used to describe inequitable food landscapes demands critical investigation. This article attends to the potency of language by interrogating the metaphorical “desert” within the food desert concept. By mapping the extensive critiques of the food desert metaphor onto longer histories of US settler colonialism and imperialism that leverage imperial ideologies about deserts as empty, barren, lacking, and in need of improvement, this article traces what the author calls a colonial desert imaginary embedded within the food desert. Staying with the problem of the metaphorical desert within the food desert refuses to forgive or look past this problematic connection, but instead tethers it to long colonial histories, imperial logics, and ideologies about arid landscapes. More than just an invitation to think critically about inherited concepts and easy metaphors to describe food inequities, this interrogation of the desert within the food desert metaphor is critically necessary, lest scholars lose sight of the counterimaginaries and alternate modes of relating to and thriving within arid landscapes that refuse these imperial ideologies and colonial spatial imaginaries.
Drawing from the perspectives of Black American Muslim parents who send their children to an Islamic school in a Sufi city in Senegal, this article develops the concept of a liberatory geography of educational possibility . I argue that parents made meaning of the school and city as spaces that nurtured their children's holistic growth and deepened their understandings of their multilayered identities in ways beyond what parents believed were possible in the U.S.
The idea of teacher education has emerged to bridge the gap in questioning intellectual equality for both male and female teachers. Pursuing higher education in language professional careers which are understood as auxiliary jobs by male counterparts poses a big challenge for female teachers who were born and raised in a patriarchal community. This current study explored and interrogated socio-cultural contexts of learning and teaching by gender roles experienced by female language student teachers. It was designed as a narrative case study inviting three student teachers who currently pursued master’s or doctoral degree in the US to share their visual narrative experiences. The findings revealed any experience and aspiration of their language learning and teaching by oppression, stereotypes, and agency associated with female language teachers. Conclusions from this study will be helpful for student teachers to reconstruct their teaching philosophy and autonomy in family, school, and community settings.
This short introduces the chair's theme for the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference 2025.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.