Upcoming workshop as part of the STS Italia 2022, with keynote speech from Professor Claudia Aradau.
Abstract of keynote speech by Claudia Aradau:
Recent encounters between STS and International Relations have focused on analyses of materiality and techno-scientific practices producing (in)security. International Relations scholars have started to attend to the ‘sociotechnologies of (in)security’ (Suchman et al. 2017), and concepts such as securitization have been deployed in STS research (Pelizza 2021). While research on (in)security has benefitted from theoretical and methodological apparatuses developed in STS, it has also been suggested that ‘STS can benefit from the decades of research within critical security studies on how discourses of security hold so much power within societies’ (Evans et al. 2021). In this talk, I propose to contribute to the dialogue between STS and International Relations by starting not from technologies and infrastructures, discourses or imaginaries, but from the politics of difference. The question of difference and otherness has been at the heart of critical approaches in International Relations. STS scholars, particularly scholars working on migration and borders, have addressed enactments of alterity. What kinds of theoretical and methodological resources do we need to attend to global proliferation and dispersal of (in)security practices that enact alterity? To do so, I argue that we can think ‘difference as method’. Difference as method means that we need to attend to the processes through which differences are constituted and which differences come to matter. Following Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2013), difference as method also means that we need to keep open the space between empirical research and concept-work. I illustrate ‘difference as method’ through an analysis of how potentially dangerous others are produced algorithmically today (Aradau and Blanke 2022).
Details of event:
11th February 2021, 10:30AM - 1:00PM CET (9:30AM-12:00PM GMT)
Register for online attendance/participation here.
For any inquiries email STS Italia here.