CASCAIUAES2017 Roundtable CFP: North of 49, West of GMT, South of Pecos: Anthropology & Technoscience Mo(u)vements in Canada and Beyond

Call for 2017 meetings CASCA, IUAES, Ottawa

North of 49, West of GMT, South of Pecos: Anthropology &
Technoscience Mo(u)vements in Canada and Beyond

A longstanding conversation needs to be had on how Anthropological
engagement with technoscience (reckoned broadly) has developed in
Canada and elsewhere – yet beyond US anthropology (if also in
dialogue with it). In Canada, although anthropologists engaging
technoscience are present in several universities and sites of action,
they have not as yet coalesced into a national community, an outcome
that would otherwise be welcome. Might this lack of coalescence be an
effect of economies of scale; the effect of diverse research
interests or institutional locations; or possibly the common
embedding of technoscience in more heterogenous socionatural,
political projects and concerns? Apart from asking how things came
to be, this roundtable also ask how are things moving differently in
this area in Canada. And what has been happening in other, non-US
anthropologies, as in the range of anthropologies emergent in Latin
America, and elsewhere? How might the action in all these areas merge
or diverge, in generative ways with what is taking place in Canada?
Indeed, are they moving more dynamically and generatively, and if so,
why?

This roundtable is meant as the beginning of a national discussion in
Canada, so is necessarily open-ended and reaching out to other
anthropologists and anthropologies for the most part based outside the
US. Several questions will be explored: What is the character of
these anthropological engagements with Technoscience? What sorts of
projects are anthropologists undertaking? Are there consistencies
with and divergences from lines of practice that have dominated US
(and European) approaches? Are there certain thematics, emergent
matters of concern, animating these wider anthropologies? How do
worldly, planetary, events and forces impinge on our work? Are there
lines of flight away from usual horizons of practice detectable in
these terrains of scholarly engagement? And how might productive
conversations and articulation of these anthropological engagements
with technoscience challenge and grow in new directions, in with
organized or organic ways?

Each of the discussants (up to 12) in the roundtable will have 3-4
minutes to locate their work, and to bring an animating point to one
of the larger questions being considered. This will be followed by a
collecting together of views and observations from all attending,
students and established researchers alike. This format of
quick-reflex presentations is meant to generate motion, with the idea
of picking this up both post-session at these meetings, and in more
diverse and pointed panels and interchanges in subsequent CASCA and
IUAES gatherings.

Brian Noble
Please send notification of interest, with brief description of your
research and engagements in the area, to bnoble@dal.ca
Organizer