Reimagining the future with liminal agents: critical interdisciplinary STS as manifestos for anti-essentialist solidarities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper traces the recent trend in interdisciplinary Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially those of the Black feminist tradition, to make an argument for how its critical scholarship on data, science and knowledge production can be interpreted as manifesto-istic texts advocating for anti-essentialist solidarities. Dorothy E. Roberts’ work demonstrates how debunking essentialist categories backed by the foundationalist veneer of science must be situated at the heart of anti-racist and anti-ablest politics of co-liberation. Ruha Benjamin’s work, meanwhile, not only analyses the technologies/knowledge production practices designed to maintain the status quo, but projects a new vision of ‘retooling’ science as a means of reimagining justice in the rapidly shifting technological climate of the twenty-first century. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick discuss human subjects often trapped in between orthodox discourses, who must then strive to reimagine/redefine their collective future through intersubjective creativity. What remains, in the end, are embodied narratives that escape reductionist logic through their welcoming of new perspectives, experiences and innovations—all of which are constantly being renewed through the arrival of new generations and diasporic traversements of ideas.