CfP: Techno-Environmental Racialization

Science, Technology, & Human Values call for abstracts: Special Issue on Techno-Environmental Racialization

The editorial collective of Science, Technology, & Human Values announces the journal’s 2024 Call for Abstracts for a Special Issue on Techno-environmental Racialization.

Interested scholars should submit a proposal using this Google form by 15 November 2024. All proposals should include a title, 200-word abstract, a selected bibliography for the proposed contribution, and a short biography of the author/s.

Diversity of contributions from scholars internationally, and at different career stages, is encouraged. The journal has some resourcing to provide specialised language editing for authors at institutions outside the Global North

2024 Topic: Techno-Environmental Racialization

Special Issue editors: Mara Dicenta, Alberto Morales, Nathalia Hernández Vidal, Columba González-Duarte, and Daphne Esquivel-Sada

Across territories, from water infrastructures and biodiversity conservation to green energy projects and zoonotic labs, techno-environmental developments are deeply entangled with processes of racialization and multispecies relations. We use the concept of techno-environment to capture the historicity of the coproduction between nature and technology. Techno-environmental projects can positively and negatively affect forms of place-based knowledge production while transforming racial disparities and technoscientific interests.

In this Special Issue (SI), we invite contributions that explore racializing techno-environmental processes and how these are un/done, contested, or disrupted by knowledge practices and multispecies relations. Building on the critical role of STS in analyzing how technology and scientific discourse materialize or challenge racialized inequalities, we aim to expand on frameworks of care, justice, abolition, and multispecies alliances to explore the intersection of techno-environmental relations and racialization.

Crucial to this conversation is place-based anti-colonial and decolonial thinking that demands different ways of conceptualizing knowledge, technology, space, place, and time. Multispecies scholarship is also significant, emphasizing how both humans and other-than-humans are subjected to distinct yet interconnected processes of oppression and racialization through technological and environmental co-becomings.

We invite submissions that examine how relations between humans and other-than-humans—biotic or otherwise—shape and are shaped by racializing orders advanced through techno-environmental relations. We are interested in papers that delve into place-based and situated experiences with technoscience and Indigenous sciences and technologies, and knowledge-making practices that challenge racialized notions of progress, atomistic visions of space, the nation-state, and the separation of human and more-than-human bodies, animacies, and agencies.

As inspirational prompts, including but not limited to, we ask:

How do techno-environmental projects advance or transform racial disparities and technoscientific interests? How is techno-environmental homogenization resisted through different place-based experiences and knowledge-making practices? How might these serve to cultivate alterity in technological development and resist colonialism and coloniality? How do time-space rhythms and imaginaries challenge or reinforce the sedimentations of techno-environmental racialization(s), and how do these, in turn, shape knowledge-making and human and other-than-human relations?

Submission timelines

After the proposed abstracts are submitted to the journal, the editorial collective and guest editors will review submissions and invite successful authors to prepare a full research article for peer review. The deadline for completed manuscripts will be mid-2025. Earlier deadlines will be set for working drafts, so that authors can receive feedback from guest editors before submitting to ST&HV.

Individual manuscripts should be no more than 8,000 words including endnotes and references. Articles that are accepted through peer review will subsequently appear OnlineFirst as ready before the publication of the Special Issue in full, anticipated in 2027.

All general inquiries should be sent in the first instance to Carolina Caliaba, ST&HV Managing Editor, at sthvjournal@gmail.com. Please submit your proposal using this form by 15 November 2024. You can find out more about ST&HV’s current submission requirements and style guide.

For more on what constitutes a contribution to the field of STS, see the editor’s recent editorial: What is an STS Contribution Now?