The general call for EASST + 4S 2020 is open! The joint conference will be held in Prague, Czech Republic, on August 18-21, 2020.
ThePanel 86 – Infrastructures of Care: Disability, Autonomy, Inter/Dependencies will be coordinated by Laura Mauldin (University of Connecticut), Helena Fietz (PPGAS/UFRGS) and Emily Rogers (New York University).
The deadline for submissions is February 29, 2020.
Panel 86. Infrastructures of Care: Disability, Autonomy, Inter/Dependencies
Laura Mauldin, University of Connecticut; Helena Moura Fietz, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS; Emily Rogers, New York University
Engaging with recent STS and feminist technoscience scholars interested in “thinking with care” (Puig de la Bella Casa, 2011;2015;2017; Murphy, 2015), this open panel invites scholars working across disability studies and STS to critically interrogate care and autonomy. Across disability activism and the sociology of science, technology, and medicine is a critique of institutions and institutionalization. Implicit in this research is the virtue of autonomy: one should have agency to direct one’s life, live according to one’s preference, and be held accountable for one’s decisions. Care, however, is often associated with facets of dependency and stigmatized. Nonetheless, recent work in feminist disability studies beckons us to critically examine care (e.g., Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018), and STS scholars have noted that the notion of “patient autonomy” is itself determined by upstream decision-making and care infrastructures (Mol 2008). The goal of this panel is to consider what STS and disability studies might gain from taking up care as an infrastructure that does not render “autonomy” as a static virtue, but instead suggests a shifting and dynamic sociotechnical terrain. What emerging worlds flourish within such sociotechnical systems of care? We invite case studies on how infrastructures transform care relations, altering configurations of autonomy and/or inter/dependency in the process, in a variety of cultural contexts. What do we mean when we talk about autonomy in the context of sociotechnical systems of care? How does an STS perspective trouble notions of care taken up in feminist scholarship and/or disability studies?
Contact: laura.mauldin@gmail.com
Keywords: disability, care, interdependence, autonomy
Categories: Medicine and Healthcare Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS