We invite submissions to our panel at 4S 2025 in Seattle, Washington (September 3 – 7, 2025). Please see details below:

Blackness as Onto-Epistemological Departure and Arrival*

Black feminist scholarship in STS and science studies have done field-defining work of articulating the various kinds of harms accumulated
by Black communities and other communities of color (Wynter 2003, Benjamin 2016). They situate such violence within existing patterns of anti-blackness, exploring how legacies of slavery and colonialism shape the epistemologies that produce technology today (Browne 2015, Noble 2018). Furthermore, the iterations of race-based harm they identify illustrate the ways in which Blackness works as a flexible tool illuminating how harm manifests within scientific knowledge production across time. Yet, thinking with Beth Coleman (2009), Jayna Brown (2021) and Kattherine McKittrick (2021), blackness is also a technology charting pathways toward alternative and speculative ways of understanding and interacting with our world, if not other worlds entirely. Blackness is therefore both a site of departure from the violent dialectic of positivist thinking and an arrival into a speculative escape. In light of this, we seek to bring together emergent methods and frameworks addressing how anti/blackness reverberates within scientific knowledge production, especially those grounded in Black feminist thought. We invite contributions that explore Blackness as method and/or as an analytical framework for breaking down the norms that exist within scientific knowledge production, and also for articulating the material impact of the current constructions of race within science practice.

There will be two panel sessions. The first session will feature panelists' presentations. In the second session, panelists will receive the opportunity to workshop methods and methodologies reflected in their scholarship, culminating in a collective reading list to aid in the exploration of the onto-epistemologies of Blackness that stand to shape and reform scientific knowledge production.

Panel Organizers: Kristen Reynolds, PhD (Brown University), Seyi Olojo (UC Berkeley)

Abstract Deadline*: January 31st *(250 words max)
Submission Page: https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_seattle.php