[Themaintainers] 4S 2019 Open Panel CFP: Remediating remediation: Imagining alternatives for assessing and redressing environmental harm

[Sebastian Ureta]

Dear all,

This Open Panel that Arn Keeling and myself are organizing for the 2019 
4S meeting in New Orleans might be of interest to some of you. Obviously 
any case study dealing with remediation schemes considering maintenance 
approaches (rather than, as usual, utter transformation) would be welcomed!

All best,

Sebastian.

-- 
Sebastián Ureta
Profesor Asociado
Director - Magister en Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad
Departamento de Sociología
Universidad Alberto Hurtado
uahurtado.academia.edu/SebastianUreta


_____________________________________________________________________________________________________


Open Panel – Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science 
(4S)

September 4 -7, 2019 New Orleans, USA


  120. Remediating remediation: Imagining alternatives for assessing and
  redressing environmental harm

Organizers: Sebastián Ureta (Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile) & Arn 
Keeling (Memorial University, Canada)

Description:

Environmental remediation, or the myriad processes and schemes through 
which a certain damaged ecology or species is looked to be restored to a 
more sustainable state, faces a serious paradox. On the one hand, in the 
face of climate change, environmental contamination, and widespread 
biodiversity depletion, to enact successful and comprehensive 
remediation schemes appears more urgent than ever. On the other hand, 
the common failure of most actual remediation schemes to really achieve 
their stated aims has caused a growing sense of skepticism among 
practitioners and analysts alike about the capacity of such 
interventions to truly help to heal damaged landscapes (or indeed, the 
planet as a whole). STS scholars have so far importantly contributed to 
enact such a paradox, mainly through developing case studies critically 
assessing the multiple shortcomings of current remediation schemes, 
especially those undertaken as technical, expert-driven processes.

This open panel aims at challenging such state of affairs. Without 
denying the multiple shortcomings of actual remediation schemes, it 
looks to go beyond critique and instead explore novel ways to enact 
remediation through experimental renderings of both the damaged 
environment and the possible paths for its transformation. Following the 
conference theme, we solicit interventions that seek to innovate, 
interrupt, or regenerate remediation practices. Explicitly avoiding 
modernist dreams of purity, such novel remediations would fully embrace 
the messy and intermingled character of life on earth, practicing 
remediation as a socio-technical ensemble involving a heterogeneous 
array of entities – certainly experts and technical devices, but also 
multiple publics and nonhuman agents.

Potential themes include:

  * Conceptual explorations of the notion of environmental remediation,
    its capabilities and shortcomings.
  * Critical engagements with actual environmental remediation schemes,
    especially focusing on ways to transform them.
  * Analytic case studies of experimental forms of remediation,
    especially examples that challenge usual environmental governance
    frames.
  * Practitioner accounts on the practice of novel remediations,
    engaging with its own shortcomings and barriers found.
  * Speculative designs for alternative remediation schemes, from
    methodologies to technologies.

Please feel free to pass on to your colleagues.

Deadline: Feb 1, 2019

Submissions: https://www.4s2019.org/accepted-open-panels/


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