Aporias at the intersection of geography and feminist science and technology studies: Critical engagements with Black studies

Abstract

In this review, we read the interdisciplinary traffic across critical human geography and feminist science and technology studies (FSTS) in light of the insights and destabilizing aporias—in other words, irresolvable contradictions or logical disjunctions—emerging from Black radical and feminist study. We highlight three thematic areas that have received sustained attention and debate and that resonate across the three fields: objectivity and subjectivity, agency, and life and its excesses. Inspired by the methodological provocations of Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and the political demands of multiple intellectual currents within Black studies, we venture a modest upending of the form of the review itself. Rather than seek to delineate and codify contributions to a scholarly debate, we point to troubled assumptions and potential openings for those working at the intersection of critical human geography, FSTS, and Black studies.

Filling the hole? On new geographies of the subsurface

“…Locating opacity as an emergent and contested effect of such entanglement can also offer a different and more diverse account of the politics of the underground. Historic and contemporary Black thought in the North American diaspora is one of the principle sources of theorizing the subversive underground, but this scholarship has not consistently been invoked in geographical conversations on science, technology, and the environment (Lehman and Johnson, 2022; Liebman et al, 2023). Though a variety of approaches exist, the Black underground is sometimes used to describe a dual physical and metaphorical fugitivity .…”

Geographies of science and technology III: Careful entanglements, responsible futures

“…The lively interest in the manifold relations between science, technology, and the practices and politics of care has grown out of work in feminist geography and STS, which collectively seeks ‘not only to critically engage and situate the making of technoscience objects but also to centre questions of social justice, inequality, and violence’ (Schurr et al, 2023: 4; see also Liebman et al, 2023). Through the lens of ‘intimate technologies’, Schurr et al (2023: 13) argue for a renewed geography of ‘the mundane spaces in which technologies and bodies intersect’.…”