Speculative Visions of Race, Technology, Science, & Survival
Friday, Mar 15, 2013 - Saturday, Mar 16, 2013 | 9:00 am - 5:30 pm
The Center for Race Gender and the Multicultural Community Center present
Speculative Visions
of Race, Technology, Science, Survival
Conference Date:
March 15-16, 2013
Multicultural Community Center
Hearst Annex D
UC Berkeley
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/546873702001283
Free and open to the public. Location is wheelchair accessible.
What will survival entail in near and far futures? In light of racialized violence and social control, massive technological innovation, and rapid transformations in science and biomedicine, this conference will engage the imperative to imagine, study, prepare for, and articulate future human life. We are interested in how science and technology shape the material and epistemological boundaries of existence, specifically how and whose existence is valued, policed, corporealized, and corporatized. We will also explore the capacity of embodied subjects to navigate these boundaries in the context of dis/abled, gendered, sex/uality, and queer formations. Recognizing that technology creates kinds of futures (both anticipated and unforeseen), this conference will create a space to analyze how technologies of the past and present contextualize and disclose future realities, and identify opportunities for creating new possibilities.
Featuring Prof. Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania, who will explore the connection between her exciting recent publication, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century, and her groundbreaking work from her previous publications on racialized reproductive violence and the racial stratification within the US child welfare system.Conference co-sponsored by American Cultures, Gender Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Berkeley Center for New Media
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:
FRIDAY, MARCH 15th:
9 am – 9:30 am: Breakfast Sign-in
9:30 am – 10 am: Welcoming Remarks
10 am – 11:20 am: Panel 1
The Body (Market) in Motion: Embodied Capital in the Now and Future
The Body (Market) in Motion: Embodied Capital in the Now and Future
Moderated by Nick Mitchell, UC Berkeley
Life for Life: Speculation, Risk and Exchange in Transnational Indian Surrogacy
Kalindi Vora, UC San Diego
Circulating Images of the Indian IT Worker
Sareeta Amrute, University of Washington
Post-1965 Asian American Science Fiction as Critical Realism
Chris Fan, UC Berkeley
The Schism Between Afrofuturism and Sport in African American Culture:
Rereading the Anxiety Towards Black Athletes Post 9/11
Rereading the Anxiety Towards Black Athletes Post 9/11
Tiffany Charlotte Boyle, University of London
11:20 – 11:30: Break w/ snacks
11:30 am – 1:00 pm: Panel 2
Speculating the Carceral Planet
Speculating the Carceral Planet
Moderated by Keith Feldman, UC Berkeley
Towards a Critical Biometric Consciousness
Simone Browne, University of Texas, Austin
Bus 174 and the Politics of Numbers
Althea Wasow, UC Berkeley
Networked Visions from Insurgent Chiapas to the California Prison System
Ricardo Gomez, UC Berkeley
Drone Vision – Seeing ‘Others’ through Unmanned Aircraft
Katherine Chandler, UC Berkeley
1:00 pm – 1:45 pm: Lunch
1:45 pm – 3:10 pm: Panel 3
Dislocating the Human: Crossing Divides of Species and Form
Dislocating the Human: Crossing Divides of Species and Form
Moderated by Mel Chen, UC Berkeley
The Future is a Parasite: Biology and Species in Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” and Fledgling
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, University of Virginia
Animal. Asian. Cyborg: Larissa Lai’s “New Cultural Politics of Intimacy”
Tamara C. Ho, UC Riverside
The Deathly Interface: Techno-Orientalism and Digitized Flesh in Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Takeo Rivera, UC Berkeley
“People of the Apokalis”: Spatial Disability and the Bhopal Disaster
Jina Kim, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
3:10 pm – 3:30 pm: Screening Discussion of “Free State Epitaph”
A Short Film by Dean Spade Craig Willse
A Short Film by Dean Spade Craig Willse
3:30 – 4:00: Speculations: Downloads Uploads (Wrap up summary, a gallery for further questions)
4:00 – 5:30: Reception @ Bancroft Hotel, 2680 Bancroft Way
6:00 pm: Night of Culture Resistance – Multicultural Community Center
SATURDAY, MARCH 16th:
9:30 am – 9:45 am: Welcome Back, Welcome Forth
9:45 am – 10:40 am: Panel 4
Eating Brains: Biotechnology and Criminal Minds
Eating Brains: Biotechnology and Criminal Minds
The Brain, Violence, and the Future of Racial Imaginaries through the Lens of Biotechnologies
Oliver Rollins, UC San Francisco
Silent Cells: Psychotropics and Intersections of Race, Gender, and Citizenship in American Prisons
Anthony Ryan Hatch, Georgia State University
10:40 – 10:50: Break w/ snacks
10:50 am– 12:25 pm: Panel 5
Inner Space and its Outer Travels: Cells, Genes, Organs
Inner Space and its Outer Travels: Cells, Genes, Organs
Moderated by Christoph Hanssmann, UC San Francisco
People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier *
Ruha Benjamin, Boston University
“This is Not A Card”: On the Exceptional Materiality of India’s National Biometrics
Lawrence Cohen, UC Berkeley
*a brief exchange with Ruha Benjamin and Lawrence Cohen*
Being in Bacterial Culture: Race, Species, and Survival in Mid-20th Century Bacteriology
Bharat Jayram Venkat, UC Berkeley
Jewish Gene Panels, Preventative Double Mastectomies:
Risk, Anxiety, and Racial Affect in Genetic Counseling
Risk, Anxiety, and Racial Affect in Genetic Counseling
Anna Jabloner, University of Chicago
12:25 pm – 1:15 pm: Lunch
Screening of FML – Fuck My Life
A short film by Xandra Ibarra / La Chica Boom
Screening of FML – Fuck My Life
A short film by Xandra Ibarra / La Chica Boom
1:15 pm – 2:15 pm: Keynote Speaker
Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania
Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania
Author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business
Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century
Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century
Moderated by Eunice Cho
2:15 – 2:30: Break
2:30 pm – 3:40 pm: Panel 6
Upward, Outward, Onward:
Afrofuturism, Transhumanism, and the Black Prophetic Tradition
Upward, Outward, Onward:
Afrofuturism, Transhumanism, and the Black Prophetic Tradition
Moderated by Jakeya Caruthers, Stanford University
Up Above My Head: Spirituals, Afrofuturism, and the Redefinition of Technology
Tamara Roberts, UC Berkeley
Transhumanism and the Prophetic Voice of the Black Church
Rev. Andrew Rollins, St. James A.M.E. Church
3:40 – 3:50: Break
3:50 pm – 5:15 pm: Panel 7
Thinking Lifeforms, Deathforms, Corporeality into the Future
Thinking Lifeforms, Deathforms, Corporeality into the Future
Moderated by Alisa Bierria, UC Berkeley
Sylvia Wynter, Environmental Endgame, and the Frontiers of Disaster Capital
Tom Meagher, San Francisco State University
White Flight to the Future: Cryonic Suspension and Cybernetic Imaginaries in the American 1960s
Grant Shofstall, University of Illinois
An Indigenous Ontological Reading of Cryopreservation Practices and Ethics (and Why I’d Rather Think about Pipestone)
Kim Tallbear, UC Berkeley
The Corporealities of Politics: US Third World Women of Color Feminisms and Healing Justice
Tala Khanmalek, UC Berkeley
5:15 pm – 5:30 pm: Analog Recap with artist, Diego Gómez