Borderlands STS
The Borderlands Science & Technology Studies Lab (Borderlands STS Lab) brings together faculty, postdocs, and graduate students from a range of disciplines. We are motivated by both human aspects of science and technology and scholarship on the place and power in/of the Borderlands.
The group was created in January 2021 by Dr. Smith.
1,950 mile-long open wound
dividing a pueblo', a culture,
running down the length of my body,.
staking fence rods in my flesh,
splits me splits me
me raja me raja
– Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
Our engagement with the Borderlands is both critical and situated. We employ critical social theories and feminist, postcolonial, etc. approaches. We work in geographic sites across the globe ranging from Mexico, India, Chile, North America, Africa, Argentina. We attend to topics related to technological innovations in agriculture, medicine, geography, science education. Ultimately our shared interests lie in the ways in which the Borderlands are materialized, enacted and embodied across subjectivities, imaginaries, temporalities, ontologies and geographies. We are also curious about the challenges posed to the physical and social science and humanities in their engagement with the concept of borderlands as a framework for sociotechnical practices and artifacts from everyday uses and governance to local and global politics.
Our hope is that this mode of engagement and collaboration will foster conversations across disciplines by troubling the notions of innovation, appropriation, development, ethics, surveillance that shape thinking around Borderlands.
Borderlands as a term connects bodies and territories, technologies and futures, sensibilities and rationalities, and constitutes an in-between-space for both scholarship and bodies (inquiry?) that is both generative, expansive, and transformative.
We organize our scholarship around themes:
