Description
As International Studies looks towards the next 50 years, the discipline must necessarily confront how technology both continues and ruptures patterns of relations simultaneously as instrument, infrastructure, and epistemology of power. Such inquiries are particularly urgent in this contemporary moment when technology has become intrinsic to the processes through which borders are drawn, populations are governed, violence is legitimised, and futures are foreclosed or imagined. Interrogating how technology, broadly defined, reinscribes historical circuits of domination even while producing novel forms of violence demands analytical frameworks attentive to the constitutive force of technology. Alongside such critiques, we suggest that future oriented interrogations of technology must also contend with its transformative potential particularly when anticipating decolonising technological futures. This entails for instance, examining digital sovereignty movements, Indigenous data protocols, and abolitionist refusals as serious political projects that crucially inform potential visions for technological governance. This panel brings together scholars working on these issues particularly those working at the intersections of technology, violence, and international relations with a focus on the colonial, imperial, racial, and gendered dimensions of technological power. Alongside these critiques, these papers extend analysis beyond narratives of disruption and violence to contend with technology's potential for care, reparations, and reimagination. In extending these interrogations, this panel seeks to proffer an understanding of technology that interrogates the conceptual and material limits of what counts as technology in the first place.
