January 23, 2023 | Report-Backs
Communities, like individuals, are born and they grow. Our STS community is growing in number of members and diversifying in the interests they share. While some of its founders have passed away, many new scholars are joining. Growth and death can make it easy to forget the past. Who is telling the new generations the stories of the elders?
It is a Mexican tradition to set aside the first days of November to remember our dead and retell their stories. Cemeteries and homes are decorated with bright orange cempasuchil flowers, cutout papers dangle from ceilings, candles and frankincense are lit. Photographs of our family and friends are displayed together with their favourite food, drink, and smoke; colours and smells invite and guide them back-home to be reunited with their living. Inspired by this ritual, we created the In Memoriam, an occasion to remember and celebrate our academic ancestors, those who have been fundamental to our community and to our personal stories as academics.
In the months leading up to the 4S 2022 meeting in Cholula, Mexico, a call for participation circulated among the 4S and ESOCITE communities. Although many found the idea inspiring and important, only a few responded. We then took upon the task of searching for those who came before us, those who are now remembered in prizes or mentioned in papers (Cozzens, 1993) as well as those who are sitting in the back of our minds. We asked friends and colleagues, we looked in and out of the web; at the end, we knew we were missing many important people. So, during the conference, we urged people to come and share their ancestors with us, to tell us their stories and to help us interconnect.
The In Memoriam shared the gymnasium with the ‘Making and Doing’ exhibit. Equipped with slips of paper, markers, yarn and pins, it soon became a place where the conference lost its structure; a place of improvisation, sociality, and inter-generational knowledge sharing. Through the overlapping sheets of paper with scribbled names, yarn entanglements and the debates over who and where and when, the altar became a space for associative thinking ‘who goes with who? how? why?’ Its configuration began to change, the seeming (and delusional) fixity of neatly bound personhood, of autonomy and sovereignty, were constantly being disrupted. Comments, questions and ideas were shared: Can we dream new intellectual overlaps, debts, resonances? Does recognizing our ancestors free us from the pain of perceiving our lives as separate, finite, and occurring in and for a perpetually foreclosed future?
It became clear that the act of remembering, to think about who is missing and who is memorialized, carries much weight. Important and troubling questions emerged when people were sharing their stories with us: Who are we forgetting when recognizing a particular lineage? Who goes into this entanglement of ideas and perspectives, can it be my partner or my uncle? What is behind each of these names? Which are the stories, the politics, the mundane processes, and the ecologies that sustain and perpetuate these names and not others? What types of present erasures are we reproducing? How do memorialization and decolonization function together in practice? How does this affect how we approach questions of science and technology? How are our relations with the dead, the dying, the disappeared and with those made dead in life, woven through our theorizations, investigations, modes of asking, questioning, and writing? The In Memoriam turned into a reverse dynamic, we started out with the statement that we need to remember our ancestors and from this statement several questions emerged.
The In Memoriam connected us with our past. Walking with these ancestral threads we were invited to tie knots, to spin and baste present, past and future. It made our memory rhythmically beat, together we waved us and waved our lives. It was a collaborative task built through questions, books, and conversations, in papers, threads, and photos, with mistakes, omissions and biases, and it was all done with care. Each generation decides what it will pass down to the next and each one decides how they will receive and what they will do with this legacy.
We thank all of you who shared names and stories and invite more of these interconnections.
Sandra P. González-Santos [sandragonzalezsantos[at]gmail.com] is Associate Researcher at the School of Bioethics, Universidad Anáhuac (Mexico) and tutor at the Tránistos Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences project at the National Arts Center (CENART, Mexico), and long time STSer interested in biotechnologies, digital interventions and arts based methodologies. Author of A Portrait of Assisted Reproduction in Mexico: Scientific, Political, and Cultural Interactions (Palgrave, 2020).
Teresa Nuñez Fortul [terenufo[at]gmail.com] with a MSc Communications and about to begin a PhD in Science Studies, she is interested in memory technologies, those involved in remembering and forgetting, like the delete key. She is currently an associate lecturer at the Claustro de Sor Juana where she teaches on STS and Science, Art & Technology.
Alex Liebman is a PhD candidate in geography at Rutgers University working with youth and womens’ campesino movements in norte del Cauca, Colombia, thinking about how illicit economies, intergenerational political struggle, and everyday care and sociality are articulated with dynamics of State repression, territorial conflict, and sugarcane plantation agriculture in the region. He has published a range of academic and popular work on sonic geographies, intersections of Black studies and feminist STS, agrarian change, and capitalist drivers of infectious disease.
Published: 01/23/2023