TAPUYA

Editors
· Tania Pérez-Bustos, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota, Colombia
· Fredy Mora-Gámez, University of Leicester, UK
· Santiago Martínez Medina, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
· Kristina Lyons, University of California Santa Cruz, USA

STS have found in ethnography a means to produce situated knowledge about their own research problems. Likewise, STS have offered a set of discussions that have permeated ethnographic practice. Hence, STS oriented ethnography consists of an interface or contact surface that continuously unmakes and remakes objects, concepts and descriptions. However, ethnography is not exempt from this transformative process; ethnography is also reconfigured as a knowledge object. The latter aspect is of particular interest for this cluster. We welcome submissions that address the possibility of rethinking STS ethnographies as experimental (destabilizing the meaning of knowing), mestizos (hybridize different objects), decomposing (account for creative processes in unconventional places), stacked (permit the coexistence of different ontologies and arrangements in a single space), inhuman (destabilize the distinction human/non-human) and (in)sensibles (interrogate what seeing, feeling or experiencing through modern technoscience is about.) We seek contributions from Latin America as well as from other similar localities around the world, that reflect about other possible adjectives and ways of (un)making STS ethnographies. Far from establishing a taxonomy, we want to delve into reflections exploring (1) how STS ethnographies reconfigure other objects and/or (2) how STS ethnography is unmade and remade through its own use.

Editor
· Leandro Rodriguez Medina, Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico, and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco, Mexico

If we accept, with most STS scholarship, that science and technology are the outcome of heterogeneous networks that transcend the relatively fixed spaces where they are enacted (from laboratories to cities to national systems of innovation), then it seems difficult to consider their internationalization as a phenomenon worthy of study. Nevertheless, from pioneering works in the field, such as Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump and Latour’s Science in Action, there is interest in exploring how knowledge changes when it travels from its place of production to others where it is used, appropriated, and eventually critically defined. In this thematic cluster we want to analyze the current and seemingly unstoppable trend of knowledge internationalization by addressing issues such as 1) the international dimension of knowledge production in both social and natural sciences, 2) the policies that encourage internationalization and the challenges they bring about, 3) the effects of asymmetries in knowledge circulation, 4) the role of materialities (e.g. instruments, standardized procedures, software, etc.) to dis/encourage internationalization, 5) the relevance of language(s), and 6) the adaptations of researchers, research teams, and institutions to increasing pressures to internationalize their work by national and international funding agencies. We welcome a diverse range of theoretical and methodological approaches in order to problematize internationalization and to understand its macro and micro configurations.

Editor
· Sandra Harding, University of California Los Angeles, USA · Manuela Fernández Pinto, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia · Manuela Fernández Pinto, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota, Colombia

The miscegenation policies that the Spanish and Portuguese introduced into the Americas in the sixteenth century established more hierarchical and rigid categories of gender, sexuality, and race than had existed earlier. These new, pre-Darwinian, sciences of race, sexuality and gender were complexly entangled with each other from the beginning. In what ways has this colonial scientific legacy persisted, and/or been revised? How has it influenced conceptions of gender as an analytic category, as well as theories of ethnicity, race, and cultural diversity in Latin America? How do Latin American feminists, both in Latin America and in the North, discuss this issue? How has it shaped (or not) STS methodological projects in Latin America? What role have such discussions played in democratizing projects?

Editors
· Raoni Rajão, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
· Susanna Hecht, University of California Los Angeles, USA

STS discussions of environmental issues tend to have a distinctively Northern perspective, taking as a starting point the emergence of post-industrial risk societies in Europe and North America. At the same time, environmental literature concerned with Latin America and other developing countries tends to focus mostly on power struggles while ignoring the central role of science and technology in framing environmental issues. This cluster welcomes studies that look at different aspects of the relation between the environment and science, technology and society in Latin America. How can such work bring new perspectives to contemporary environmental controversies in the region, such as climate change adaptation, the Yasuni initiative, REDD+, and Mariana’s tillage dam burst, as well as payments for environmental services, urban pollution, (post)colonial conservation, local environmental knowledges, socioenvironmental conflicts, and the production of environmental knowledge across the north/south divide?

Editors
· Tiago Ribeiro Duarte, Universidade de Brasília, Brazil
· Claudia Magallanes-Blanco, Universidad Iberomericana-Puebla, Mexico

Indigenous knowledges and technologies continue to be a marginal topic in STS. Yet there has been an array of approaches to such phenomena from such other fields as media studies, visual anthropology, telecommunications, and human rights. STS appears to still be in the process of decolonization insofar as it continues to ignore knowledges, technologies, and epistemologies treated by Europeans as irrelevant to knowledge production. This cluster welcomes submissions on indigenous knowledges and technology appropriation, biopiracy, and/or technological policy making, indigenous uses and developments of information and communication technologies, decolonial and postcolonial indigenous STS, and clashes between indigenous and modern ontologies.

Editor
· Luis Reyes-Galindo, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil

The call to ‘open up’ the boundaries of scientific communication and scientific practice have become major talking points in ‘Global North’ science. For this thematic cluster we invite the submissions of manuscripts that examine the application, conceptualization and results of Open Access and Open Science projects in Latin American contexts. Manuscripts from empirically-oriented research are particularly welcome to illustrate the opportunities and barriers for OA/OSc in Latin America, as well as possible adaptations to local cultural contexts specific projects have faced.

Editor
· Sandra P. González Santos, Independent Researcher

What are the diverse health issues and medical traditions in Latin American contexts? How do these interact with those in the rest of the world? We are particularly interested in articles that address any of the following topics: medical tourism; reproductive tourism; clinical trials and biomedical research; health and medical regulation; the interaction between non-biomedical and biomedical healthcare practices; histories of health, illness and healthcare practices; ways of conceiving health, illness, disease, sickness, healthcare, and medicine.

Editors
· Raquel Velho, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
· Sebastián Ureta, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile

Through a joint focus on processes of infrastructural repair and ruination, this special issue aims to explore the seemingly “dark side” of Latin American infrastructures, when promises of modernity turn sour and breakdown and obsolesce replace functionality. This issue aims to open up this field in Latin America, questioning how infrastructures, developed and often discussed using frames imported from the Global North, might be better thought to deal with contexts characterized by acute infrastructural decay. Through this, we aim to center the study of infrastructuration as a form of nation (un)building and thus how repair/maintenance and ruination processes fit into infrastructures, making them more-than-visible things with significant, but fragile, power. Your proposal should consist of an abstract (ca. 300 words) and a brief biographical note (ca. 100 words). Please submit abstracts to Raquel Velho (velhor@rpi.edu) and Sebastian Ureta (sureta@uahurtado.cl) by July 31, 2018 with the subject “Frail Modernities.” We will also accept proposals for photo essays. If accepted, full 8000-word drafts would be due December 31, 2018. This thematic cluster is planned to be published during the first half of 2019.

A longer version of this Call for Papers can be viewed here on our blog (Tapuya.la) for further information.

Editors
· Óscar Moreno-M, The University of Edinburgh, UK
· Javier Guerrero-C, Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano, Colombia

This special cluster aims to put together works analysing grey processes of illegal and informal innovation in Latin America and other geographies in the global south. The objective is to overtake the security and economic approaches to see the kind of knowledge, designs, technologies, techniques, learnings or shrewdness flowing through contexts of illegality and informality. Creativity expressed in workarounds, repair, maintenance, reuse, as well as the production of craft machines and artefacts are crucial for this call. How does the informal or illegal nature influence innovation? How is the illegal and informal related to the legal and formal? How could the type of creativities that emerges in these grey environments be characterized? How is the relationship between production and consumption in these grey areas? How can we overcome the malevolent, disdained or tropical vision and start seeing the productive and creative dimensions of illegality and informality?

A longer version of this Call for Papers can be viewed here on our blog (Tapuya.la) for further information.

Learn more and submit your work