Each year, EnviroLab focuses on a theme, explore past themes in our archive.

 “Technology’s (Im)Possibilities” centers on the political and ethical salience of technology as a world-making and world-breaking force. The concept of technology has long captivated scholars across Anthropology and STS.  It has been critiqued as alienating humans from nature (Marx 1992 [1844]; Vogel 1997), as a “script” that weaves humans and nonhumans as agentive and inseparable (Latour 1992), as a “hazardous” semantic that blurs boundaries between physical and conceptual meanings (Marx 1997), or at the center of materials actively entwined with the production of information and practices around them (Barry 2013). To go beyond the subject/object, nature/culture oppositions created in determining what is possible with technology requires testing the grounds and claims on which it is made to endure and transform.

As technologies are called upon to save us yet again, now from the effects of climate change it has produced, we are drawn to thinking of how technology sustains the durability of coloniality, when the cost and conditions of access to data gathering and problem-solving technologies are held by former colonizers, settler-colonial states, and neo-colonial regimes. When the burden and benefits of technological progress reinforce power asymmetries between the Global North and Global South, technology’s ubiquitous presence also draws out its irreconcilable role in perpetuating colonial modes of ‘othering’ . How do technologies to mitigate pollution participate in the remaking of toxic geographies, created by the trajectories of its waste-ways? What are the ethical implications of framing technology as both a force of disruption, a place of possible resistance, and a means to imagine life in its wake? This year at Envirolab, we will examine the duality and cruddiness of technology in an era of intense socio-ecological violence, as it simultaneously affects, remakes, and disrupts worlds.