Are you doing work on quantification and the state, past and/or present? If so, this 4S/EASST 2024 open panel might be for you! Join us in Amsterdam in July!
Historicizing State Quantification in Disciplinary and Control Societies (P341)
Convenors: Luke Stark (Western University), Melissa Adler (Western University), David Nemer (University of Virginia)
Numerical techniques and technologies used to inscribe and circulate differences—racial, gendered, class, caste-based, and others—are everywhere in disciplinary and control societies. This panel interrogates the history of these quantitative mechanisms
of power, and the ways they have been resisted.
Numerous thinkers (including Fanon, Foucault, Deleuze, Crenshaw, Hartman, Freire, and others) have theorized the ways in which the political arithmetic of the capitalist state and its agents has prompted the development of numerical techniques and technologies
to inscribe and circulate differences—racial, gendered, class, caste-based, and others—about populations intended for exploitation and dispossession. In this panel, we aim to further interrogate the history of these quantitative, statistical, and inferential
mechanisms of power.
From the Enlightenment calculation of early American enslavers to the contemporary deep learning transformations of artificial intelligence (AI) practitioners, and even the human infrastructures that transmit disinformation through messaging apps, numbers
have never been neutral nor free from narrative. This panel will focus on the continuities in thinking and practice around the use of numbers as a tool of oppression across both space and time, and the often-nuanced strategies of resistance and cooption that
progressive social movements have deployed in response.
Some of the questions we hope to see addressed by the panel include the following:
• How have historical discourses and ideologies of inequality, oppression, and supremacy prompted, shaped, and refined quantitative or technical metrics and mechanisms of scientific or social differentiation?
• How have the developers of these metrics and techniques drawn on transnational or global circuits of oppression?
• What are examples of such technical metrics and mechanisms being developed in an overtly oppressive context and then laundered more general scientific practice? How have professional fields such as medicine, statistics, and psychology grappled with
or ignored these historical genealogies?
• How have people and communities targeted by such numerical mechanisms resisted, responded, refused, and coopted these technologies? What have been the results of such encounters, and what lessons can contemporary groups dedicated to opposing unfreedom
take from these historical examples?