We have one more presentation slot available in our AAA panel on testing.
Please send abstracts of c. 250 words until 5th of April to:
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*CFP Panel AAA: Testing as World-Making *
**
Organizers: Uli Beisel & Sandra Calkins
Chair: Richard Rottenburg
Trials and different forms of testing have become ubiquitous. Water
quality is continually monitored and tested, food is tested for
pollutants, toys for chemicals, building materials are tested in
mechanical models and computer simulations, and even banks are tested.
Tests are designed to sift out the best job candidates, to evaluate
students, to measure the IQ, to identify our genetic risk for chronic
diseases. Tests in animal models and humans are believed to be necessary
to create safe products, such as pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. In the
Global South, large-scale randomized controlled trials have become
critical sources of medical data. What these forms of testing in
different domains share is their analytics: they assume that
experimental constructions and simulations of real-life situations allow
drawing conclusions about reality out there. We do not principally
challenge this analytics, yet approach testing as a form of world-making
that relies on and creates specific models, evidences, technologies, and
sites. Tests have the power to make the familiar strange, and the
strange familiar: they give names to a vague sense of sickness in our
body, and can render normal tasting water toxic.
We are tempted to suggest that testing has become a new paradigm to
produce knowledge about unknowns and risks, at a time when the
evidence-base—and less the political imaginary—create the legitimacy of
policy. In spite of its societal relevance, anthropological engagement
with testing practices and the infrastructures that support them has
thus far been scant and dispersed across disciplinary subfields. This
panel thus seeks to assemble and compare similarities and differences
between various forms of testing. We invite ethnographies of the lab but
also in other settings, especially where decisions have to be made based
on “best evidence” (i.e., medicine, development cooperation, global
health). Exploring testing as an evidentiary practices that is able to
disrupt and unsettle established facts, this panel inquiries into how
tests also raise new questions about sameness and difference,
un/predictability, and the relations between reality, truth and
authenticity.
Some of the question for consideration are:
-When, where and how is testing done?
-How do tests and testing practices in different fields (biology,
medicine, physics, etc.) produce, shape and/or challenge evidences?
-What are the normativities of testing practices?
-What are the stabilities and temporalities of evidences produced by
testing?
-What types of politics do testing practices enact? What space is there
for emancipatory projects?
-How might testing relate to sensing?
-How does testing disrupt and intervene? How are contradictory testing
results negotiated?
KEYWORDS: testing, evidentiary practices, world-making, performativity
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