This year’s Technoscience Salon convenes scholars, artists, and scientists around the theme of unsettling practices. Practice is a site where inquiry and technique, ontics and epistemics, experimentation and formalization, and creativity and repetition converge. This year’s salon invites the critical cultivation of skills that can disturb, stir up, and set into motion the sedimented relations that make up what and how we know and do.  How might practices be unsettled?  What makes a practice unsettling?

Practices are more than pragmatic protocols – they are ways of composing and cutting relations, of recognizing and avoiding responsibilities, and of opening and foreclosing potentials. By inviting participants to unsettle practices, the Salon aspires to foster futures that might creatively subvert the knotted histories of dispossession and privilege that shape ways of making, knowing, and relating.  The aspirations to reimagine, remix, appropriate, abduct, innovate, hack, reorient, and transform practices is shared by scientists, writers, designers, activists, students and artists alike. Underscoring the performative craft of engaging technoscience, the task of unsettling practices holds together efforts to critically challenge dominant techniques with the project of creatively recomposing ways of making and knowing. Striving to do more than critiquing,  unsettling practices invites collaboration between techniques that come from different histories, life-worlds and politics.  By taking up the politics of practice, the Salon hopes to provoke and gather together projects that affirmatively attempt to remake, remix, and reconceptualise potentials and futures about and with technoscience.

Unsettling practices is an invitation to address the ways practices are entangled in the current and historical structural violence of settler colonialism, imperialism, racism, geopolitics, and capitalism.  Drawing lessons from scholars and activists theorizing the project of decolonization in Canada and the US, unsettling might be understood as a commitment to addressing the ways disciplines, universities, and knowledge-making are not innocent historical productions. What histories accrete in and animate habitual practices? Learning from queer, feminist, anti-racist, and indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, the project of unsettling strives to challenge and reimagine the compositions of belonging, ownership, relation, and solidarity that are built into research practices. How are practices complicit in skewed relations of power, destructive economies and normative orders?  Unsettling practices invites the troubling of practices so they might be acknowledged and remade in better, less violent, more livable ways.

Throughout the year, we will be inviting participants to bring and share a practice that they aspire to unsettle, either as part of their own work or as a research or political concern. Provocation and Salon Co-organizers :: Michelle Murphy, Natasha Myers, Kelly Fritsch, and Martina Schlünder, Nehal El-Hadi.