Sea, Sky, and Land: Engaging in Solidarity in Endangered Ecologies

4S 2023 Honolulu—Sea, Sky, Land, Endangered Ecologies, Solidarities

Society for Social Studies of Science

What happens when we center 4S and STS issues in Hawaiʻi? As we gather in Honolulu, we recognize Kānaka Maoli, their allies, and the devastating effects of militarism, colonialism, overtourism, and racial capitalism. We seek to work in solidarity with those who have suffered from various forms of injustice. Experiences of Kānaka Maoli in Hawaiʻi and indigenous people around the world focus our consciousness on struggles over land, water, and bodies and on how science, technology and knowledge—central concerns for 4S—are integral to oppression and marginalization.

In these efforts, we offer sea, sky, and land as metaphors and materialities with which to think about how to live with and revitalize harmed bodies, maligned ecologies, and strained societies. In the midst of settler colonialism, we focus, for example, on the solidarity of Kānaka Maoli with Asian Americans, to address water issues in Hawaiʻi and around the world. Or, to interrogate the problems created when Hawaiʻi is used as a base of military operations to control politics across the Pacific and beyond. We embrace 4S’s long-standing commitments to social and environmental justice across overlapping and diverse intellectual communities to encourage innovative contributions attentive to the problems of dwelling in polluted waters, colonized landscapes, and militarized spaces; of air-born transmission and breathing in asphyxiating economies; or of speaking through undersea cables, underground data centers, and online systems. We welcome STS insights into technoscientific practice and knowledge, the nature of expertise, and whose knowledge claims count and how. We invite you to gather in Honolulu to think and learn about how we care and connect in endangered times.