On Tinkering with Bodily Waste and Care

Datum
11. Juni – 13. Juni 2025 

CfP to a pan­el at an STS-Con­fer­ence in Stokholm

CfP to the pan­el „On Tin­ker­ing with Bod­i­ly Waste and Care”
7th Nordic STS Con­fer­ence: STS in and out of the Laboratory
11–13 June 2025
Stockholm

Orga­niz­ers:
Malis­sa Kay Shaw, Uni­ver­si­ty of Health Sci­ences & Phar­ma­cy in St. Louis
Liwen Shih, Taipei Med­ical University 

Sub­mis­sion link: https://www.nordicsts.se/call-for-abstracts/

Dead­line: March 1st

Title max 150 char­ac­ters and Abstract max 250 words.

Abstract:
“Why did care become an object of con­cern and what is it about care that war­rants being stud­ied and attend­ed to in social sci­ence writ­ing. This ques­tion can­not be answered by point­ing to bare facts, but has to do with val­ues.” (Mol et al. 2010:9)

“What is hap­pen­ing when we imag­ine oth­er­wise worth­less, even dan­ger­ous, human wastes as infor­ma­tive and valu­able viral sen­tinels?” (Ander­son 2024) 

Waste is tra­di­tion­al­ly some­thing unwant­ed, or use­less, that should be discarded—intrinsically defined in rela­tion to things per­ceived as valu­able or pro­duc­tive. The­o­riza­tions of waste often draw on Dou­glas’ (1984) fram­ing of “dirt as mat­ter out of place,” a means to explore social cat­e­go­riza­tions of pol­lut­ing, taboo, and dan­ger­ous sub­stances. This is use­ful when con­sid­er­ing bod­i­ly wastes (sub­stances com­mon­ly imbued with dis­gust and repul­sion), espe­cial­ly when out­side the body where they are “out of place,” which negates their poten­tial capac­i­ties to be reimag­ined as valuable/useful.
Sim­i­lar to oth­er forms of waste, bod­i­ly wastes pose sym­bol­ic and mate­r­i­al con­se­quences, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the embod­i­ment of their social dis­gust, and their con­tain­ment or dis­pos­al. How we care for bod­i­ly waste—both sym­bol­i­cal­ly and materially—affects present and future indi­vid­u­als, net­works of human and non­hu­man actors, the envi­ron­ment, and mul­ti­species gen­er­a­tional col­lec­tives. This pan­el pro­pos­es engag­ing with the notion of care to reimag­ine bod­i­ly waste and its alter­na­tive rela­tion­al influences.
STS approach­es, inspired by Celia Roberts, Annemarie Mol, and María Puig de la Bel­la­casa, frame care as col­lec­tive, dis­trib­uted prac­tices that involve dynam­ic inter­ac­tions between humans, non­hu­man actors, and tech­nolo­gies. Care is nei­ther sta­t­ic or ten­ta­tive, but con­tin­u­al, sus­tained enact­ments that shape cur­rent and future worlds. By attend­ing to the ways care is enact­ed through embod­ied, rela­tion­al, and mate­r­i­al process­es, STS schol­ar­ship helps uncov­er the ten­sions, inequal­i­ties, and con­tin­u­al con­se­quences embed­ded in care prac­tices. Draw­ing on this, our pan­el aims to use care to medi­ate waste as an actor with­in var­i­ous con­texts and spec­u­late on its val­ue and lack there­of. Sim­i­lar to waste, what is cared for and what is not, cor­re­sponds with what is val­ued and de-val­ued, and these val­ues are passed onto and shape future humans and non-humans alike (Fre­den­gren and Åsberg 2020:57).
We invite schol­ars to use care to spec­u­late on the val­ue of bod­i­ly waste in diverse con­texts. This may entail ask­ing: what is the rela­tion­al­i­ty of bod­i­ly waste; how may new techno­sci­en­tif­ic, bioso­cial, or polit­i­cal eco­nom­ic prac­tices trans­form what waste is and can do. Our own research in the realm of repro­duc­tive health offers exam­ples. For instance, when con­sti­tut­ing the uter­ine lin­ing, men­stru­al sub­stance is use­ful, con­tribut­ing to embryo devel­op­ment. But when expelled from the body, men­stru­al flu­id is “dirty,” requir­ing dis­creet hygiene prac­tices in many cul­tures. Sym­bol­isms of men­stru­al filth shape these prac­tices and accept­able men­stru­al prod­ucts, cur­tail­ing the suit­abil­i­ty of reusable prod­ucts and cre­at­ing addi­tion­al waste that impacts the envi­ron­ment and future inter­species gen­er­a­tions. Men­stru­al “filth” sym­bol­ism lim­its techno­sci­en­tif­ic ven­tures to reframe men­stru­al flu­id as a biosen­sor— trans­form­ing “waste” into a valu­able, infor­ma­tive sub­stance. Mis­car­ried embryos and abort­ed fetus­es, once expelled from the body, are often sim­i­lar­ly cat­e­go­rized as med­ical waste with­in bio­med­ical sys­tems. Those entan­gled with this “waste,” how­ev­er, mourn an unborn child, or rec­og­nize a biosig­nif­i­cant sub­stance that imparts knowl­edge of repro­duc­tive poten­tial. In such remak­ings, what was pre­vi­ous­ly deemed “waste” can become crit­i­cal tools for advanc­ing sci­en­tif­ic inquiries in diag­nos­tic tech­niques, stem cell research, devel­op­men­tal biol­o­gy, or genet­ic stud­ies. This shift high­lights the rela­tion­al nature of val­ue, where the enact­ment of waste and non-waste is con­tin­gent on the “waste’s” con­text, capac­i­ty, and fram­ing. Con­tin­u­ing to tin­ker with bod­i­ly wastes, of which there are many, and notions of care may offer a way to re-val­ue “waste” and trans­form its engage­ment with more-than-human worlds, both present and future. 

Ref­er­ences
Ander­son, War­wick (2024) Excre­men­tal haunt­ings, or the waste of mod­ern bod­ies. Soci­ety for Social Stud­ies of Sci­ence. https://4sonline.org/news_manager.php?page=37981.
Dou­glas, Mary (1984) Puri­ty and dan­ger: An analy­sis of con­cepts of pol­lu­tion and taboo. Routledge.
Fre­den­gren, Christi­na and Åsberg, Cecil­ia (2020) Check­ing in with deep time: intra­gen­er­a­tional care in reg­is­ters of fem­i­nist posthu­man­i­ties, the case of Gärstadsverken. In Deter­ri­to­ri­al­iz­ing the future: Her­itage in, of and after the Anthro­pocene, Rod­ney Har­ri­son and Col­in Ster­ling (eds). Open Human­i­ties Press, pp 56–95.
Mol, Annemarie, Moser, Ingunn, and Pols, Jean­nette, eds (2010) Care: putting prac­tice in the­o­ry. In Care in prac­tice: On tin­ker­ing in clin­ics, homes and farms. Tran­script Pub­lish­ing, pp 7‑25.

More infor­ma­tion about the con­fer­ence can be found here.

We look for­ward to receiv­ing your sub­mis­sions. If you have any ques­tions or want to dis­cuss paper ideas or pre­sen­ta­tion for­mats, please feel free to reach out to us!