Talk at Strelka, The New Normal

7 Feb., 2019

Lecture on 7 Feb., 2019 – 18:00, at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow, RU. Talk on Platform Cosmology.

More often than not, there is no singular, determinate consequence of scientific or technological novelty, and the cosmological stakes lie in making claims on the construction of social, political and ethical narrations to ramify the meanings we ought to extrapolate from them, influencing a cosmological milieu we need for their just deployment. What is of particular relevance here is not only the relation between cosmology and pragmatics, but also the relation between our accounts of reality (through science, in this case, but I don’t think this is exclusive) and normativity (or what ought to be). While both feminist epistemologies and social studies of science have critically addressed socio-normative influences in the construction of knowledge (with the most enduring feminist epistemologies having redefined ‘objectivity’ in so doing), significantly less attention has been placed on the socio-normative narrations, or speculative ramifications of that knowledge, even when they are always to be understood as potentially fallible.