Recovery

Project Co-Directors: Elizabeth Bernstein and Rebecca Jordan-Young
Project Coordinator: Chloé Samala Faux

Working Group Members: Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, Kerwin Kaye, Salma Ismaiel, Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr., Marisa Solomon, Miriam Ticktin, Jacqueline Torr, Amy Zhou

Credit: used with permission from account owners of @healthcareforthepeople2020 on Instagram.

What histories have given rise to the concept of “recovery,” and explain the apparent fungibility of this concept across such broad domains of social life? In accordance with the CSSD’s designated focus on Imagining Justice, our working group critically considers the circulations of “recovery” in arenas such as biomedicine, pandemic politics, climate change, economics, and other fields of governance. Aligned with current scholarly and activist efforts to think through the transformations in social relations required for meaningful versions of repair and recuperation, we are particularly interested in challenging presumptions of the feasibility/desirability of a return to a prior normative state. Instead, we aim to consider how a transformative justice approach might spur new imaginations of not only social justice but also embodiment, health, individual well-being and collective dis-ease. Because the grounding metaphors for “recovery” in social and political life derive from biomedical discourse, and because technoscientific solutions are often deemed to be integral to modes of recuperation, our proposed method for addressing these questions is F/ISTS (feminist intersectional science and technology studies). Exploring notions of "recovery" through the dual lenses of transformative justice and feminist/intersectional STS, we will pay close attention to the reciprocal relations between techno-scientific practices and knowledges, on the one hand, and multiple intersecting axes of power on the other.