Dear colleagues, We are soliciting abstracts for panels at the upcoming 4S conference in Seattle. Here is the call in its entirety: Back to Black Marxism: Convening racial capitalism theories and STS It’s been more than 4 decades since the original publication of Cedric J. Robinson’s monumental work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition in 1983. In it, Robinson challenges the framing often present in Western critical theory wherein capitalism is seen as a departure from feudalism. Instead, his theory of racial capitalism invites us to see capitalism as a configuration of world order that requires racialized forms of control and domination including imperialism, slavery, and genocide as a precondition. Previous discourse in STS has considered what new insights the field can gain from Black studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Marxist, and other critical approaches. We are interested in deepening existing engagements to attend to the ways STS can benefit from dialogue with theories of racial capitalism. The following questions are meant to offer a starting point: - How can STS approaches be expanded through an analytical lens that views capitalism as being co-constructed with race, racism, and racialism? - How can STS learn from insights of racial capitalism including but not limited to difference, racialized labor hierarchies and wage scales, racialized regimes of property? - What are, if any, the disciplinary limitations and knowledge politics in STS that potentially preclude it from meaningfully engaging with theories of racial capitalism? We welcome contributions from community researchers, academics, independent scholars, and others with similar commitments to interrogating and expanding ways of researching how science and technology are tied up with logics of capital, race and racialism, and empire. In this panel we seek to convene scholars and practitioners across a variety of disciplines and knowledge-making practices in a conversation on expanding the repertoire of approaches to studying science and technology. This conversation will be moderated by scholars who work across disciplines of geography, anthropology, feminist studies, and human-computer interaction. Anoolia Gakhokidze, University of Washington annygakhokidze@gmail.com Diego Martinez-Lugo, University of Washington diegoml@uw.edu Sucheta Ghoshal, University of Washington sghoshal@uw.edu (discussant) Erin McElroy, University of Washington erinmcel@uw.edu (discussant) This panel is intended to be in-person Thank you, -Anoolia