Recovery - Incite at Columbia University

What historical developments have led to the emergence of the concept of recovery, and how is this concept applied so flexibly across various areas of social life?

Part of the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Recovery working group critically considers the circulations of recovery in 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, they are particularly interested in challenging presumptions of the feasibility/desirability of a return to a prior normative state.

Instead, they 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 disease. 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, their 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, they 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.