Abstract Using the concept of immunity as a generative case study, this article explores the methodological implications of Sylvia Wynter's liberatory counterhumanism for science and technology studies (STS), asking, What would STS look like if Wynter were considered one of its foundational figures? The author contends that centering Wynter in STS would offer new methodological starting points, innovative narrative modes, and an important public-facing role for the field. To develop this Wynterian STS, the author uses the concepts of immunity, the immune system, and inflammation to explicate Wynter's understanding of technics, or the cultural stories that humans tell about who and what we are. Wynter argues that cultural stories like Darwinian evolution have both defined the human on exclusionary terms and justified social inequality as “natural.” Immunity and related concepts are historically specific cultural stories that not only enrich Wynter's critique of modernity but also provide a genealogy of the technics that have upheld the overrepresentation of Man. A Wynterian STS would denaturalize these technics and help identify less exclusionary stories about who and what we are. However, as this article's critical review of STS literatures demonstrates, any new concepts of the human must center the perspectives of marginalized communities. By situating these experiences as the starting point for analysis, STS could help identify scientific concepts like inflammation that can be mobilized to anticolonial ends, showing that the unjust social order is not natural but, indeed, humanly authored.
Pat Kinley (Mon,) studied this question.