This talk draws on a series of empirical studies on technoscience and innovation conducted in Sardinia, a region whose peripheral position within Europe provides a distinctive vantage point for exploring the persistence of colonial-type relations in scientific and technological practices.
Based on long-term fieldwork in research institutions, local innovation projects, and digital infrastructures, the paper examines how discursive and material arrangements reproduce forms of marginality typical of colonial dynamics. These marginal contexts exhibit recurrent colonial dynamics, including discourse structures that frame marginality through essentialist representations of intrinsic characteristics—analytical patterns characteristic of colonialism.
To address this topic, my analysis introduces the concept of the Not-Quite-West – territories where colonial-type relations persist, encompassing marginal areas located within Western or post-imperial states. These regions are characterized by complex negotiations of belonging that exceed traditional colonial/metropolitan binaries.
In Not-Quite-Western regions, diverse forms of knowledge exist whose significance derives not from truth claims or instrumental utility, but from their uses and agency. These distinct modes of knowledge production invoke differing ideals and metaphysics, producing epistemic conflicts characteristic of colonial encounters. Local knowledge undergoes systematic extraction from its traditional contexts of production and use, with commodifiable elements appropriated for value generation, while the originating communities receive no return.
Even within the social sciences and STS, the Not-Quite-West occupies a peripheral position in knowledge production hierarchies. This epistemic marginalization pervades global scholarship, extending to peripheral regions where theoretical frameworks developed in “advanced” countries nonetheless assert universal authority.
This is a hybrid event. It will be hosted both in-person and over Zoom.
Bio
Sociologist and STS scholar, Alessandro Mongili is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the School of Human Sciences at the University of Padova (Padua), Italy. He previously taught Sociology and the Sociology of technology at the University of Cagliari (School of Political Science) and was a visiting scholar at the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow (1987-1988), the University of California, San Diego (2004) and Berkeley (2011), Santa Clara University (2007), Stanford University (2008), and Imperial University of Tokyo (2016). He obtained his doctorate in sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). His early work focused on Soviet science (La chute de l’U.R.S.S. et la recherche scientifique, 1998), then on issues of technology and information technology (Donne al computer, 2006; Tecnologia e società, 2007; Information Infrastructure(s), 2014) and on socio-technical processes in peripheral regions (Topologie postcoloniali, 2015; Filosofia de logu, 2021). In 1995 he published in French Staline et le stalinisme, translated also into Italian and Czech, and published in a new edition in Italian in 2019. He was co-founder and first president of the Italian Society for Science and Technology Studies (STS Italia). His research focuses on computer design and development, innovation in peripheral regions, and endangered languages.
