Mobile Menu

4S Mission

Fostering interdisciplinary and engaged scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine across the globe.

Latest 4S News

Hybrid Participation

Published On: Jan 24, 2025

Deadline: Aug 20, 2025

An important update to the planning for the 4S Meeting in Seattle in September. In a change of course, we are planning to enable hybrid participation. This meeting will be predominantly in person, but with hybrid set-up to enable online participation as well. Submissions to the conference are due one week from today, on Friday January 31st: https://www.4sonline.org/meeting.php
 
All best,
Anne
4S President

Bee smellscapes: olfactory relations in urban everyday ecologies

Published On: Nov 11, 2024

In this post, Ceall Quinn describes multispecies smellwalking, a method for attuning to olfactory pollinator relations in urban ecologies.

Excremental Hauntings, or the Waste of Modern Bodies

Published On: Nov 4, 2024

What does our growing obsession with shit and bodily leakage tell us about being modern, enlightened, and objective? Can we think without the dialectic of the sphincter, that alternation between containment and discharge, sovereignty and submission?

See All 4S News ⪢

4S Publications

Science, Technology, and Human Values

For more than forty years, Science, Technology, & Human Values has provided the forum for cutting-edge research and debate in the field of science and technology studies.

Learn More About STHV ⪢

On Peer Review and Exchanges Unseen: Thank You to Our Reviewers 2023 and 2024

Kari Lancaster

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.

Consolidating the Strata: Geoscience and Underground Territory in South Korean Radioactive Waste Disposal

Sungeun Kim

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
In South Korea, the nation with the world's highest density of nuclear power plants, the disposal of high-level radioactive waste has become a pressing sociotechnical concern....

The Hidden Labor of Translation: Introduction to Special Issue

Clémence Pinel

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Translational medicine is concerned with hastening the application of basic scientific discoveries at the bench toward beneficial clinical outcomes at the bedside. Disrupting...

Invisible Participation: Patients with Oncological and Rare Diseases in Russia

Olga Temina

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Scholars have paid much attention to patients’ participation in healthcare, such as engagement in activities developed by healthcare providers and involvement in patient...

Co-Design in Practice: Bringing STS to Post-Brexit Agricultural Policy

Judith Tsouvalis

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Following the Brexit referendum, the United Kingdom's Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) began to "co-design" a new agri-environment policy for...

Engaging Science, Technology and Society

Engaging Science, Technology, & Society is an online, open access publication of The Society for Social Studies of Science.

Learn More About ESTS ⪢

Standards, Pedagogies, and Celebrating the STS Infrastructure Award to ESTS

Published On: Dec 1 2024

Grant Jun Otsuki, Ali Kenner, Clément Dréano, Noela Invernizzi, Duygu Kaşdoğan, Aalok Khandekar, Angela Okune, Sujatha Raman, Tim Schütz, Federico Vasen, Amanda Windle, Emily York

Volume 10 comes in two parts, issue 1 and 2 published together. The double issue includes two Thematic Collections, “Standards and their Containers” and “Pedagogical Intersections.” It also includes two original research...

Tracing the Displacement of Data Work in AI: A Political Economy of “Human-in-the-Loop”

Published On: Dec 2 2024

Bidisha Chaudhuri, Srravya Chandhiramowuli

In this study, we trace the evolution of a data work team in an artificial intelligence (AI) startup in India. By bringing attention to data work, which is the indispensable work of preparing annotated datasets for training AI...

Renewable Ruse: Bioenergy Development in North Carolina’s Coastal Plains

Published On: Dec 1 2024

Dana Powell, Jefferson Currie, Danielle Koonce, Mac Legerton, Rebecca Witter

Rural communities in eastern North Carolina are responding to the emergence of bioenergy development as an extension of environmental injustices, rather than sustainable solutions to climate change as presented by state and industry...

Storying Monocrop Infrastructure: A Conversation on Governance, Scale, and Failure

Published On: Dec 2 2024

Sophie Chao, Kregg Hetherington

Plantations have recently become the focus of renewed empirical and conceptual inquiry across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Scholarship in this interdisciplinary space calls on us to reckon with industrial monocultures’...

4S Blog: Backchannels

Towards fairness in machine learning for dermatology: a skin tone representation disparities study

Celia Cintas
Feb 10, 2025
Images depicting dark skin tones are significantly under-represented in the educational materials used to teach primary care physicians and dermatologists to recognize skin diseases. In this piece, Celia Cintas introduces an open-source initiative to fight this issue.

And the winner is…Alphafold!

Alexandre Hocquet (Université de Lorraine and KHK Aachen), Frédéric Wieber (Université de Lorraine), Marcus Carrier (Technische Universität Berlin and KHK Aachen)
Feb 09, 2025
Reflecting upon the Alphafold as the recent recipient of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize in Chemistry, this post examines the role of artificial intelligence and new ways of 'doing science' aligned toward gamification, contests and awards.

Reimagining Disease Modelling and Outbreak Analysis: A Report on the "Critical Social Science Approaches to Epidemic Intelligence" Workshop

Rachel Yang
Jan 20, 2025
In this post, Rachel Yang reports on the "Critical Social Science Approaches to Epidemic Intelligence" workshop held at the University of Sydney on 21 and 22 March 2024.

Technology, health, and gender: contributions from and with Feminist STS

Mariana Pitta Lima
Dec 30, 2024
In this post, Mariana Pitta Lima discusses contributions from and with feminist STS from the South, drawing on a recently published chapter on technologies, health, and gender based on fieldwork in Brazil.

Backchannels content is contributed by our members to highlight news relevant to their work.

See All Backchannels ⪢

Making and Doing: STS Beyond the Four Corners of the Paper

STS News

Items submitted by the community and emailed to members monthly.

Maastricht | Making and Design in Hospitals Postdoc

Jan 07, 2025
The Department of Society Studies is looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher to undertake exciting research about hospital practices. You will be part of a new team doing research helping to address the escalating issue of clinical waste. The project is called The Upcycled Clinic: A global ethnography of material creativity in contemporary medicine. The focus of this European Research Council funded project is on hospitals and clinics, which have become sites of disposability in recent years. Atte...

Rochester Institute of Technology | Tenure-Track Assistant Professor

Feb 10, 2025
The Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology invites applications for a full-time tenure track Assistant Professor beginning in August 2025. Prospective candidates are expected to have earned a Ph.D. in either Sociology, Anthropology, or a related field (in hand by August 1, 2025).
Our department has strengths in the areas of health, social inequalities, race & ethnicity, and global migration. We seek candidates with ex...

Houston | Instructional Assistant Professor

Dec 12, 2024
The Honors College at the University of Houston invites applications for a non-tenure track position of Instructional Assistant Professor to begin Fall 2025. We seek an exceptional educator and scholar who is passionate about creating transformative educational experiences that inspire and engage students, who thrives in an interdisciplinary environment, and who is committed to shaping engaged citizens and lifelong learners. We are seeking candidates that bring multiple stakeholder perspectives ...

Max Planck | Doctoral Positions

Feb 14, 2025
The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) conducts basic research on the governance of modern societies. It aims to develop an empirically based theory of the social and political foundations of modern economies by investigating the interrelation between economic, social, and political action. We are currently seeking to recruit up to two Doctoral Researchers for our Research Group on Technology and Sovereignty. The starting date is October 1, 2025.
More STS News ⪢