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

Latest 4S News

CfP | Science as Culture Special Issue: Colonial Relations in Modern Techno-Securitisation

Published On: Nov 11, 2024

Deadline: Apr 30, 2025

‘Security’ has become an increasingly dominant frame in recent decades, linking issues such as climate, biodiversity, borders, energy, food and military activities. Ever-more societal issues have been framed as security problems, even as existential threats. These frames seek to justify pre-emptive management through technoscientific expert systems, imagining control over everything and fostering an authoritarian culture. This SaC special issue will explore linkages among three dynam...

4S Palestine Forum | Contributions Call

Published On: Jul 30, 2024

The 4S Palestine Forum, launched earlier this year as the initial project of the Working Group on War and Genocide that was initiated at 4S Honolulu in 2023, is welcoming further contributions.

Please submit new short blog-style entries, as well as references to published work, syllabi, and other resources by writing info@4sonline.org.

View the Palestine Forum in its entirety here: https://www.4sonline.org/palestine_forum.php

CfP | Medical and Health Humanities: Global Perspectives 2025

Published On: Oct 4, 2024

Deadline: Dec 15, 2024

The 3rd international conference on Medical and Health Humanities: Global Perspectives 2025 in Doha, Qatar on February 7-8, 2025 invites abstracts for oral presentations and posters on the topics of: narrative medicine, medical sociology, philosophy of medicine, medical ethics and narrative ethics, literature and medicine, arts therapies and arts-in-health, healthcare communication, the history of medicine and other humanistic initiatives in health and medicine.
Abstract Submission Deadline: ...

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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.

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Making Light Work: Infrastructures and Their Many Publics

Judith Green

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
This article explores the multiplicity of publics that are enacted in relation to infrastructures. We take the case of street lighting infrastructure in the UK in 2013/4,...

The Sociotechnical Life of a Shapeshifting Technology: The Bike Lift Trampe in Trondheim

Ivana Suboticki

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
This article explores the idea that technologies may be considered shapeshifting as they move between and are domesticated in different social worlds. We employ a material-semiotic...

Psychedelic Nation? (De)Provincializing the Psychedelic Renaissance from Brazil

Pietro Benedito

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances has garnered spectacular international attention. Most of this focuses on research in the Global North....

Between Decay and Maintenance: Tuberculosis Sanatoriums, Care Infrastructures and U.S. Health Policy Debates, 1945–1972

Sydney Goggins

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
The development of streptomycin and isoniazid transformed the landscape of tuberculosis treatment in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Sanatoriums continued...

Bearly Recognizable: Facial Recognition and the Wild

Emily Wanderer

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
While big tech companies are growing more circumspect about the use of facial recognition for humans, interest in nonhuman facial recognition is surging. The identification...

Engaging Science, Technology and Society

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

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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

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.

Changing toolkits in sustainability research – a perspective on transformative and transforming methods

Anja Klein, Catharina Lüder, Britta Acksel
Dec 23, 2024
In this post, Anja Klein, Catharina Lüder and Britta Acksel consider what it is that research methods in sustainability science seek to "transform" and how those methods might themselves be transformed along the way

Possession as Ruse—A Conversation about Digital Dispossession

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup (Copenhagen University) and Fleur Johns
Dec 09, 2024
This conversation reveals how traditional frameworks of dispossession, while valuable, may not fully capture the complexities of exploitation in today's digital economy.

Reframing histories of vaccine development through non-human animal lenses

Alexis Bedolla Velázquez
Dec 02, 2024
In this post, Alexis Bedolla explores vaccine development in Mexico through non-human animal lenses, arguing for the transgression of epidemiological representations.

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

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

STS News

Items submitted by the community and emailed to members monthly.

CfP | Science as Culture Special Issue: Colonial Relations in Modern Techno-Securitisation

Nov 11, 2024
‘Security’ has become an increasingly dominant frame in recent decades, linking issues such as climate, biodiversity, borders, energy, food and military activities. Ever-more societal issues have been framed as security problems, even as existential threats. These frames seek to justify pre-emptive management through technoscientific expert systems, imagining control over everything and fostering an authoritarian culture. This SaC special issue will explore linkages among three dynam...

Linda Hall Library Research Fellowships

Dec 09, 2024
The Linda Hall Library is now accepting applications for our 2025-26 fellowship program. These fellowships provide graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and independent scholars in the history of science and related humanities fields with financial support to explore the Library’s outstanding science and engineering collections. Fellows also participate in a dynamic intellectual community alongside in-house experts and scholars from other Kansas City cultural institutions. The Libra...

CfP | International Peace Research Association conference

Dec 09, 2024
Celebrating sixty years since International Peace Research Association was first founded in 1964, the 30th IPRA biennial conference, warmly welcomes you to join the largest body of global peace researchers, students, academics and community-based practitioners to Aotearoa New Zealand from 5-8 November 2025. The conference theme is “Peace, Resistance and Reconciliation | Te Rongo i Tau, Te Riri i Tū and Te Ringa i Kotuia” will gather inspiring thought leaders of activists, artists, c...

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 ...
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