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

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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

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.

CfP | InterAcademy Partnership Competitive Grants

Published On: Oct 18, 2024

Deadline: Dec 2, 2024

The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) invites proposals from IAP member academies and regional networks, for projects that would help advance IAP’s mission and strategic goals. Proposed projects should preferably be collaborative across member academies and regional networks. Priority will be given to project proposals that aim to establish or continue support for collaborations across disciplines (for example, collaborations across academies of science, medicine and engineering), especially ...

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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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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...

Ethics and Artificial Intelligence in the Interdisciplinary Collaborations of Smart Care

Christine Hine

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
This article explores how the work of ethical assurance is understood by those involved in artificial intelligence development and deployment, and uses the findings to...

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.

Haverford | Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship

Nov 13, 2024
The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College invites applications for a two-year, full-time Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship to begin Fall 2025. We seek a scholar interested in discard studies and the relation between waste and life systems. Candidates may have a wide range of theoretical and interdisciplinary interests, such as science and technology studies, environmental studies, geography, cultural studies, literature, visual and performance studies, bi...

Rensselaer Polytechnic | Teaching Track Professor Design and Society

Dec 09, 2024
The Department of Science & Technology Studies (STS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) seeks a teaching-track Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, or Professor of Practice in the area of design and society. We seek a versatile educator who can teach in studio, introductory, and seminar classrooms. The selected candidate will teach required and elective courses for the major in Design, Innovation, and Society (DIS) and the major/minor in Science, Technology, and Society. Studio courses are the ...

Rensselaer Polytechnic | Assistant Professor Design and Society

Dec 09, 2024
The Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute seeks a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the areas of equitable design, sustainability and design, design justice, collaborative or participatory design, product design, industrial design, or object design. The person hired for this position will conduct research at the intersection of design and STS, which may include publications, exhibitio...

Harvard | Postdoctoral Fellowships in Chinese Studies

Dec 09, 2024
For academic year 2025-26 the Fairbank Center is offering two post-doctoral fellowships to support participants in an interdisciplinary research group that will focus on the timely theme of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Society in Global China. The research group will be led by Dr. Ya-Wen Lei, Professor of Sociology and Dr. Moira Weigel, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. The 2025-26 An Wang research group aims to examine AI development, adoption, and impact...
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