Mobile Menu

4S Mission

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

Latest 4S News

New Book | Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays in Distributed Agency

Published On: Jul 8, 2025

In recent decades, there has been a call for decentering knowledge in the social sciences and humanities, bringing to light perspectives from previously ignored or undervalued groups or areas of the world. Feminist epistemologies and postcolonial studies have led this trend. However, there has been less interest in the specific infrastructures and practices that make decentering possible. Drawing from science and technology studies, Decentralizing Knowledges examines how to bring about such chan...

India Going Global: Ayurveda, Standardisation and the Cultural Politics of Globalisation

Published On: Jul 6, 2025

Purbita Das advocates for a policy framework to safeguard Ayurveda’s regionality, plurality and its epistemological richness in light of increasing efforts to standardise its practices for the global health market.

The field talks back: listening to Southeast Asia after the book

Published On: Jun 16, 2025

An STS scholar researching social media and society in Southeast Asia reflects on a whirlwind book tour that became an unexpected journey of “post-publication listening”—where dialogue with regional publics reanimated the book’s arguments and affirmed Southeast Asia as a microcosm of global digital politics.

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 ⪢

Bearly Recognizable: Facial Recognition and the Wild

Emily WandererDepartment of Anthropology, 6614University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

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...

Between Code and Culture: The Evolving Role of Conversation Designers and UX in AI Development

Elizabeth Rodwell1Department of Information Science Technology, 14743University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Artificial intelligence (AI)-related technologies available to consumers have been rapidly advancing but without parallel insight into the social process of their design....

Machine's Eye View: Postmodern Data Science and the Politics of Ground Truth

Jathan SadowskiEmerging Technologies Research Lab, Faculty of Information Technology, 2541Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
This paper advances the critical analysis of machine learning by placing it in direct relation with actuarial science as a way to further draw out their shared epistemic...

Agriculture by Algorithm: Big Data, Digitalization, and Biotechnology Under Climate Change

Yıldı‌z Atasoy1Department of Sociology and Anthropology, 1763Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Based on textual analysis of publicly available documents published by the Food and Agriculture Organization, Bayer, and its partner delivery start-ups, this paper provides...

Making the Global Local: The Case of Chinese Research and Innovation Evaluation Systems

Julia Kirch Kirkegaard, Alan Irwin, Xuan Li

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Starting with China's increasingly prominent role in the global politics of science, this paper considers the case of Chinese policies for the evaluation of Research &...

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 ⪢

Transitioning ESTS

Published On: Mar 7 2025

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

Contributions to this issue focus on a wide range of domains and problematics—environment, extractivism, air pollution, climate change, digitalization, automation, care, surveillance—that offer a thought-provoking commentary...

Volatile Atmosphere: A Tkaronto Archive

Published On: Mar 10 2025

Sophia Jaworski

This article delves into the history of petrochemical-derived gas emissions in Toronto, focusing on their emergence and regulation from the end of World War II and up to 1980. Drawing on archival materials, I trace local knowledge...

Origin Stories of the ‘Grants Uranium District’ in Northwestern New Mexico: Archives, Memoirs, and Exploratory Boreholes in the Production of Geological Regions

Published On: Mar 7 2025

Thomas De Pree

The “Grants uranium district” of northwestern New Mexico yielded more uranium ore than any other mining district in the United States during the Cold War Period (1947-1989). After the national market for uranium collapsed...

Farmers’ Creativity and Cultivated Senses: The Immediacy of Embodied Knowledge in Alternative Agriculture

Published On: Mar 7 2025

Dimas Dwi Laksmana

The Indonesian government has promoted several forms of alternative agriculture in response to the productivity orientation and top-down bureaucratic institutions in intensive agriculture. Implemented in the late 1980s, the Integrated...

4S Blog: Backchannels

India Going Global: Ayurveda, Standardisation and the Cultural Politics of Globalisation

Purbita Das
Jul 06, 2025
Purbita Das advocates for a policy framework to safeguard Ayurveda’s regionality, plurality and its epistemological richness in light of increasing efforts to standardise its practices for the global health market.

The field talks back: listening to Southeast Asia after the book

Merlyna Lim
Jun 16, 2025
An STS scholar researching social media and society in Southeast Asia reflects on a whirlwind book tour that became an unexpected journey of “post-publication listening”—where dialogue with regional publics reanimated the book’s arguments and affirmed Southeast Asia as a microcosm of global digital politics.

BOOK REVIEW: 'On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America from Starvation to Ozempic' by Dana Simmons

Aaron Gregory PhD (UC Riverside)
Jun 09, 2025
On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America from Starvation to Ozempic (2025; UC Press) is a timely and compelling contribution to Science and Technology Studies (STS) and History of Science (HOS). Extending common threads woven throughout their prior work on vital minimums, Dr. Dana Simmons addresses an enduring pattern in United States history: the production of hunger. This book traces the production of hunger throughout the nineteenth to the present, articulating the ways in which hunger is c...

Cancer in multiple realities, medical technologies and their political implications

Tainã Queiroz
Jun 02, 2025
Tainã Queiroz discusses the incorporation of medical technologies for oncological treatments in the Brazilian health system, focusing on the challenge of combining multiple realities.

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.

SFU | Postdoc on social-ecological traps

Jun 10, 2025
In partnership with the Hatchery Modernization Team at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the Aquatic Research Cooperative Institute at SFU, the Fisheries Management Lab is looking for a Postdoctoral researcher to lead a project on social-ecological traps associated with hatcheries. This project aims to identify types of socio-ecological traps, risk factors, and potential mitigations to aid in hatchery modernization efforts. Specifically, this project involves conducting a literature review of s...

CfP | Frontiers in Global Women's Health: Contemporary perspectives on informal third-party conception and reproduction

Jun 10, 2025
Third-party conception or reproduction involves using donated eggs, sperm or embryos, or a surrogate, to help individuals or couples have a child. Being able to start and build a family is frequently seen as personally, culturally and socially important. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, describes the family as the “fundamental unit of society”. For many people, third-party conception is critical in achieving this goal, particularly for single individuals, indi...

Berggruen Prize Essay Competition

May 22, 2025
The Berggruen Prize Essay Competition, in the amount of $50,000 USD, is calling for essay submissions in English and Chinese on the theme of consciousness. It is given annually by the Berggruen Institute with the goal to stimulate new thinking and innovative concepts while embracing cross-cultural perspectives across fields, disciplines, and geographies. Inspired by the pivotal role essays have played in shaping thought and inquiry, we are inviting essays that follow in the tradition of renowned...

UQAM | Algorithmic Imaginaries Postdoctoral Fellowship

Jul 08, 2025
The project “Algorithmic imaginaries: practices and representations of algorithms in academia” aims to understand the place algorithms occupy in contemporary societies by examining the imaginaries and practices developed around generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools and scientific social networking sites. The project examines, on the one hand, the imaginations of the people who design algorithms and, on the other, the imaginations of those who use them, in order to gain a bro...
More STS News ⪢