The 4S STS Infrastructure Award Committee is pleased to announce its 2019 award to Virginia Tech Professor Gary Downey. The 4S STS Infrastructure Award is awarded annually to recognize scholarship that performs Science and Technology Studies through infrastructure.
The decision of the award committee was based on Downey’s leadership and creativity in developing numerous infrastructures that embody STS insights and commitments. Downey has played a lead role in co-founding and co-nurturing Virginia Tech’s STS graduate program and the field of Engineering Studies, co-founding and sustaining for a decade the journal Engineering Studies and the International Network for Engineering Studies that supports it, establishing the MIT book series in Engineering Studies and the Global Engineering series at Morgan & Claypool, and building the multimedia course, Engineering Cultures. Downey led the founding and continues to provide intellectual contributions to the STS Making and Doing program at 4S’s annual meetings, which showcases scholarship in non-linear STS including his own conceptualization of critical participation. During his tenure as 4S President, 2014-2015, Downey led an energetic Council and appointed committees in producing organizational upgrades to 4S itself. These upgrades have endured, making 4S more transparent, inclusive, and proactive in recognizing and supporting diverse scholars and scholarship. Downey’s initiatives and reputation have transnational, intergenerational reach, expanding how STS scholarship is conceived so that it can travel beyond the boundaries of the field, challenging and inflecting dominant images and practices of science and technology.
The 2019 4S Infrastructure Award Committee included Lesley Green (University of Cape Town), Anita Chan (University of Illinois), Katie Ulrich (Rice University) and Kim Fortun (chair) (University of California Irvine).
I am honored to receive the 4S Infrastructure Prize, delighted both for myself and for STS. Our field recognizes scholarship through infrastructure! Not only does that turn STS lessons onto STS work, it also helps activate STS by promoting nonlinear modes of knowledge expression and travel. If STS is going to make important knowledge contributions to settings that continue to demarcate technical from social, it must figure out how to participate critically in and inflect those settings and knowledge forms. I thank prize committee members for their infrastructural scholarship. I thank all my colleagues, senior and junior, who have worked with me on projects to infrastructure STS. I dedicate this prize to all those STS colleagues who sometimes feel that their nonlinear scholarship has been invisible work. It is no longer. – Gary Downey
P.S. Remember that you steer a canoe by paddling from the back.
Downey received undergraduate degrees in mechanical engineering and social relations from Lehigh University and a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. Downey has been at Virginia Tech since 1983, receiving the Diggs Teaching Scholar Award for original scholarship in teaching, XCaliber Award for high-quality instructional technology, and William E. Wine Award for career excellence in teaching. He was named Alumni Distinguished Professor in 2007 and, in 2011, awarded the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award, the Commonwealth’s highest honor for faculty. He has published four books and 60 articles and book chapters, received 17 grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, advised more than 90 graduate students, and served as affiliated professor in Women’s and Gender Studies and in Engineering Education. He is currently co-editing Making and Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel (with Teun Zuiderent-Jerak).
Read more about Downey’s conceptualizations and contributions to Engineering Studies and nonlinear STS. Watch Downey’s 2013 keynote, Big STS: Critical Analysis for Critical Participation, at the joint congress of the Brazilian Association for Social Studies of Science and Technology (ESOCITE.BR) and National Symposium on Technology and Society. Watch a short interview with Downey at 4S’s 2018 annual meeting in Sydney, Australia.
2020: Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
2018: East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (EASTS)
2017: Editors of the Handbooks of Science and Technology Studies
2016: WTMC (Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture)