Emma Kowal is Professor of Anthropology at the Alfred Deakin Institute of Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist and STS scholar who previously worked as a medical doctor and public health researcher in Indigenous health in Australia’s Northern Territory. She co-Chaired 4S Sydney in 2018, was Founding Convenor of the Deakin Science and Society Network, Founding Convenor of the Culture, Environment and Science research stream of the Alfred Deakin Institute and Founding Deputy Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics at the Australian National University. She also convenes the Australian chapter of the Summer Internship for Indigenous Peoples in Genomics. Much of her work is at the intersection of science and technology studies, settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies. Her publications include the monograph Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia and the collection (co-edited with Joanna Radin) Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World. Her forthcoming book is entitled Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia.
Anne Pollock is Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, where she serves as Head of Department. She received her BA in Sociology from Brandeis University and her PhD in STS from MIT, and she was a member of the faculty of Georgia Tech for ten years before moving to the UK in 2018. Her research explores feminist, antiracist, and decolonial engagements with science, technology, and medicine. Broadly, she is engaged in ongoing research in three areas: racism and health, feminist theory and biomedicine, and social studies of pharmaceuticals. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Wellcome Trust. She is the author of three books: Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference (Duke 2012); Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery (Chicago 2019); and Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States (Minnesota 2021). She has published widely in key STS journals, such as Social Studies of Science and Engaging STS, and has co-edited (with Banu Subramaniam) a 2015 Special Issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values on Feminist Postcolonial STS, and (with Amade M’charek, Nadine Ehlers, Vivette García-Deister, and Melissa Creary) a 2021 Special Issue of BioSocieties on Race and Biomedicine Beyond the Lab: 21st Century Mobilisations of Genetics. She has served as a member of the Lead Editorial Team of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and continues to serve as an Editor at BioSocieties.
Vivian Y. Choi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at St. Olaf College, where she is also affiliate faculty in Race and Ethnic Studies and Environmental Studies. Her research focuses on the political, environmental, and technological dimensions of disasters. Her current book project, entitled Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka (under contract with Duke U.P.), examines the intersections of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. She is currently developing a new project, Sea Change: Experimental Collaborations across the Indian Ocean. Approaching sea-surface warming in the Indian Ocean as a slow-moving disaster, this project examines a problem that is planetary in scale through the interfaces of legal, scientific, and international infrastructures and practices. Vivian has long collaborated with a community of Disaster-STS scholars. She has published in several edited volumes and the open-access journals Cultural Anthropology and Commoning Ethnography. Vivian is also co-editor of the experimental ethnographic photo essay initiative, Writing with Light, and serves on the board of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. In 2019, Vivian was co-chair with Andrea Ballestero, of 4S’ annual conference in New Orleans.
A. Aneesh is a sociologist of globalization, technology, and labor. He is Executive Director of the School of Global Studies and Languages at the University of Oregon (USA) and Professor of global studies and sociology. Previously, he served as a professor of sociology and director of the Institute of World Affairs and the global studies program at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. In the early 2000s, he taught in the science and technology program at Stanford University and formulated a theory of algocracy, distinguishing it from bureaucratic, market, and surveillance-based governance systems, pioneering the field of algorithmic governance in the social sciences. Author of Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (Duke 2006) and Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor and Life Become Global (Duke 2015), Aneesh is currently completing a manuscript on the rise of what he calls modular citizenship.
Amanda Windle is a digital STS design researcher with 16 years of research and teaching experience. Amanda is known to many in 4S for her past and current work as editor for Backchannels, Managing Editor of Engaging Science and Technology Studies (ESTS), and 4S Council member. She has also written for New Statesman Tech and assisted the editors-in-chief and curator at Interactions magazine, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). Her experience with non-profits includes her recent role as Chair of the Simon Community London, a charity for the homeless and rootless. Windle is also a pluralist training psychotherapist with an interest in the phenomenology of group relations, boundary objects and reparative spaces. Her PhD was entitled Territorial Violence and Design, 1950–2010: A Human-Computer Study of Personal Space and Chatbot Interaction and she is the author of A Companion of Feminisms for Digital Design and Spherology. 4S appointed Windle as its first Managing Director with a Selection Panel consisting of Wiebe Bijker, Alan Irwin, Emma Kowal, Knut H. Sørensen, Hebe Vessuri, Vivian Choi and Aneesh Aneesh.
Shiv Issar is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon. Aside from being the Digital Projects Coordinator for 4S, he currently serves as an Assistant Editor for Backchannels. Shiv was also elected as a student representative on SSSP’s Board of Directors for a two-year term beginning in August 2022. His prior teaching experiences cover an array of both, introductory and upper-level undergraduate courses, ranging from India Studies, to Social Problems, Globalization, Environmental Sociology and Urban Sociology at different universities. Shiv’s research interests lie within the spheres of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Cultural Studies, Game Studies, and Environmental Sociology. Having recently completed projects on Algorithmic Governance and Walking simulator games, his proposed dissertation work would focus on the realm of civilian drones, or UAVs. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Shiv earned an MA in Sociology from Manipal University, India in 2018. He was also a Young India Fellow at Ashoka University, India from 2014-15.
A. Aneesh is a sociologist of globalization, technology, and labor. He is Executive Director of the School of Global Studies and Languages at the University of Oregon (USA) and Professor of global studies and sociology. Previously, he served as a professor of sociology and director of the Institute of World Affairs and the global studies program at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. In the early 2000s, he taught in the science and technology program at Stanford University and formulated a theory of algocracy, distinguishing it from bureaucratic, market, and surveillance-based governance systems, pioneering the field of algorithmic governance in the social sciences. Author of Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (Duke 2006) and Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor and Life Become Global (Duke 2015), Aneesh is currently completing a manuscript on the rise of what he calls modular citizenship.
Vivette García-Deister is a Professor at the S&TS lab at UNAM’s Faculty of Science in Mexico City. Her research focuses on the epistemologies of biomedical and forensic genetics in Mexico as informed by historical research, ethnographic methods, and philosophy of science in practice. She is interested in the impact of these developments on issues of racism, health, and justice.
Maka Suarez is cofounder of Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography, an academic infrastructure and scientific capacity in the global south attending to current tensions between environmental disasters and human aspirations with a distinct eye for how these events occur locally. She has actively participated in developing collaborative projects on issues of air pollution and environmental governance, data distrust, scientific and public health knowledge production, and gendered poverty as a result of systemic vulnerabilities exacerbated in disaster contexts, now particularly COVID-19. For the past two years she has actively participated in the STS Across Borders and Innovating STS initiatives developed by 4S and tried to continue these efforts into more permanent sites of international dialogue through digital spaces like the Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography (PECE).
Chihyung Jeon is an associate professor and department head of the Graduate School of Science, Technology, and Policy at KAIST, South Korea. Within KAIST, he is also a group leader at the Center for Anthropocene Studies. He conducts research on the social and cultural relationship between humans and technologies with a focus on the culture of robotics in South Korea. He has also worked on engineering and politics in Korea with case studies of highway construction and river restoration projects. These studies have been published in Technology and Culture, East Asian Science, Technology and Society, Environmental History, and Interaction Studies. In recent years, he has been involved in disaster research and investigation in Korea, especially on the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014.
Vivian Y. Choi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at St. Olaf College, where she is also affiliate faculty in Race and Ethnic Studies and Environmental Studies. Her research focuses on the political, environmental, and technological dimensions of disasters. Her current book project, entitled Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka (under contract with Duke U.P.), examines the intersections of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. She is currently developing a new project, Sea Change: Experimental Collaborations across the Indian Ocean. Approaching sea-surface warming in the Indian Ocean as a slow-moving disaster, this project examines a problem that is planetary in scale through the interfaces of legal, scientific, and international infrastructures and practices. Vivian has long collaborated with a community of Disaster-STS scholars. She has published in several edited volumes and the open-access journals Cultural Anthropology and Commoning Ethnography. Vivian is also co-editor of the experimental ethnographic photo essay initiative, Writing with Light, and serves on the board of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. In 2019, Vivian was co-chair with Andrea Ballestero, of 4S’ annual conference in New Orleans.
Canay Özden-Schilling is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at the National University of Singapore. She is an anthropologist and STS scholar interested in the technological cultures that create and disseminate the economic formations with which we live. Her first book, The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economics (Stanford University Press, 2021), is an ethnography of the electric grid in the United States in the age of competitive markets and smart grids. Her second book-length project explores global supply chain logistics, as seen from the port cities of Mersin (Turkey) and Singapore. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 2016 from the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Eugene Richardson is a physician-anthropologist based at Harvard Medical School. He previously served as the clinical lead for Partners In Health’s Ebola response in Kono District, Sierra Leone, where he continues to conduct research on the social epidemiology of Ebola virus disease and COVID-19. He also worked as a clinical consultant for the WHO’s Ebola riposte in Beni, Democratic Republic of the Congo. More recently, he was seconded to the Africa CDC to join their COVID-19 response. His overall focus is on the ways coloniality shapes epidemic disease prevention, containment, and treatment. As part of this effort, he co-chairs the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice. In his recent book, Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health (MIT Press), Gene draws on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies to demonstrate how public health practices–from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference–play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities.
Lucy van de Wiel is a Lecturer in Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of assisted reproductive technologies and their relation to contemporary conceptualisations and practices of ageing. She is also developing a research project on the intersection of data technologies and reproductive technologies. Lucy received her PhD in 2015 at the University of Amsterdam and won the 2016 ASCA Award for best dissertation as well as the 2017 Erasmus Research Prize.
Yelena Gluzman is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the University of Alberta, committed to working collaboratively with the communities she researches as a mode of experimental STS. She has a background making experimental theater and film, and works across feminist STS, ethnomethodological hybrid studies, critical disability studies and research creation. Her PhD dissertation, Cognitive Neuroscience and the Experimental Theater of Other Minds, investigated how ‘the social’ is staged in laboratory experiments on autism, and analyzed her own collaborations with scientists to design experiments beyond deficit models. Her ongoing second project traces the distributed communication ecologies of human stenographers who caption talk as text in real time for d/Deaf and Hard-of-hearing students in the classroom. Her publications contribute to theorizing intersections between performance and STS, and consider the pragmatics of experimentality, reflexivity, and research as theater (e.g., Reflexivity Practiced Daily: Theatricality in the Performative Doing of STS, in the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science and Technology Studies, 2021 and Research-as-Theatre in Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact, 2017). Yelena has been a member of 4S since 2013, and was twice awarded a 4S Making & Doing Award (Experimental Methods, 2015, with Sarah Klein, and Feminist Theory Theater Workbook Prototype, 2021, with Klein, Michael Berman and Christina Aushana).
Michal Nahman is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and a member of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group, Cambridge. Beginning in the early 2000s she was a member of the Board of Science Studies at Lancaster University, and has been researching and mentoring feminist scholars in science studies since then. Nahman’s work on cross-border reproductive politics examined ‘the border’ as a reproductive technology in the context of nationalism, violence and austerity, in Israel/Palestine, Romania and Spain. As well as her book, Extractions: An Ethnography of Reproductive Tourism (Palgrave, 2013) Nahman’s work has been published in Science as Culture, Catalyst, and Science Technology and Human Values. Current work examines on the one hand, extractive human milk markets and gendered socially reproductive labour in India and the UK (www.thisisessentialwork.com), and the politics of food in the Middle East and North Africa (Instagram @mikkifoodie_anthropologist).
Marko Monteiro has a PhD in Social Sciences (University of Campinas, 2005). He has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Texas at Austin (2006-2008) and the University of Campinas (2009), both in Science, Technology and Society. He is currently Associate Professor at the Science and Technology Policy Department, University of Campinas, Brazil. His research interests lie in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Anthropology of Science and Technology. He has worked with topics such as sociotechnical controversies; ethnographies of interdisciplinary scientific practice; and visual representation in science. He is currently conducting research related to the governance of science in Brazil, especially focusing on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and the Brazilian response to Covid-19. He is also the leader of GEICT—Interdisciplinary Research Group in Science and Technology (https://geict.wordpress.com/).
Zheng Li is an Associate Researcher at the National Academy of Innovation Strategy, which is an affiliated institute to the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST). After having a Bachelor of Industrial Design in 2007 and a Master of Mechanical Engineering in 2010 from the Northeast Forestry University in China, he received a Master of Art in Design Strategy and Innovation in 2011, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Patent Informatics in 2015 from Brunel University London. He was the invited guest of the public hearings for patent policy making with the UK Patent Office, the partner of a large US manufacturing company working with the vice-president of engineering. Zheng’s research interests turned into STS during his postdoctoral research in Tsinghua University since 2016, particularly in mathematicians, including their societies, cultures, histories, and incentive policies. He has been a member of the Chinese Mathematical Society (CMS) and the Chinese Association for Science of Science and S&T Policy (CASSSP). His recent output is a little handbook called Method for Social Studies Based on Qualitative Data Analysis: Theory and Cases (China S&T Press, 2022).
Misria Shaik Ali is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her doctoral research focuses on India’s uranium based nuclear fuel cycle, the politics of knowledge production about irradiation, and the postcolonial politics around making India a self-reliant and hindu nation, and its effect on radiation protection. Her research interests include politics of science and technology, violence and alterity, sensory studies, environmental politics and the politics of colonialism. Prior to her stint at RPI, Misria worked as research and teaching assistant at the Centre for Study of Knowledge Systems, O.P. Jindal Global University for two years. She is currently also serving as director and treasurer of Project Kalpavriksh Society and founding member of the Yugma network. She regularly contributes to Seminar magazine, India and newspapers like the FirstPost, Outlook, Deccan Herald among others.
Barkha Kagliwal is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University. Her research focuses on food processing technologies as a solution to the problem of food wastage. Using the case of Mega Food Parks in India, the thesis analyzes visions of this infrastructure and the food system. While processing is envisioned as a technological fix, it is not a panacea for all food system related problems. Prior to Cornell STS, Barkha pursued a Masters in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research, NY and worked in healthcare settings both in the UK and in India.
Pouya Sepehr is currently University Assistant and Lecturer at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. As an STS scholar in the intersecting fields of urban sociology, human geography and infrastructure studies, he primarily conducts empirical studies to capture the sociotechnical and spatial constitution of urban practices and the ways in which cities embody technologies. His research focuses on smart cities, critical algorithm studies, smart communities, urban programming, urban imaginaries, and mobility studies. Currently he is finishing his PhD thesis focusing on techno-political cultures of the smart city Vienna and the mundanity of control in the city. He has a background in development studies and architecture. Prior to his academic endeavours, he worked in the field of democratisation of rural and urban development planning for over five years. He has worked in different projects with international organisation such as the UNDP, UNEP and IIEA in different places but mainly in Iran where he is from.