Arusha in Energy
Turner Adornetto, recent graduate of Ohio State University
Shot over the course of ten months in Tanzania‘s Arusha Region, Arusha in Energy is an experimental documentary film about energy and innovation. In one sense, the film can be understood as a rejection of common development sensibilities that so-often locate Tanzania and its people outside of the scientific, the technological, and the innovative. In another, the film explores forms of energy that sit at the intersection of worlds material, spiritual, and human – suggesting that renewed conceptions of the energetic are in order.
Dust: Communicating Indeterminacy
Akshita Sivakumar, University of California at San Diego
The picture book follows a little boy and his companion vacuum cleaner who ask questions of dust. This narrative of imagined engagements brings together voices from interdisciplinary networks of actors to whom dust has come to matter, while laying out the stakes of indeterminacy and unequal knowledge regimes. It puts two such knowledge regimes in conversation to ask : who do we listen to and who have we silenced in our attunements to dust?
Imagining Other Internets
Dawn Walker, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
Presenting an imagined cluttered home office desk, "Imagining Other Internets" invites individuals to see themselves as someone actively engaged in creating alternative network infrastructures.
Interrupting Conventions: artLAB as an Innovative Research and Teaching Format
Regula Valérie Burri, HCU – HafenCity University Hamburg
Drawing from STS concepts and involving art practices, artLAB aims at exploring sociomaterial realities – often in an urban context. artLAB studies how the artistic inquiry of our complex and hybrid sociomaterial realities adds to conventional ways of doing research in STS and offers a more comprehensive understanding of the worlds we live in. It also engages critically with teaching conventions, thus interrupting traditional modes of instruction, learning, and thinking. At 4S conference, I will present the format and selected works that have been developed in artLAB and were shown in public exhibitions.
Parallel City: Rethinking Economic Futures
Maryam Heidaripour, Illinois Institute of Technology
Parallel City is a conceptual space that opens up the process of future-making. Shaping futures is primarily dominated by elite white male perspectives from the Global North, which reinforce modernist, linear, and masculine models of progress.
Reflections On Queering The Science Museum Tours
Eleanor S. Armstrong, University College London
Queering the Science Museum was a series of guided tours that used queer theory and LGBTQ+ lives of STEM professionals as a point of departure for thinking about how we construct narratives about STEM in museums. In collaboration with Damien Arness-Dalton, I worked to develop and deliver the tours in the Science Museum, London, queering the tour format as well as the tour content. Since delivering these tours, I have been working with four other science and technical museums, exploring different stories and different approaches to communicating STS-related knowledge.
What does it take to get a drink here? Delivering potable water in New Orleans
Housing for Health Incubator and Civic Studio
New Orleans residents are familiar with boil water advisories. Many locals install filters on kitchen taps, while others consume bottled water, concerned about the municipal supply. This Making & Doing session considers the history, labour, expertise, social relations, chemicals, geography, and infrastructures that combine to deliver safe and palatable drinking water to New Orleanians.