The exhibit will be in the Grand Ballroom Foyer (fifth floor) throughout the conference
Furthering its theme, Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations, the 2019 annual 4S meeting in New Orleans includes a special exhibit, Innovating STS, that showcases innovations in STS as well as ways innovation has been studied, conceptualized, practiced, and critiqued. Extending 4S’s commitment to the transnational character of STS, Innovating STS exhibits convey diverse ways innovation has been an organizing rubric in different settings as well as how STS itself has been built and innovated in different settings.
Innovating STS exhibits explore how particular strands of STS scholarship (e.g. feminist and postcolonial STS) have been built, or innovative ways STS scholars and practitioners have connected to and communicated with new publics. Some exhibits also extend the digital collections built for the 2018 4S meeting in Sydney, STS Across Borders (responding to the theme, TRANSnational STS) — adding new content and analysis to exhibits focused on particular departments and groups, journals, and regional formations.
Exhibits in Innovating STS will be presented gallery-style in New Orleans, and also as curated digital collections that can be preserved, elaborated, and accessed over time in a new STS archive, STSinfrastructures (stsinfrastructures.org). The goal is to build deeply diverse grounds for the future of STS and 4S. Presenters unable to attend the New Orleans conference in person have also been encouraged to develop digital collections for Innovating STS: an important motivation for the special exhibit is to create new forms of intellectual community that span beyond the space-time of the annual 4S conference.
The goal of these newly launched special exhibits, STS Across Borders and Innovating STS, is to support collective engagement across different trajectories and enactments of STS in the lead-up to, at, and beyond its annual conferences. Thus, beyond the New Orleans conference, Innovating STS exhibits could also be installed in various STS departments, library foyers, or in local science musea. Digital collections prepared as part of Innovating STS also can be engaged in multiple ways beyond the New Orleans conference: for example, for individual research, workshops (online or in-person), and classroom instruction.
Innovating STS digital collections can be accessed at: https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/innovating-sts/essay. The gallery exhibition will be installed throughout the conference at the Grand Ballroom Foyer on the fifth floor. Conference delegates can also interact with exhibitors during the reception on Thursday, September 5 (6.30-7.30 pm) at their respective exhibition booths. For further information or comments, please reach out to the Innovating STS Design Group.
Innovating STS Design Group:
Chair: Aalok Khandekar (Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad)
María Belén Albornoz (FLACSO Latin American Social Studies Faculty)
Kim Fortun (University of California – Irvine)
Duygu Kasdogan (İzmir Katip Çelebi Üniversitesi)
Angela Okune (University of California – Irvine)
Grant Jun Otsuki (Victoria University of Wellington)
The Arcades – An Analysis of Memory and it’s Deterioration in the Digital Age
*Emma Goldman (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
The focus of The Arcades is on the way memory is effected in a digital age, where the use of smart devices is becoming one of the primary forms of archival and documentation. The Aracdes began as a video-based art installation, filling a room with projections meant to transport the observers into a familiar space, but one that is not necessarily their own. More recently the project has taken a turn focusing not only on the effects of digital documentation, but also on the roles of mental illness, and issues such as dissociation in the creation of memory. Using video and sound to open a conversation with the viewers about the influence of technology in memory allows us to also bring forward conversations on the ways that other’s are affected that might otherwise be less clear. Materials from this exhibit that could be achieved online include; documentation of the space (i.e. photographs), and video/sound clips from the installation.
Becoming an STS Thinker
*Nicole Mogul (University of Maryland College Park), David Tomblin (University of Maryland College Park)
This exhibit will engage people with a new framework for how to get undergraduates to Become STS Thinkers. Our STS program is is a 2-year living learning program for undergraduate STEM majors. For the past several years, we have been collaborating with the University of Maryland Academy of Innovation and Entrepreneurship to integrate design thinking skills with STS concepts to help STEM majors adopt an ethnographic mindset. Becoming an STS Thinker involves: 1) Looking for ethics in artifacts; 2) Listening contextually; 3) Making meaning; 4) Seeking stories about science and technology’s past, present, and future; 5) Thinking socio-technically; 6) Developing STS questions; and 7) Hosting an STS party. It is our aim to develop self-motivated ethnographic data collectors that will take these skills into their STEM classrooms, internships, and careers.
Chemical Entanglements: Gender and Exposure
*Rachel C Lee (UCLA Center for the Study of Women)
UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) proposes Chemical Entanglements: Gender and Exposure (CE) as an example of innovation in Science and Technology Studies. CE is a multiyear collaboration involving scientists, artists, epidemiologists, oral historians, environmental justice activists, disability studies researchers, and scholars of intersectional gender & sexuality studies. CE advances STS innovation across four facets:
Our display will emphasize the roots of these four facets in feminist care practices and disability activism as they inform the study of technology and science. While our first facet aligns with the infrastructural format most familiar to professional research associations (e.g., the academic conference), facets two through four emphasize our Center’s devotion to a more public-facing mission, channeling communications outreach through already existing networks of blog readership, and providing DIY policy change tools for advocates of better indoor air quality and disability accommodation. Some of the tools we will display in our exhibit are:
Our pedagogy is aimed at cultivating the next generation of researchers, activists, and care networks invested in the study of toxic exposure. This exhibit will demonstrate how we have sought to strengthen traditions of feminist care practices and disability activism that prioritize DIY advocacy (e.g. Garland-Thomson 2005; Hughes et al. 2005), and train aspiring researchers or institutional activists (Pettinicchio 2012), who will go on to create new forms of access and opportunity.
Works Cited
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Feminist disability studies. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 2 (2005): 1557-1587.
Hughes, Bill, Linda McKie, Debra Hopkins, and Nick Watson. Love’s Labours Lost? Feminism, the Disabled People’s Movement and an Ethic of Care. Sociology 39, no. 2 (April 2005): 259–75. doi:10.1177/0038038505050538.
Pettinicchio, David. Institutional activism: Reconsidering the insider/outsider dichotomy. Sociology Compass 6, no. 6 (2012): 499-510.
Countermapping Displacement and Resistance: On the Work of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
*Erin Mariel Brownstein McElroy (University of California Santa Cruz)
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital humanities project documenting displacement and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes. Here I display some of the collective’s work, largely based upon that in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I co-founded the project in 2013. As contemporary gentrification in the Bay Area is largely related to the Silicon Valley tech boom, or Tech 2.0, for the AEMP, it has been important to use digital technology to fight back against gentrification, and to archive neighborhood transformations and resistance struggles. In this way, we are committed to technological futures that exist beyond that of Silicon Valley.
While most of the AEMP lives digitally and can be projected and interacted with through digital interfaces, we have also been converting web-maps into printable versions, as we are publishing a book with PM Press that will come out in 2020, entitled Counterpoints: Bay Area Data and Stories for Resisting Displacement. Thus here, I present several poster images from the manuscript, as well as several digital platforms that can be projected or used on devices. Digital links include the following: www.antievictionmap.com; http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/ellis.html; http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/pledge/; https://arcg.is/19Kmy0; http://delta.center/light-atlas-for-aemp/; and http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/narratives.html.
Design and Innovation at STS@RPI: Reflecting on 20 Years of STS through Design
*James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Alex Jenseth, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Caroline Mason, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Jamie Steele, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
In the Fall of 2018, the STS Department at RPI celebrated the 20th year of its Design, Innovation, & Society (DIS) program, an undergraduate major and research program focused on the pursuit of STS scholarship and social justice through the practice of design. For the past 20 years, DIS has been the only studio-based, undergraduate design program housed completely within a social sciences & humanities department in the world.
DIS teaches practical design skills–drafting, prototyping, CAD, problem definition, design ethnography, and organizational design–while also using STS literature and conversations as a vehicle for deconstructing and critiquing the popular assumptions of design and designers. As such, DIS treats design simultaneously as critical technical practice, an imagined community of practice, and an epistemic/ideological position.
While all of the DIS Studio classes are taught by STS faculty, many of our students dual-major with Engineering, Architecture, Graphic Design, or Computer Science, and the vast majority of studio work results in the design and development of physical products. While DIS leverages similar literature that have contributed to the more recent Critical Making circles in STS, many DIS projects are self-consciously market-centered and consumer-facing. DIS thus thrives on exploring productive tensions between activist/anti-capitalist orientations of STS with designing for mass production, as well as the tensions between criticisms of technology & innovation culture and our students’ drive to create & desires to enter industry.
This exhibit will track the history of DIS @ RPI, speaking to how DIS serves as both an innovation of and critique of STS itself, and how DIS as reflexively evolved over the past 20 years in response to changes in faculty, institutional capital, the popularization of design thinking, and the politics of STS. Materials include timelines–both in a long-poster format to be showcased at 4SNOLA and in a digital format, physical and digital student projects, syllabi, photography & documentation from the history of the program, and writings and reflections from DIS students and faculty.
Ecuadorian STS. A Story from the Middle of the World
*María Belén Albornoz (FLACSO Latin American Social Studies Faculty)
Academic communities often emerge from the collisions of scholarly interests, the building of new research programs, and opportunities for collaboration. The Ecuadorian community of researchers on Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies is one of those cases. This exhibit recreates the story of all the associations of human and non-human actors which co-created the STS network in Ecuador. We follow their traces and co-produce a narrative to show how different STS scholars came along in constant dialogue and institutionally stabilized their trajectories. The route includes traveling from the Equatorial line throughout the country in order to uncover the different locations of the Andes where STS studies are rooting as a new field and building academic communities. Visualization techniques, podcasts, and text are used to reveal the Ecuadorian STS debates, challenges, and practices.
The Emergence of Biotechnology in India: Collaboration, Contestation and Non-Western perspective
*Abhinav Tyagi (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay), *Anuj Tyagi (The Indira Gandhi National Open University)
In the modern biological and biotechnological paradigm, the ‘west’ has been the source and site for knowledge production. India has its unique journey to biotechnology. Beyond the hegemonic gene-centric approaches of ‘west’, chemical engineering coming together with biological sciences shaped the trajectory of biotechnology in India. Biochemical engineering research centre (BERC henceforth) at IIT Delhi, India came into existence with Swiss and British collaboration in 1974. Within few years of its inception, BERC emerged as a formidable force and chaired/led various committees and conferences focusing on biofuels and non-conventional energy sources worldwide.
My exhibit engages with different forms of archival material such as photographs of the experiments, instruments, records of communication exchange between scientists and government institutions and the raw material which includes sounds and oral forms. Curation of archival material in the form of digital collection and posters will depict the trajectory of BERC, IIT Delhi from a collaborative initiative to leading institutions in biofuels and non-conventional energy resources worldwide.
The curatorial exhibit aims to depict the epistemic culture of innovation and counter-hegemonic trajectory of biotechnology in India, beyond the dominant gene-centric approaches. The exhibit aims to emphasise the role of BERC by making alterations in object-culture such as choice of technologies and design, selection of raw material and socio-cultural context of research, which eventually changed the epistemic trajectory of the discipline as a whole. Through the curatorial process, exhibit further aim to complicate the dichotomous and hegemonic nature of so-called ‘western’ and/over ‘eastern’ science.
Innovating STS in Turkey: Boundaries, Translations, and Temporalities
*Duygu Kasdogan & Aybike Alkan, STS IstanbuLab, Research Platform
This exhibit extends the digital collection entitled An Archaeology of STS in Turkey that was built for the 4S 2018 meeting in Sydney. As IstanbuLab, this year, we aim to re-think the figurations and performances of STS in Turkey with a focus on microhistories and experimental interventions. Drawing on the fragmented and discontinuous past of STS in Turkey, we want to render multiple interruptions of STS in this country visible while simultaneously innovating the past, present and future of the field through zooming into creative spaces such as art. This exhibit is a speculative endeavor towards investigating the ways to sustain STS praxis in a country where the field lacks institutional grounding. On the basis of multiple personal narratives, we highlight what it means to do STS in Turkey; how scholars innovate STS across different scales and spaces, and what STS innovate in this country. Overall, we ask: Whether and how would it be possible to sustain critical STS in a country where nothing endures but constantly changes?
Innovation Research and Dissemination Methods: Visual Vignettes
*Mascha Gugganig (Technical University Munich), Anja Rueß (Technical University Munich), Laure Kuen (Rachel Carson Center), Felix Remter (Technical University Munich), Zinaida Vasilyeva (Technical University Munich), Luise M. Ruge (Technical University Munich), Christopher P. Wood (Queen Mary University)
This contribution takes up the theme of infraStrucTureS by considering research, data analysis and dissemination tools as methodological infrastructure. What are the norms of common research, writing and communication practices that have defined STS, which are often borrowed and readapted from neighboring disciplines? Methodological infrastructures, like any infrastructure, channel and guide, are made and remade, they leak and break, they get fixed and repurposed. The latter is central to this proposed contribution to the Innovating STS exhibition. Visual vignettes is a novel genre that connects the vignette with the visual essay, and in the process breaks the ‘labour division’ of the text as content and the image as its illustrator. The rules are simple: 5 frames, however many visuals (images, drawings, graphs, etc.), and 700 words. By repurposing the software program of Powerpoint, participants are invited to consider rearranging their (visual and textual) material beyond the common formats of a dissertation, article or a seminar essay. In previous workshops, the convenors have found that Visual Vignettes are adaptable, serving anything from curating fieldnotes, to analysing one’s collected data, to developing new communication modes. Similar to Innovating STS’ potential installment in departments, library foyers, etc. and its digital collections, Visual vignettes does both as well: exhibiting developed (printed) Visual Vignettes, and curating them online via http://visualvignettes.wordpress.com/
Kaleidoscopic STS: Interruptions from the Global South
*Maka Suarez, Jorge Nuñez, Maria Elissa Torres (Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at University of Cuenca & FLACSO – Ecuador)
At Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at University of Cuenca & FLACSO – Ecuador, we envision STS as a kaleidoscopic intervention into economics, ethics, knowledge, and politics from the global south. We explore how novel academic infrastructures can become pathways for interrupting and regenerating the field of STS. Through a series of collaborative essays we render visible in this exhibit the many ethnographic approaches to STS in Cuenca, Ecuador; from environmental governance, to disability studies, LGBTQ+ algorithms, and financial frontiers, we interrogate how the anthropocene unfolds on the ground. Our aim here is to showcase how STS has enabled us to promote collaborative projects that tie together universities, industries, publics, and institutions in new and mutually attractive modalities of interdisciplinarity and interdependence. The field of STS has allowed Kaleidos to open up the imagination of researchers in multiple fields of study who can look into this approach as a way of combining and collaborating through their different fields of expertise.
Mestizo Knowledge: Mixing Identities from/above the Existence of Chilean STS
*Nicolás Sanhueza (P. Catholic University of Chile), Martin Andrés Perez Comisso (SFIS – Arizona State University), Gloria Baigorrotegui (Instituto de Estudios Avanzados – Usach)
A community of researchers and practitioners in science, technology and society studies in Chile (CTS-Chile) continue to shape the STS studies in their land, based on mixed identities, ideas, and institutions. Its origins, traditions, and particularities have evolved and begun to be institutionalized in the academic context, publications, and research centers. This exhibit focuses on how there is a mestizo institutionalized form, what is left outside or inside, and how STS studies are enacted in institutional and identity spaces. For example, with the establishment of the first STS MSc program, or with the artifacts of the internal networks such as the STS History LAB and the Energy and Society Nucleus. However, we must not decontextualize this interest in discussing science and technology issues, in Latin American, rooted into local and global networks that have influenced their situated and mestizo development. Particularly, as a formation of critical and transdisciplinary thinking in the oscillation among extremes. We seek to inquire: What knowledge and technologies have enabled the emergence of institutionalized STS studies in Chile? How the academic infrastructures innovate on previous conceptions of academic society blended on institutionalized national STS? The exhibition will be through the inscription of different STS artifacts in Chile, such as books, graduate programs, papers, and academics reports, will uncover the challenges in institutionalizing STS in Chile and their mestizo singularity.
Methodological Interruptions Across the Field and Archive: Doing STS in Mexico
*María Torres, Arturo Vallejo, Vivette Garcia Deister, S&TS Group Facultad de Ciencias/CEIICH, UNAM
The Science and Technology Studies research group at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) is a multi-disciplinary cluster that brings together scholars and students working in the history, philosophy, cultural, feminist, and social studies of science, technology, and biomedicine. Situated in Mexico, in our research we engage methods spanning visual and laboratory ethnography, textual analysis, archival research, and participant observation. Throughout our investigative processes, whether in the field or the archive, we have encountered and experienced a number of interruptions. Rather than dismissing them as epistemic obstacles or methodological noise, our position as STSers in a postcolonial context has attuned us to recognize them as provocations that allow us to reposition and retool our approaches. In this exhibit we bring interruptions to the fore, instantiated as a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Mexico City that abruptly ended a patient interview; the jarring image of a cancerous tumor laid out on a tray instead of pristine slides expected to find catalogued in a biobank; the itinerary of a mobile radioisotope unit disrupted by the crashing of its transport train; when Mexico’s context of violence and insecurity not only limits access to the field, but forcefully expels us from it. These are some of the moments of interruption that we capture in diverse formats: audio, image, video, and text. We propose a digital collection of these materials with brief (100 word), bilingual (English-Spanish), analytic captions accompanying each piece (8 to 10), that together explore the generative effect of interruptions.
Sources of materials: GoPro footage, Tascam audio, field notes, archival materials, photographs, interview transcripts.
MISFIRES and Market Innovation: STS Research for Participatory and Inclusive Healthcare
*Ilaria Galasso (University College Dublin), Susi Geiger (University College Dublin), Stephen Nicola (University College Dublin), Emma Stendahl (University College Dublin), Gemma Watts (University College Dublin)
This exhibit introduces the MISFIRES ERC Consolidator research project: MISFIRES and market innovation: Toward a Collaborative Turn in Organising Markets (misfires.ucd.ie).MISFIRES is a new interdisciplinary research program at the intersection of STS and critical market studies, based at University College Dublin. It aims to guide new academic and policy thinking by establishing how: 1) concerned actors voice and mobilise around the notion that healthcare market has ‘failed’ them; 2) concerned actors seek to negotiate and address healthcare market failures; 3) this process may lead to ‘better’ healthcare markets (as defined by the actors). The project also explores participatory and collaborative strategies in the five cases it researches by helping to open these markets up to the concerns of those who are let down by them. Individual case studies include issues around the assetization of pharmaceutical patents (Hepatitis C), evolving activist strategies around access to medicines (HIV/AIDS), digital activism and user innovation (Type 1 Diabetes), and the use of participatory tools as a response to non-engagement by publics (private and public genomics initiatives).
NatureCulture
*Grant Jun Otsuki, Victoria University of Wellington; Gergely Mohacsi, Osaka University; Miki Namba, Hitotsubashi University; Liv Nyland Krause, Osaka University; Asli Kemiksiz, Osaka University; Emile St-Pierre, Osaka University
Building upon the exhibit created for 4S 2018, this exhibit explores genealogies of anthropologies of science and technology in and of Japan. As last year’s exhibit showed, Japan has been an active venue for anthropologists and STS scholars working with a diverse range of approaches and topics. At the same time, science and technology in Japan has been a highly fruitful area for scholars located to understand technoscientific cultures. Physicists, engineers, and biologists in Japan, among many others, have been taken up in many ethnographic studies. This exhibit will continue to examine the interactions among scholars and literatures in anthropology and STS in Japan, and expand to look at how anthropological and STS studies by scholars of Japan have been a part of and apart from work by Japanese scholars. The 2019 exhibit will focus particularly on (1) mapping key relations among scholars within and beyond Japan, beginning with the relations surrounding the key books and journals, (2) beginning an archive of key articles in Japanese and English produced by these scholars, and (3) exploring ways of using Innovating STS and the PECE platform itself as a resource and hub of activity for these scholars.
Neighborhood Environments as Socio-Techno-Bio Systems
*Paloma Contreras (University Of Michigan), *David Palma (Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública, México), Mary Leighton (University of Michigan – Ann Arbor), Alyssa Huberts (Harvard University), Ernesto Martinez (University of Michigan), Branko Kerkez (University of Michigan), Krista Rule Wigginton (University of Michigan), Martha M Téllez-Rojo (Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública, México), Brisa N. Sánchez (University of Michigan), Jaclyn Goodrich (University of Michigan), Belinda Needham (University of Michigan), Deborah Watkins (University of Michigan), Elizabeth F.S. Roberts (University Of Michigan)
NESTSMX (Neighborhood Environments as Socio-Techno-Bio Systems: Water Quality, Public Trust, and Health in Mexico City) is a multi-disciplinary collaborative project that brings together expertise from epidemiology, environmental engineering, anthropology and STS. The project develops new methods for exploring the complex relationship between water infrastructure, public trust in water quality and health across Mexico City neighborhoods. In order to study water trust in neighborhoods as socio-techno-biological systems we have developed household and neighborhood water audits which include the generation of epidemiological, epigenetic, and ethnographic data. During these audits members of the field team work with different objects such as cisterns, buccal swabs, hair samples, petri dishes, water quality tests, and fieldnotes to reveal the different water realities experienced by Mexico City residents. The team also uses multi-media to share these complex material realities with laboratory-based team members who don’t participate in field work. The gallery exhibit we are proposing will be a combination of photographs, schematic representations and video examining three different aspects of the NESTSMX project: 1) how neighborhoods water audits demonstrate the efficacy of our socio-techno-biological systems approach, 2) our findings from household water audits about how collective family storage and management of water affects trust in water quality and 3) our efforts within the NESTSMX project to coordinate different knowledge-making practices amongst the research team and the communities with whom we work. In summary, we will portray how our NESTSMX team members learn from each other and study participants, as well as the multiple social and material realities of water in Mexico City.
Response: Interruptions in the Production of Scientific Knowledge
*Emily Simmonds (York University), Max Liboiron (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Responses is a collaborative process document that explores the productive potential of being interrupted and the labour of interrupting in scientific knowledge production. It draws upon the everyday experiences and networks of members of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Research Action (CLEAR) a feminist, anti-colonial marine science lab specializing in monitoring plastic pollution. It offers a critical examination of the ways that different scientific practitioners grapple with bringing feminist and anti-colonial commitments to bare on their practices, and how those practices help them understand how other scientists are grappling with similar issues. This collective endeavour situates the counters and forces of interruptions within specific contexts in which we as students, teachers and researchers are deeply implicated. In this process document, interruption is framed not simply as occasions or encounters that get in our way, prohibiting us from completing our work. Instead, they are instances that prompt us to reflect upon how our ways of working, and making knowledge claims about phenomenon, and the world, are already entangled in relations and structures of power. With an emphasis on the contingent and the contextual, this collection provokes curiosity about how interruptions can serve as a powerful catalyst that enables new modes of working both politically and personally, as well as serve as moments where power relations come to discipline and direct knowledge.
Scholarly Memory in Nairobi, Kenya: Care for Sites and Sources
*Angela Okune (University of California – Irvine)
Extending the 2018 STS Across Borders analytic question investigating the scholarly infrastructure that has supported the growth of STS on the African continent, this exhibit looks at sites of scholarly memory practices (Bowker 2008) in Nairobi, Kenya to ask how qualitative research data are being cared for, by whom and for whom. Tacking between the materials found in the very places highlighted and the rationale behind the creation of these spaces, this exhibit offers snapshots from the exhibit creator’s ongoing fieldwork research in Nairobi and includes images, texts, and interview data from and about the Kenya National Archives, British Institute of Eastern Africa (BIEA), McMillan library, and PALIAct Ukombozi library, among others. How has the purpose(s) and care of libraries and archives shifted over time in Nairobi? What are the implications for contemporary scholarly communications and the circulation of knowledges today? The exhibit uses these materials to track shifts and changes to public research data capacity that have and continue to influence the conduct of social science in the city, country, and region.
Social Studies of Outer Space
*Richard Tutton (University of York), Tamara Alvarez (The New School for Social Research), Michael Clormann (Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich), Matjaz Vidmar (University of Edinburgh), Craig Jones (Lancaster University), Alexander Taylor (University of Cambridge)
This Innovating STS Exhibit will be an interactive gallery of posters that present themes from the work of a new network of scholars engaged in critical STS work on outer space science and technology. Organized under the rubric Social Studies of Outer Space (Messeri 2016), this network includes sociologists, anthropologists, historians and cultural theorists, and advances critical perspectives on future engagements in STS with outer space as well as planeto-orbital infrastructures and environments. Human spaceflight, one of the foremost technoscientific projects of the twentieth century, promised a radical transformation of human society. While many of the early promises of humans in space remain unfulfilled, renewed commercial interest in spaceflight can be seen, such as commercial space launches (i.e., SpaceX, Blue Origin), space tourism (Virgin Galactic) and asteroid mining ventures. New governmental actors (i.e. China, India) are investing in new space exploration programmes and establishing economic interests in orbit. STS scholarship has so far demonstrated limited interest in this area relative to other technoscientific fields. However, multidisciplinary approaches are emerging to address outer space in terms of ‘New Space’ economics, technopolitics, extractivism, space archaeologies, human-machine relations, waste and sustainability, research infrastructures, globalization, sociotechnical imaginaries, surveillance, and warfare. This interactive exhibit will showcase how new STS work is reaching outer space and reflect on its specific impact on STS paradigms. We highlight how outer space technoscience is a contested site of innovation and investment in particular sociotechnical futures. The exhibited content will be digitalized and made available for online archiving (i.e. webpage).
The STS Futures Lab at the Intersection of Research and Pedagogy
*Emily York (James Madison University), Shannon Conley (James Madison University)
The STS Futures Lab at James Madison University is a fun and intellectually stimulating space where faculty and students collaborate on cross-disciplinary STS research and pedagogy. A key dimension of this work involves imagining and critically interrogating plausible sociotechnical futures through a blend of scenario analysis, design fiction, and anticipatory ethical reasoning, in the interest of supporting holistic problem solving, anticipatory governance, and responsible innovation. Through the STS Futures Lab, innovations in STS pedagogy have begun to inform a reconceptualization of STS theories and methods concerning socio-technical integration, knowledge production, expertise, and critical participation. This exhibit will highlight the Lab’s engagement with critical STS pedagogies in STEM curricula, its involvement of STEM students and collaborations with STEM faculty, and its new Co-Imagining Futures research project. In this project, the Lab invites experts from various disciplines to collaborate on scenario analysis and design fiction as a way to develop interactional expertise. Essays and artifacts in this exhibit will include images, video clips, audio clips, interview excerpts, examples of scenario analyses and design fictions, and publications. We examine and reflect on the possibilities and constraints of play and collaborative making in developing critical thinking and interactional expertise, in developing tools for anticipatory governance of emerging technologies, and in developing multidisciplinary collaborations that produce new knowledge at the intersection of pedagogy and research.
STS@Nottm 2019: Diasporas, Innovations and (Re)generations
*Eleanor Hadley Kershaw (University of Nottingham), Dimitris Papadopoulos (University of Nottingham), Sujatha Raman (The Australian National University), Judit Varga (Centre for Science & Technology Studies [CWTS], Leiden University), Brigitte Nerlich (University of Nottingham), Pru Hobson-West (University of Nottingham), Murray Goulden (University of Nottingham)
What holds together an STS network with diverse empirical, conceptual and philosophical orientations? How does such diversity enable institutional, epistemic and practical innovation and (re)generation? This exhibit extends the ‘STS@Nottm Diasporas: Openness as Ethos and as Topic’ collection prepared for STS Across Borders (4S 2018), elaborating and expanding our account of the past, present and futures of the Institute for Science and Society (ISS).
ISS originated in 1998 in Nottingham, UK as a small unit formed to examine the emerging life sciences ‘revolution’. The Institute grew through the involvement of a diverse set of people, developing new research and training practices, striking collaborations across disciplines, and spawning geographical and intellectual diasporas across continents and STS sites. In relating this story, we explore whether openness can be understood as the glue that holds us together: both as an ethos (allowing us to expand beyond our origins in the social aspects of life sciences), and as a topic (which we investigated via a research programme on ‘Making Science Public’). Furthermore, we consider openness as a catalyst for empirical, theoretical, methodological, pedagogical and institutional innovation and (re)generation.
The exhibit aims to make sense of our diverse foci, and conceive of contributions to STS in new ways, namely, through diasporas, innovations and regenerations, rather than despite them. STS@Nottm tells our story through material from our events, blog, PhD programme, and reports (alongside key academic outputs). This extended edition incorporates new content from members and alumni of ISS, and fleshes out the substantive themes of our work.
Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society
*Leandro Rodriguez Medina (Universidad de las Americas Puebla), *Edmundo Meza (Freelance researcher), *Sandra Harding (Graduate Department of Education, UCLA)
There is and has been an active and distinct STS Latin American community whose work is largely unknown to English readers. Tapuya brings such perspectives and projects to inform and transform international STS..
The journal presents Latin American perspectives on both Latin American and international STS issues, rather than treatomg Latin America only as a source of data and labor for international STS. It analyzes the effects in Latin America of international science, technology, and social studies of science and technology. Moreover, it features ‘periphery studies’: conversations between Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the historically marginalized STS world.
Tapuya also has introduced innovative production practices. 1) It publishes in English, with a top-rank Northern publisher, though editorial decisions are made entirely in Latin America. 2) It is the only STS journal to publish in English across both Portuguese and Spanish Latin American authors and concerns. 3) It publishes abstracts and key words of all research articles in 3 languages, so it can be searched in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. 4) It is Open Access, with rolling publication. 5) Articles are double-blind reviewed by one Latin American scholar and one from other parts of the world. 6) It is engaging in collaborative projects with other journals (such as East Asian Science, Technology and Society). 7) It publishes book reviews in several innovative formats.
This exhibit will feature examples of the innovations above through texts and photographs.