Hallam Stevens, Nanyang Technological University; Robin Wolfe Scheffler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
After a wave of suburbanization in the mid-twentieth century, modern science now seeks niches in urban areas – whether university campuses or private research laboratories. The renewed urbanization of science has largely escaped the attention of STS scholars, who have focused within the walls of laboratories on the day-to-day practices, social hierarchies, and flows of materials and information that generate universal knowledge claims. Yet these approaches have revealed that laboratories are situated in specific geographic, social, and political terrains – contexts that draw science studies beyond the laboratory to its urban environs, and prompt questions about the kinds of modern (techno)science cities help produce.
Through bringing urban studies into deeper conversation with STS, we hope to extend and diversify the discussion of how scientific endeavors have shaped cities and how cities are shaping science. Cities are zones in which the global forms of technoscience are enacted or reconfigured at the local level. Laboratories have an impact on the urban spaces around them, and these urban spaces can themselves shape the kinds of science being done and the kinds of knowledge being produced within the laboratory. Drawing on urbanist theories of space and production, we seek papers exploring how (spaces of) science fit into neighborhoods (or don’t), influence urban politics, shape land use, transform urban economies and infrastructures, or refigure notions of urban citizenship and belonging. Conversely, we also seek papers that interrogate how cities and the citizens have structured and shaped technoscientific practice and knowledge.
