Be Kind Rewind: Backchannels Review of 2021

The new year begins, and you probably have made your wishes for it and have set some resolutions for 2022. Whether they are personal or professional, we wish you that they become fulfilled and that 2022 is a healthy, good year for you and your beloved ones. The Backchannels editorial committee has also set some goals for 2022, and we hope we will achieve as many of them as possible. But for now, here’s my editorial perspective on behalf of the entire committee of the previous year of Backchannels’ publications and activities, which included many reflections, projects, event reports, and a 4S 2021 workshop covered.

In review, 2021 was a tremendous and diverse blog posting year on Backchannels. We started the year with a fresh new look of the 4S website making the posts even more visually appealing. We welcomed several new editors and writers who contributed many pieces. For the 4S 2021 conference in virtual Toronto, we organized a small Backchannels workshop to provide information to interested contributors and exchange with the 4S community. For the workshop, some editors reflected on their experience and appreciation of Backchannels in a short video that invites future authors. You can rewatch the video below.

The following posts would make broad-ranging reading lists of current STS themes, that is, if you haven’t read them already. We hope you enjoy them and consider sharing them in your community.

STS projects on new topics, methods, and engaging community

• Digital collaborative platform Ethnodata created by Kaleidos Collective to understand the occurrence of violent deaths, hate crimes, femicides, and missing people in Ecuador
• A summary of an ongoing project on increasing social responsibility in engineering training and professional practice at the University of Buenos Aires (in Spanish only)
• Aimée Crickmore and Rachael Gardner discuss their project to catalog and conserve the Miscellaneous Reports Collection at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
• Silvan Pollozek et al. present a portrait of the independent STS-MIGTEC (migration technologies) network
• Ranjit Singh and Rigoberto Lara Guzmán reflect on a project at Data & Society to map the conceptual vocabulary of AI in/from the Global South
• Tommaso Venturini and Anders Kristian Munk introduce a new approach for the analysis of controversies drawing upon ANT, digital methods, and an amusing animal story from the Savannah

Conversations with STS scholars

• Pia Vuolanto discusses questions of trust, skepticism, gender, and the medical fringe
• Iván Chaar-López talks about the connections between his research and the politics of space and place in information technologies
• Philosopher of technology Wang Jinzhu elucidates contemporary understandings of privacy in the context of STS
• Dawn Walker shares her PhD research on the values and social transformation in the design of web decentralization projects such as Dweb and the role of research activism
• Historian of science and technology Jahnavi Phalkey reflects on the role of film-making for research and public engagement with science
• Walter Gómez discusses how ethics and STS are contributing to more critical and reflective educational practices in Latin America in general and in Argentina in particular (in English and Spanish)
• Sophia Rossmann presents her PhD research on environmental epigenetics and the challenges of conducting STS research during the ongoing pandemic
• Philosopher of technology Chen Fan sheds light on the “sinicization” of STS in China (in Chinese and English)
• Alessandro Delfanti reflects on digital capitalism and the future of labor
• Historian of science Matthew Adamson discusses the work of DHST Commission for Science, Technology, and Diplomacy and the Commission’s engagement with science diplomacy in the global South
• Réka Patrícia Gál interviews architectural scholar Fred Scharmen on his latest book Space Forces, the constructive power of science fiction, and the need for more critical studies of outer space (colonization)

STS events across the globe

• A zine by TopEndSTS (Australia) reflecting on the 2021 Australiasian STS graduate workshop
• Report on the 2021 STS Annual Meeting in Chile by Christian Ortega Caro
• Report on the virtual workshop on “Building STS Pedagogies in India” by Nishtha Bharti and Abhigya
• Report on the INES-workshop session “How We Build: Feminist and Anti-Racist Practices in Engineering Studies” by Kari Zacharias, Marie Stettler Kleine, and Elizabeth Reddy
• Report on four virtual panels titled “A Revelatory Pandemic? Disaster Social Science and the COVID 19 Pandemic in Latin America” by Virginia García-Acosta and Roberto E. Barrios
• Report on the Second Peruvian STS Meeting by Adriana Thalia Gonzales Del Carpio, Sebastián Zárate Vásquez and Amanda Vilchez

Reflections and research on the pandemic

• The research group Comparative Covid Response: Crisis, Knowledge, Politics (CompCoRe) discuss the politics of COVID-19 vaccines in Brazil
• Vaibhavi Shah explores the politics and perceptibility of breath during the pandemic as it relates to the intertwined history of environmental justice, the civil rights movement, and racial justice
• Leah Lovett, Helena Rice, and Valerio Signorelli reflect on their collaboration with creative producers at the V&A Museum of Childhood to co-create a series of interactive, web-based virtual reality studios for young people during the lockdown
• Michael Stanley-Baker and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim introduce their co-edited special issue on Asian medicine and COVID-19

Digital technoscience and technopolitics

• Anthropologist of technology and former 4S president Lucy Suchman reflects on conversations with microchip architect Lynn Conway during their time at Xerox PARC
• Sharique Hassan Manazir discusses personal data-related policy challenges in Asian countries in general and India in particular
• Trang Le on digital participatory mapping building on ground-up, collective efforts that render women as experts of space
• Daniela Pinheiro and Federico Vasen on the motivations and diversity of Latin American hacker cultures

Environment and infrastructures

• Shashank Deora talks about watershed development and management programs in India and the implications for governance
• Tina Sikka examines solar climate engineering through the lens of art, culture, and history

Models and traditions of education

• John Mathew reflects on the place of history at Krea University in India
• Sujit Sinha introduces Nai Taleem (New Education), a model of education developed by Mahatma Gandhi, to encourage STS scholars to engage with regional traditions of environmental justice

Reviews

• Film review of Shalini Kantayya’s award-winning documentary Coded Bias (2020) by Renee M. Shelby
• Book review of Kat Jungnickel’s Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research

Published: 01/03/2022