Sep 23 2024
In this post, Maitreyi Redkar reflects on the medical research on Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, identifying how it neglects Indian women and their lived experiences.
Aug 26 2024
In this post, Sarah Cheung (University of Edinburgh) examines the ways in which generative AI continually refigures the 'digital public sphere', portending new regulatory regimes and possibilities.
Aug 20 2024
Carlos Andrés Arroyave Bernal offers a commentary on the role of health among data labelers in artificial intelligence, most of whom are Venezuelan immigrants. The text is based on the preliminary findings of his doctoral research titled "Dignity as a Commodity? Labor Process and Partial Inclusion among Data Labelers in Artificial Intelligence in Colombia"
Aug 12 2024
In this timely post, A.R.E. Taylor, an anthropologist of technology and Senior Lecturer in Communications at the University of Exeter reflects on the wider socioeconomic issues underpinning the CrowdStrike IT outage that occurred on Friday 19th July 2024.
Jul 29 2024
The globalization of the academic work prompted an increased flux of scholars in international conferences in all fields. In this piece, Noela Invernizzi and Sofía Foladori-Invernizzi explore how transnational 4S meetings have become, as a response to their own field’s critique of its Euro-American-centrism.
Jul 1 2024
In this reflection based on her fieldwork in Ghana, Joyce Koranteng-Acquah shows how farmers engage with scientific institutions to produce knowledge and technologies, addressing the complex dynamics between scientific research, community engagement and policy development.
Jun 3 2024
In this text, Giuliana Faccioli critically revisits the supposed return of feudal relations in platform capitalism through a reading of “North by South” applied to political economy. Rather than venturing into the genealogy of the term, she argues we should look into its more recent historical origins and outcomes.
May 27 2024
In this reflection on the development of interdisciplinary environmental justice units for California high schoolers, authors Prerna Srigyan, Margaret Tebbe, and Nadine Tanio reflexively analyze the politics of knowledge in translational research involving STS scholars and STEM educators.
May 13 2024
Natalie’s current book project is a critical history of the “invasive” European starling in the US. In this piece, she describes how one twentieth-century ornithologist characterizes the bird as communist, and how this narrative bolstered ornithology and later invasion biology.
May 6 2024
In the second of a two-part Backchannels post, Amanda Domingues and Rogelio Scott-Insua interview Professor Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. They continue the conversation on narratives within the history of science that apply categories originally conceptualized in Europe and North America to understand events that transpired across the globe.