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.
Apr 28 2024
Michaela Clark explores the UCT DoS Collection of clinical photographs, produced at South Africa’s first medical school. She submits that its photographic contents testify to connections between historical actors and institutions. Following the collection outside the settler-colonial medical archive offers insight into how clinical photography crossed scientific and lay terrains, and continues to bridge local and global space and time.
Apr 22 2024
In this reflection based on fieldwork in Donegal, Ireland, Kaitlyn Rabach shows how a defective concrete disaster is changing the ways homeowners and activists demand governmental policies be driven by expertise and evidence-backed science.
Mar 25 2024
Jumping spider "song and dance" can serve as a generative entry point for staging broader disruptions in the misogyny and cisheterosexism that have long underwritten scientific studies of animal behavior.
Apr 15 2024
Scuba diver and anthropologist Jakkrit Sangkhamanee explores the multispecies, symbiotic relationships in coral reefs, drawing parallels to human-technology interactions and emphasizing the need for ecological awareness in the Anthropocene era.
Apr 1 2024
In the first 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 discuss his research on the formative role of "Latin America" in US colonial history and the history of "Western" modernity as a whole.