About The STS Futures Initiative

The STS Futures Initiative

The STS Futures Initiative is an ongoing project dedicated to opening new professional pathways for graduate students in the Humanities specializing in Science, Technology and Society (STS). A graduate student-led endeavor, the STS Futures Initiative is organized by students and faculty from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Santa Barbara in collaboration with UC Berkeley's Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (CSTMS), and is funded by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) through the end of fall 2021.

Over the course of the year, the STS Futures Initiative will host a series of workshops and events dedicated to professionalization, engagement, and community building with the aim of demystifying the job market, highlighting Humanities' students transferable skills, and shedding light on the "hidden curriculum" of academia.

Co-Organizers

Rebecca Baker is an English PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before starting graduate school, she worked for several years as an EFL teacher in Querétaro, México. She is broadly interested in cultural constructions of scientific discourses (including science fiction), the generative potential of worldbuilding, and counterhegemonic speculative futures “from below,” including authors of color, feminist, queer, and working class voices. Her work is situated at the intersections of Science and Technology Studies and the Environmental Humanities, with an emphasis on critical and technical infrastructures, decolonial and environmental justice within the Anthropocene, and the “biocognitive” turn in our cultural understandings of what it means to be human.

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses on the Philippines and modern Southeast Asia. Her research explores colonial botany, agentic plant studies, and textile weaving technologies. With Paul Michael L. Atienza, she is guest co-editing an STS-themed special issue of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. Currently, she is in residence at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow to complete her book manuscript, tentatively titled Sovereign Vernaculars: Philippine Botany at the Dawn of New Imperial Science.

Elizabeth Hargrett is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UC Berkeley, and a graduate student researcher at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society (CSTMS). Though her previous research has covered medical jurisprudence in Gold Rush-era California and eugenic sterilization in postwar Georgia, her dissertation project examines labor, landscape, and the “carceral circuitry” of late 19th- and early 20th-century North Carolina. Her interest in broadening graduate students' professional horizons runs deep: before beginning her PhD at UC Berkeley, she worked as a university lecturer in Lyon, France, where she had previously found employment as a middle and high school teacher, translator, and project manager at a creative firm specializing in naming services.

Lois Rosson is a 7th year Ph.D candidate in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. She worked at NASA Ames for two years before starting graduate school, and recently finished up a Guggenheim Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Her dissertation project looks at how the practice of American astronomical illustration changed in response to the onset of the Space Race, and how the look of alien topographies has developed over time. More broadly, she's interested in how scientific subjects that are difficult to see can be made legible to wide groups of people.

Hannah Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at UC Berkeley, and sits on the Executive Committees of the University of California at Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and The Berkeley Center for New Media. Her first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy was published by MIT Press in August 2021, with a Foreword by John Durham Peters. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU in 2018. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming from Technology & Culture, differences: A Journal of Feminist Studies, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.