Join The STS Futures Initiative for the 2021 Cal STS Retreat, held virtually on June 25-26, 2021. This year, we’ll be hosting two days of online workshops, panels, and social events. Registration is required, but free and open to anyone from within or beyond the UC system. Please use the registration form here! More details forthcoming.

Friday June 25

11-12:30h PDT: Post-Ac Career Coaching Workshop

13-15h PDT: 2 Slides, 2 Minutes

15-17h PDT: Flyer Design Workshop

17-20h PDT: Film Viewing on Discord

Saturday June 26

11-13h PDT: How to Get Your Work Published in an Interdisciplinary Journal, with editors from Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Isis, History of Human Sciences, and Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

13-15h: Activity: Interdisciplinary Feedback on Your Research Project

15-17h: Mentor/Mentee Introductions and Discussion

17-20h: STS Graduate Student and Alumni Happy Hour

Please contact stsfuturesinitiative@gmail.com for more information. Captioned recordings of some of our workshops will be posted on YouTube after the event.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact the STS Futures Initiative team at stsfuturesintitiative@gmail.com with as much advance notice as possible.

In recent years, the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) has been undergoing what some have called a “global turn” through greater attention to knowledge production, scientific practices, and therapeutics outside of North America and Western Europe. As junior scholars, many of us are interested in exploring transnational network-building, collaborative research, and decolonial praxis in STS.

To facilitate dialogue on the intellectual and political stakes of this “global turn” and how we might become involved, we will be hosting a two-part series on Global STS. This first workshop will feature STS leaders who have pioneered new academic networks in Australia, Asia, and globally. We will learn about their work and discuss how grad students can become involved.

Speakers:

Kim Fortun, a cultural anthropologist with research and teaching focused on environmental risk and disaster, experimental ethnographic methods and research design, and the poetics and politics of data infrastructure.  2017-2019, Fortun served as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science, with a strong commitment to the transnational character of the society and STS as a field.  

Casper Bruun Jensen, an anthropologist of science and technology currently residing in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is the author of Ontologies for Developing Things (Sense, 2010) and Monitoring Movements in Development Aid (with Brit Ross Winthereik) (2013, MIT) and the editor of Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology with Kjetil Rödje (Berghahn, 2009) and Infrastructures and Social Complexity with Penny Harvey and Atsuro Morita (Routledge, 2016). His work focuses on climate, environments, infrastructures, and speculative and practical ontologies. 

Aalok Khandekar, an assistant professor of Anthropology/Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India. Khandekar's recent research has focused on infrastructures of environmental health governance in southern cities; as part of the Cool Infrastructures consortium, his current research examines thermal knowledges and practices as marginalized groups in the urban global South adapt to rising temperatures in their cities. Khandekar was lead curator of the STS Across Borders and Innovating STS exhibits at the 2018 and 2019 4S annual meetings and is a founding member of the Transnational STS and TransAsiaSTS networks. Khandekar currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, the Open Access journal of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).

Grant Otsuki, a lecturer in cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has a PhD in anthropology (Toronto), and an MS in STS (RPI). Previously, he was assistant professor of anthropology, University of Tsukuba, Japan. His work is in the anthropology and history of technology. Grant has written about human-machine interfaces and the history of cybernetics in Japan, postcolonial anthropology, translation, and the anthropology of ethics in Japanese and English.

Thao Phan, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. She is a feminist STS scholar who analyses the technologization of gender and race in algorithmic culture. Her work on Amazon Echo and the aesthetics of whiteness received the Nicholas C. Mullins Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) and the Most Distinguished Paper Prize by the Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA). She is also the co-founder and convenor of AusSTS—a network that brings together STS researchers across the Australasian region.

Please contact stsfuturesinitiative@gmail.com for more information. A captioned recording of the discussion will be posted on YouTube after the event.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact the STS Futures Initiative team at stsfuturesintitiative@gmail.com with as much advance notice as possible

Thursday, March 4th, 2021, 4-6pm (PST)
Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/9717309292
Meeting ID: 971 730 9292

How can humanities’ methods and foci can act as a “bridging discourse” between scientists, culture workers, and the wider public? How can students and scholars engage critically and usefully with science and technology from a humanities point of view, and what might be the implications and importance of bringing together these traditionally separate disciplinary discourses--both within and outside the academy?

This event brings together the following scholars (in order of presentation), working at the intersections of STS-oriented pedagogy, the public/digital humanities, and feminist/antiracist approaches to research:

Lindsay Thomas (U of Miami):
The "Big Humanities": Collaboration and Team-Based Open Research in the Digital Humanities

Lindsay Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami. Her research and teaching focus on cultural and media studies, contemporary US literature, and the digital humanities. Her book, Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11, will be published in March 2021 by the University of Minnesota Press. She is also a co-director of WhatEvery1Says, a digital humanities project that employs a variety of methods in data science, ethnographic research, and textual analysis to examine contemporary public discourse about the humanities on a large scale.

Abigail Droge (Emory University):
Reading with Scientists

Dr. Abigail Droge is an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow in the Department of English at Emory University. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2018 and subsequently collaborated on the Mellon-funded digital and public humanities project “WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse” as a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the history of reading in nineteenth-century Britain, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Victorian Periodicals Review, the Journal of Literature and Science, and Victorian Studies. She is particularly interested in considering how literature might help us to bridge specialized fields, and her teaching emphasizes connections between academic disciplines, time periods, and reading communities.

Nicky Rehnberg (UC Santa Barbara):
Alone, I Am Just One Tree: Community Science and the Archangel Tree Archive

Nicky Rehnberg is a UC Santa Barbara graduate student in History, studying 19th- and 20th-century Environmental Public Histories. Her dissertation explores the development of national and state parks in California, particularly focusing on the areas surrounding Sequoia National Park and Redwood National and State Parks. She works on the History and Relevancy Project with the California State Parks Service, researching and creating public tours of Carpinteria State Beach and, since COVID-19, a virtual field trip week-long event with the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation for Santa Barbara junior high schoolers.

Kalindi Vora & Sarah McCullough (Dir & Assoc Dir of Feminist Research Institute, UC Davis):
The Science We Are For: Feminist Antiracist STS Approaches to STEM

Kalindi Vora is Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and Director of the Feminist Research Institute at UC Davis. She is author of Surrogate Humanity: Race Robotics and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke 2019), co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, and Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (2015, recipient of Rachel Carson Book Prize 2018), and is one of the authors of the multigraph Technoprecarious (2020). She has published numerous ethnographic articles about gestational surrogates in India, appearing in journals such as: Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Social Identities, The South Atlantic Quarterly, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.

Sarah McCullough, PhD, is the Associate Director at the Feminist Research Institute. She is Co-PI on a NSF study that integrates justice-oriented frameworks from STS/ethnic studies into STEM graduate education. She participates in a multi-racial collective of transportation professionals dedicated to mobility justice and is the founder of the Mobility Justice Research Network. She applies her expertise in ethnographic methods, discourse and power analysis, and science & technology studies to create research partnerships between social science/humanities scholars, STEM researchers, and community partners. She earned her PhD in Cultural Studies with a DE in Feminist Theory & Research at UC Davis.

Facilitated by Rebecca Baker (UC Santa Barbara)

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact the STS Futures Initiative team at stsfuturesinitiative@gmail.com with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7days in advance of the event. 

The academic monograph has long been the cornerstone of a tenure file in the humanities and most social science fields. Despite its centrality, how books get made is too frequently part of the “hidden curriculum” of the academy. At the same time, many junior academics are increasingly thinking about writing books for trade presses, either alongside or instead of the traditional academic book. This panel will look at both routes to publication, from dissertation to book proposal, and eventually, to book.

Speakers:

Katie Helke, Editor, MIT Press. She has been the editor of the STS list since 2014.

Audra J. Wolfe, Ph.D., is a writer, editor, and historian based in Philadelphia. Her editorial and publishing consulting company, The Outside Reader, supports the work of scholars and scholarly publishers. She has previously worked at the University of Pennsylvania Press, Rutgers University Press, and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, where she additionally produced an award-winning podcast, Distillations. She is the author of two books, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (2018) and Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (2013). Her bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, as well as more scholarly venues. She tweets at @ColdWarScience.

Moira Weigel is a writer, scholar, and founding editor at Logic Magazine, currently at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (FSG Books). She received her PhD in Comparative Literature and Film and Media from Yale University in 2017.

Xiaowei Wang is the Creative Director of Logic Magazine, and is the author of Blockchain Chicken Farm and Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (FSGX Logic Magazine, 2020). 

Caroline Eisenmann is a literary agent at Frances Goldin Agency in New York. Her clients include Kyle Chayka, Linda Rui Feng, Amanda Goldblatt, James Gregor, Theresa Levitt, Micah Nemerever, Jenny Odell, Peter Kispert, Kate Wagner, Michelle Webster-Hein, and Ye Chun. Authors represented by Caroline have won the Pushcart Prize, received a NEA Writing grant, and appeared on the shortlist for the National Book Award in fiction. 

Co-hosted by Morgan G. Ames [UC Berkeley] & Hannah Zeavin [UC Berkeley]

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact the STS Futures Initiative team at stsfuturesinitiative@gmail.com with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.