2024-25 Colloquium Series
10 Sept 2024 | Christoph Lynn Hanssmann
5:30–7:00pm | Andrews House 110
Sick of it all: Care without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists are Changing Medicine
Trans depathologization has often centered around the claim “We’re trans; we’re not sick.” However, activists’ efforts to push back against psychiatric diagnoses are increasingly being identified as ableist in their work to distinguish trans wellness and sanity from “true” forms of mental pathology. Given these critiques, what’s useful now about thinking with depathologization? Rather than focusing solely on disavowals of disability, this talk examines depathologization as a more expansive set of phenomena. Drawing on ethnographic and document-based research in New York City and Buenos Aires between 2012–2018, it analyzes various strands of trans depathologization activism, their specific objectives, and their dispersed effects.
Looking to interviews, historiography, and activist writing and art, scholar Christoph Hanssmann shows how activists theorized pathologization and depathologization in different ways, leading to a range of political visions. Bringing together critiques of trans normativity, feminist science and technology studies, and analyses of care and political economy, he argues that depathologization must be recognized diffractively and in a broader historical and political landscape. In so doing, he focuses on how coalition-focused activists approached depathologization with a desire not only to change medicine, but also to intervene in structures of racialized immiseration and to transform care politics.
26 Sept 2024 | Athia Choudhury
4-5:30pm | Data Science Institute 302
Sociotechnical Computing, Evaluation, and Governance
The phrase “sociotechnical” has become a key part of research and policy work on AI governance. The portmanteau acknowledges a core premise of STS scholarship - that understanding how we develop and deploy technology in ways that benefit all people must be deeply contextual. As a consequence, there is a growing sense that the way we do AI research, the way we evaluate the impact of AI systems, and the way we design policy around the governance of AI systems, must bring the societal and the technological together - in effect, becoming sociotechnical.
I’ll illustrate this trend with examples and suggest ways for fruitful collaborations between scholars who live in different “cities” in this sociotechnical landscape.
6 Feb 2025 | Tiago Saraiva
4-5:30pm | Location TBD
Statistics for a Decolonial World
This talk explores the role of statistical practices in decolonizing the world. It follows the work of Pandurang Sukhatme at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations; Henry A. Wallace at Iowa State University and the USDA; and Amílcar Cabral as surveyor for the Portuguese colonial government and guerrilla leader in Guinea Bissau. Their engagement with statistics, namely with sampling and randomization, enables the historical weaving of projects of world governance at the UN, Indian independence, and West African liberation movements. In this connected history of decolonization, statistical methods became central not only to denounce the injustices of the colonial order, but also to unveil forms of agency from below for worldmaking after empire.
Tiago Saraiva is Full Professor of History at Drexel University, coeditor of the journal History and Technology, and of the Cambridge History of Technology. He is an historian of science and technology interested in the connections between science, technology, crops, and politics at the global scale. He is the author of Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (MIT Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Pfizer Prize awarded by the History of Science Society (HSS) and co-author of Moving Crops and the Scales of History (Yale University Press, 2023), which won the award for best scholarly book by both the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and the World History Association.
13 March 2025 | Christa Kuljian
4-5:30pm | Location TBD
Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science
Our Science Ourselves tells the story of a trailblazing network of women scientists in the Boston area in the 1970s, 80s and 90s including Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Banu Subramaniam. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women’s movement, and organizations like Science for the People and the Combahee River Collective, they began to develop feminist and anti-racist critiques of science. The book tells the origin story of feminist science studies, and also illustrates how engaging with these critiques is often difficult for many women scientists, including Nancy Hopkins, initially a “reluctant feminist.”
Christa Kuljian is a historian of science, science writer, and the author of two previous books – Sanctuary and Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins (both published with Jacana Media). Darwin’s Hunch was short listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction. Originally from the Boston area, Christa has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for over 30 years. She is a Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University. In addition to her undergraduate degree in the History of Science from Harvard, she holds a Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton (1989) and an MA in Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand (2007).
10 April 2025 | Katerina Korola
4-5:30pm | Location TBD
Images of Exposure: Atmosphere, Labour, and Toxicity in the Socialist Film Factory
In the mid-1960s, the industrial photographer Wolfgang G. Schröter turned his camera on the VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen. Located at the center of East Germany’s “Chemical Triangle,” the Filmfabrik was, at the time, Europe’s largest producer of color film, second only to Kodak in the world. Guiding the viewer from the manufacture of celluloid to the packaging of the finished film, Schröter’s photographs present the (gendered) labour of photographic manufacturing as a chromatic spectacle in its own right. In doing so, the series did more than advertise the factory’s product line. It also promoted an ostensibly socialist vision of chemical modernity, to be disseminated within the GDR and abroad.
This talk takes Schröter’s series as an opportunity to explore the intertwined histories of photography, chemistry, and industrial exposure in the socialist film factory. More specifically, it considers how the act of picturing the film factory (and the labour within) provokes a confrontation with the fundamental ambivalence of photochemical color. As I argue, color, in this context, functions as both visual spectacle and material witness, registering the dangerous chemical intimacy behind the manufacture of photosensitive materials. Though created for the purpose of advertising, Schröter’s series ultimately emerges as an unlikely archive that not only reveals the material conditions of photographic production, but also prompts us to reflect on the medium’s toxicity, the consequences of which continue to shape life in the region today.
17 April 2025 | Rijul Kochhar
4-5:30pm | Location TBD
Title & Abstract TBD
2023-24 Colloquium Series
Feb 15 | Laura Stark & Xan Chacko
4-5:30pm | Smith-Buonanno Hall 207
No thanks: Acknowledgment in Isis
This article undertakes a history of labor as seen through practice of acknowledgement in the journals of the History of Science Society. It situates the practice of acknowledgement within the broader historiography of science and documents what has been intentionally removed from Isis acknowledgements over the years. It focuses on the Isis editorial offices with special attention to the career of copy editor, Joan Vandegrift. Alongside a reading of select printed acknowledgements, this article offers an unprinted history of labor in the journal’s office. It shows how the history of acknowledgements in the Society’s journals echoes shifts in the field. Overall, the aim is to support better understanding, continued rewriting, and urgent transformation of the labor inequalities in our field.
Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory. She is author of Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research, which was published in 2012 by University of Chicago Press.
Xan Chacko is Lecturer in STS at Brown University. She is the co-editor of Invisible Labour in Modern Science, which was published in 2022 by Rowman and Littlefield.
Feb 22: Anne Fausto Sterling
“Chair’s Office” Seminar Room, 1st floor of Peter Green House
"NARRATING GENDER/SEX: HOW TO STUDY IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT AS A DYNAMIC, EMBODIED, SPECTRUM"
ABSTRACT:
Current dogma has it that gender/sex identity somehow magically appears in young children between the ages of two and three years. Before that there was nothing, after that a static and monopole sense of self. And in any normative description the model child is assumed to be white. But this belief is almost certainly wrong. Identity is continuous, dynamic and cumulative and culturally varied. The infant, from birth or perhaps even earlier, starts to accumulate subjective experiences that ultimately contribute to identity formation. It is time to understand how we came to believe in fixed, normative, racially constricted, binary gender/sex/uality, and why it is no longer a useful approach to understanding development.
Feb 29 | Diana Pardo Pedraza
Noon-1pm | Conde Room, Nicholson House
Containing Minefields: From Matters of Fear to Matters of Fact
Within Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict, improvised landmines have sown suspicion in the countryside. Deployed irregularly by rebel groups, these explosive devices have not only turned rural areas into “explosive fields” but also into unsettling “landscapes of suspicion.” This presentation delves into the widely adopted demining approach of Land Release, focusing particularly on its pivotal initial step—the Non-Technical Survey (NTS). I examine the technical processes and inscriptional devices through which a rather odd group of demining collaborators attempts to contain landmine-related suspicions by creating landscapes of certainty. These are spaces where the presence or absence of explosive devices is established as a fact, not as a “matter of fear,” as a demining technician put it. While the latter refers to local communities’ affective experiences of uncertainty, the former signifies the fabrication of a conclusive reality of explosive violence.
Dr. Pardo Pedraza is an assistant professor of anthropology and international affairs at the George Washington University and a 2023=24 Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe institute. Her ethnographic research focuses on improvised explosive devices and mine clearance and explores (de)militarized landscapes, humanitarian relations of care, and post-conflict politics.
This colloquium is a work in progress where we hope to solicit feedback from the audience.
Please register here if you would like to receive the draft chapter. (https://forms.gle/FhwSfoD7eS2q6YRVA)
April 11 | Sarah McCullough
Noon-1pm | Conde Room, Nicholson House
Title: Feminist STS as a Tool for Training Justice-Motivated Scientists
This talk will discuss the Asking Different Questions program, a research training designed to provide a broader swath of scientists with literacy in STS, particularly feminist and critical race STS. These fields offer insights into how histories of oppression such as colonialism, patriarchy and white supremacy continue to influence scientific practice today. They also offer alternative approaches and methodologies that can better address the reality of bias in research. The result is scientists motivated to transform their fields into spaces welcoming to more just and equitable research.
The integration of STS and scientific practice has the potential to strengthen the validity of science and account for long-neglected expertise coming from those historically excluded from research. Many feminist STS scholars were trained as scientists and found traditional scientific practice to be unwelcoming to alternative modes of knowledge production. Have we reached a point where feminist and justice-oriented scientists with an STS lens can continue to work in science and even flourish?
Sarah Rebolloso McCullough, PhD, is the Associate Director at the Feminist Research Institute and Director of the Environmental Justice Leaders Program at UC Davis, where 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. Her two major project are running a research training program that teaches feminist STS to justice-driven STEM researchers and studying mobility justice She earned her PhD in Cultural Studies with a designated emphasis in Feminist Theory & Research at UC Davis.
April 25: Elaine Ayers
Noon-1:30pm | Conde Room, Nicholson House
Moss as Medium: Colonial Plant Transportation and the Materiality of Movement"
While historians of colonial natural history have long described how plants, animals, and other “natural” specimens were culled and collected in the field and, in turn, ordered and displayed at “centralized” institutions like museums, herbaria, and botanical gardens, few have considered the material media facilitating those processes of global shipping and circulation. Acting as a natural technology that functioned much like the modern packing noodle, moss—that commonplace, ancient, and mundane group of miniscule plants—was used to safely cushion more “valuable” specimens like cinchona saplings, taxidermied birds of paradise, and fragile porcelain across oceans. Gathered in one environment and “invisibly” transported to various locations via glass case or wooden crate, either ignored or interpreted in its own right by colonial naturalists, moss drove the global transformation of rainforests into monocultured plantations, the displacement of species into radically new environments, and the exploitative hoarding of objects in colonial institutions.
May 2nd: Arnon Levy
Noon-1:30pm | Conde Room, Nicholson House
Values in science: a plea for pessimism
Recent philosophy of science has seen a retreat from the once-dominant value-free ideal for science – the notion that scientists should conduct research without appealing to moral, social and political considerations. There are several sources for this. Among them: feminist philosophers of science have argued that scientific knowers are inherently situated and their work must therefore be value-laden. The fact that “thick” concepts and “mixed claims” are central to many areas of science is seen as necessitating value judgments by scientists. Perhaps most prominently, the argument from inductive risk has convinced even relatively conservative philosophers that scientists must rely on values to manage tradeoffs among different sorts of error.
While I accept that these arguments present formidable challenges to the feasibility of the value-free ideal, I aim to challenge the current consensus on two important fronts. First, I think that the value-laden picture seriously understates the dangers of a world in which scientists make value judgements, specifically in the course of ongoing work. The relative ideological homogeneity of present-day Anglo-Saxon academia makes this somewhat harder to appreciate, so I illustrate the worry with examples from other times and places. Second, I stress the ways in which the value-free ideal is an ideal, a normative standard. I urge that we take seriously the difference between refuting an ideal and showing how hard, or even virtually impossible, it is to meet. We should compare the merits of value-freedom to those of other ideals, and in doing so, we should make fairly pessimistic assumptions about how well individual working scientists will live up to them.