Last week SC&I faculty, doctoral students, and recent alums traveled north to Toronto to attend the 50th anniversary meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference. The 4S conference is known for meditations on boundary objects, infrastructure, cyborg manifestos, and the importance of not abandoning our monsters (technology).
The Rutgers STS Working Group held our first networking event on Thursday to give fellow travelers and cyborgs a chance to catch up or meet for the first time over samosas and beverages. Over 30 colleagues from various fields and institutions attended. Topics of conversation ranged from the Mertonian values of astrophysicists and adversarial reanalysis of EPA pollution data, to how to get an academic book contract. Either way, the working group was working.
After the snacks came the scholarship. At a meeting organized around the themes of “TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures,” our Rutgers School of Communication and Information comrades had questions about who gets to build the future and what kinds of technologies they promise.
In a panel on corporate power and ghost management, Professor of Journalism and Media Studies Melissa Aronczyk discussed how professional consultants are shaping climate change. Ph.D. student Nayana Kirasur shared new research on India’s DigiLocker platform and its promises of paperless documentation in a session on state counting and accounting bureaucracy. Ph.D. student Margo Lee and Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies Youngrim Kim presented collective resistance to data centers in South Korea. Doctoral student Grant Lattanzi presented his ongoing work examining Governors Island’s reinvention as a climate-tech hub. Just like today, the technoscientific future will probably still have zoning disputes, paperwork, and management consultants.
Our colleagues also organized a number of panels, convening scholars across a range of topics from critical data studies, AI and labor, infrastructure and the environment. Associate Professor of Library and Information Science Britt Paris co-organized sessions on resisting the datafied university (with Ph.D. alumna Emma May), co-facilitated a packed "making and doing" workshop on the same topic, contributed to a book roundtable panel on people-centered infrastructure, and presented co-authored work on technological frontierism. Lattanzi and doctoral student Kaitlyn Rich co-organized three power-house sessions on infrastructure, environments, and energy; Lattanzi also helped convene researchers of the digital everyday. Associate Professor of Library and Information Science Amelia Acker co-organized two sessions on openness and open-science futures in STS.
Congratulations to our doctoral students and faculty for bringing their amazing research to the field of STS and keeping the questions difficult! Cyborgs need colleagues, too.
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