The Institute for Science & Technology Studies (STS) will host a panel discussion today at 12:30pm in the Delaney Gallery, 320 Bethune College. The panel will examine the future of Science & Technology Studies.
Participating in the panel are University of Western Ontario Professor William Turkel; University of Toronto Professor Michelle Murphy; Queen’s University Professor Sergio Sismundo; and York University Professor Darrin Durant. It will be moderated by York anthropology Professor Natasha Myers.
A professor of history, Turkel is also the project director, Digital Infrastructure for the Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada Strategic Knowledge Cluster NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment. His research and teaching draws on, integrates and tries to extend a number of different disciplines, including environmental and public history, the histories of science and technology, ‘big history’, science and technology studies, computation, and studies of place and social memory.
Murphy’s research interests include the history of technoscience, sex, gender, race, environmental politics and capitalism in the United States through transnational and post-colonial theoretical perspectives. She is the author of Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers (Duke University Press, 2006), which examines history of low-level exposures and the production of uncertainty in twentieth century American environmental politics, with a focus on labor and office buildings.
Sismundo’s research explores the philosophical consequences of seeing science as a thoroughly social activity. He is examining how historical and sociological work on the practice of science affect our views of a diverse set of issues in the philosophy of science, from the realism/anti-realism debate to the scope of standpoint epistemologies.
Durant’s primary field of research concerns nuclear waste disposal, specifically debates over technical assessments and policy-making priorities between credentialed experts, the lay public and social movements. His theoretical interests focus upon the links between topics in STS (such as lay public involvement in technical controversies) and political philosophy (such as different notions of democracy, the issue of minority and majority rights, the controversy over the role of social identities in democratic decision-making, the perils of counter-cultural thinking, and the unfortunate withering of the idea of a common good.
Meyers is an anthropologist working in the field of science and technology. Her research examines the lively visual cultures that thrive in contemporary life science laboratories and classrooms. She is curious about how laboratories operate as spaces for producing scientists and tracks how pedagogy and training shape forms of knowing, ways of seeing and modes of embodiment in the practical cultures of technoscience.
The panel is free and open to the community. For more information, visit the Science & Technology Studies website.