Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

Events

STS Circle

The STS Circle at Harvard meets weekly during the academic semester. For Fall 2025, all meetings are planned to take place in person on Mondays, from 12:15-2:00 p.m., in CGIS South S354, 1730 Cambridge Street unless otherwise noted. Sandwich lunches will be provided. To receive the abstract and bio for each talk, and to register to attend, please join our mailing list.

Spring 2026

» More information and past schedules

Science & Democracy Lecture Series

Once a semester, the STS Program, with co-sponsorship from other local institutions, hosts an installation in its Science and Democracy Lecture Series.

In the face of climate catastrophe, why have existing conceptions of collective life appeared so impervious to critique? One concept stands out: the idea of the economy and our preoccupation with its continued growth. For most people, including its critics, economic growth appears as the inevitable movement of capitalist society, driven by a process of technological improvement or an endless accumulation of capital. It is almost never connected to capitalization, or the capitalist modes of indebting and extracting payment from the future. Growth is better understood as a device for securing the repayment of debt. This does not make it any less damaging to collective well-being. But it does allow growth to be grasped not as the inevitable movement of capitalist development but as a more recent arrangement that arises from—rather than simply causing—a mode of living at the expense of the future.  

Co-sponsored by Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Center for the Environment (A Center of the Salata Institute), and the McQuillan Institute.

» Lecture series archive

Workshops and Panels

Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, generative AI technologies have become an unmistakable part of the Harvard landscape. Yet the rapid normalization of AI in university life and beyond has occurred with little attention to big questions about what these developments mean—for the ways we want to think, the people we wish to be, and the societies we hope to inhabit. Why do people around the world accept projections from AI companies as inevitable, whether for their personal relationships or professional futures? How did a handful of billionaires in Silicon Valley come to define our ideas of progress and social well-being around the development of AI? Why does Silicon Valley dominate the conversation on AI when the decisions they make, with little public oversight, could radically transform the human future? And what kind of world will today's students graduate into? This town hall presents an opportunity to reflect on these issues and help chart a different path, as part of a new grassroots movement Humans First. The event will provide a forum for students to share their hopes, excitement, fears, and uncertainties around AI. We hope to explore how to generate the political power to bring AI development under democratic control and animate a vision for how democracy can be preserved, rethought, and expanded as the power of AI grows.

» Workshops and panels archive

Program news

Submit to the Against Inevitability anthology by March 23!      

STS Fellow Pariroo Rattan recently defended her dissertation, "A Marketplace for Populism: The Moral Politics of Digitization in India's Informal Economy," joining Nicole and Hilton to complete our trio of outstanding newly minted doctors.

Congratulations to our extraordinary STS Fellows Nicole West Bassoff and Hilton Simmet, the first graduates to hold a PhD in Public Policy on the Science, Technology and Policy Studies track! Nicole's dissertation is titled "Can Cities Be Smart? Urban Governance in the Digital Age," and Hilton's is "Just Economics: Inequality and Political Culture in Cross-National Perspective."

Two STS Undergraduate Fellows received a Hoopes Prize for their senior theses — Katie Burstein with “The Body Restored: Constructions of the Patient in the Cult of Asclepius,” and Emil Massad with “We Never Said You Weren’t Exposed: Risk in the Aftermath of the Train Derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.”

Join us for the Global Observatory for Genome Editing International Summit on May 21-23. Register and learn more here.

Register here for a panel discussion on April 24 regarding recent changes to federal research funding, co-hosted with the Harvard Griffin GSAS Science Policy Group.

The 2025 STS Undergraduate Essay Prize contest is now open. Submissions are due here by April 14, 2025.

The 2025-2026 STS Fellows application is now OPEN. Application deadline has been extended to March 14, 2025.

Register to attend the launch symposium on October 25 for the McQuillan Institute for Science, Technology and the Human Future.

Sheila Jasanoff was honored with the Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Iota Excellence in Teaching prize.

» Program news archive