Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

Harvard Kennedy School of Government | Harvard University

STS Circle at Harvard

STS Circle logo

The STS Circle at Harvard provides a space for weekly conversations about contemporary issues in science and technology that are relevant to fields such as anthropology, history of science, sociology, STS, law, government, public policy, and the natural sciences. Dissertation writers and recent graduates are working on exciting topics that intersect with STS at the edges of their home disciplines. The Circle offers wide exposure to such emerging STS scholarship that otherwise has no forum at Harvard.

The STS Circle at Harvard meets weekly during the academic semester. For Spring 2023, all meetings are planned to take place in person on Mondays, from 12:15-2:00 p.m., in CGIS South S050, 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.

The STS Circle at Harvard is co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2024

Jan. 29:
Jules Gill-Peterson (Johns Hopkins, History)
Who Really Invented Gender? Transvestites and the Psychologization of Class
Feb. 5:
Spencer Doyle (Harvard STS and Physics)
Maintaining the Atom: US Nuclear Energy Policy 70 Years After “Atoms for Peace”
Feb. 12:
Paul Thomas Clarke (Harvard, Anthropology)
Risk is the Life Source: Labor and Working-class Consciousness in Johannesburg’s Security Industry
Feb. 26:
David S. Jones (Harvard Medical School/History of Science)
The Health Effects of Air Pollution: The Harvard Six Cities Study as a Generator of Surprises
Mar. 4:
Jacquelene Mwangi (Harvard Law School)
Techno-colonialism vs. Techno-utopianism in Historical Perspective
Mar. 18:
Jason Furman (HKS and Economics)
Economists Can’t Predict the Future, But Can They Agree on the Past?
Mar. 25:
Alexander Rewegan (MIT, HASTS)
Settler Environmentality and the Making of a Post-Prohibition Drug Terroir
Apr. 1:
Swarnabh Ghosh (Harvard STS and Architecture)
Infrastructuration: Colonial Irrigation and the Spacetime of Fossil Capitalism
Apr. 8:
Timothy Loh (MIT, HASTS)
Not Modern Enough: Lexical Anxieties over Jordanian Sign Language
Apr. 15:
Natalie Ngai (Boston College, Communication)
Mediated Animal-human Relations
Apr. 22:
Abigail Coplin (Vassar, Sociology and STS)
Biopolitical Entanglements: The Political Economy and Nationalist Imaginaries of China’s Genetic Data Troves
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2023

Sep. 11:
Kate Brown (HASTS, MIT)
Big Brother and the Nuclear Security State®: MADE IN AMERICA
Sep. 18:
Maddy Kroot (Geography, Clark University)
Decarbonization vs. Democratization? Participatory Politics and the New England Grid
Sep. 25:
Austin Clyde (Computer Science, University of Chicago)
The Prompt Engineer's Paradox: The Hidden Human Effort in AI Systems
Oct. 2:
Sannoy Das (Harvard Law School)
Instruments of the Rich: Subsidies and the Idea of the International Economy
Oct. 16:
Lucía Ortiz de Zárate Alcarazo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Framing Artificial Intelligence in Spain, Chile, and Mexico
Oct. 23:
Iris Hilbrich (Sociology, University of Hamburg)
Geoengineering the Climate: Sociotechnical Transformations and Changing Knowledge Practices in the Anthropocene
Oct. 30:
Anna Thieser (Columbia, Sociology)
Open Network of the Saints: Closure and Translation in the Maintenance of Ethereum
Nov. 6:
Adam Longenbach (Harvard GSD)
Hate Architecture: Combat Towns and the Construction of the Enemy
Nov. 13:
Michèle Lamont (Sociology, Harvard)
The Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation (SVE): From Peer Review to Concepts of Worth
Nov. 20:
Sushant Kumar (Public Policy, Northeastern)
From Population to People: Deconstructing the Population Control Debate in India
Nov. 27:
Andrew Stokols (Urban Studies & Planning, MIT)
Building Digital Cities and Digital Nations in the Age of Big Data
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2023

Jan. 30:
Jamie Wong (HASTS, MIT)
Crowdsourced Cats: Machine Learning as Culture in Chinese Governance
Feb. 6:
Sam Weiss Evans (Harvard STS & Harvard SEAS)
Governance of Security Concerns in Science
Feb. 13:
Rahul Bhatia (Harvard Radcliffe Institute)
India’s Biometric Identity Project
LOCATION CHANGE: Bell Hall, Belfer Building, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK St
Feb. 27:
Marlise Schneider (Technical University Munich & Harvard STS)
Ever Upward? Microchip Futures for New York’s Rustbelt
Mar. 6:
Arunabh Ghosh (History, Harvard)
China and Global Small Hydropower in the 1980s
Mar. 20:
Abigail Coplin (Vassar)
The Precarious Expert: Science and the State During China’s GMO Controversy
Mar. 27:
Martin Abbott (S&TS, Cornell)
Fragile New Orleans. Fortress New Orleans
Apr. 3:
Andy Murray (Harvard STS)
Democracy in a Dish? Open Insulin and the Democratization of Biotechnology
Apr. 10:
Elizabeth Dietz (ASU & Harvard STS)
No Choice But to Choose: Informed Consent, Abortion, and the Politics of Denying Politics
Apr. 17:
Larry Au (City College of New York)
Chinese Scientists and Imaginaries of Global Science
Apr. 24:
Neil Safier (Brown)
Translating the Plantationocene from the Prevolutionary Caribbean to Colonial Brazil
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2022

Sep. 12:
Brenda Dvoskin (Harvard Law School)
Expert Governance of Online Speech
Sep. 19:
Archon Fung (Harvard Kennedy School)
Epistemic Polarization: Who Killed the Truth and Can We Resurrect It?
Sep. 26:
Edward R. Carr (Clark University, International Development, Community, and Environment)
Transformational Adaptation as an Applied STS Problem
Oct. 3:
Sam Bookman (Harvard Law School)
What We Talk About When We Talk About “Environmental Constitutionalism”
Oct. 17:
Aniket De (Harvard University, History)
Racial Segregation and Colonial Self-Government: South Africa and British India, 1900–35
Oct. 24:
Lundy Braun (Brown University, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine)
Algorithms, Race, and Racism: Historical Perspectives
Oct. 31:
Anthony Acciavatti (Yale University, Architecture)
Sensing Village Life: Satellites, Lies, and Videotape in India
Nov. 7:
Pierre Delvenne (University of Liège, Political Science)
Moving Cells, Making Value: The Biography of Living Things Revisited
Nov. 14:
Tawanna Dillahunt (University of Michigan, Information)
Alternative Narratives of Digital Futures: A Discussion of Equitable Approaches
Nov. 21:
José Perillan (Vassar College, Physics and STS)
Science Between Myth and History: Writing the Past to Control the Future
Nov. 28:
Karl Dudman (Harvard STS)
Cooperative Extension, Climate Science, and the Quest for the Public Good
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2022

Jan. 31:
Michelle Spektor (MIT HASTS)
Quantifying the 'National Physique': Deterioration, Degeneracy, and the Proposed British National Anthropometric Survey of 1904
Feb. 7:
Madisson Whitman (Center for Science & Society, Columbia)
As Close to Robot as Possible: The Making of Data Subjects in Higher Education
Feb. 14:
Tiffany Nichols (History of Science, Harvard)
Expanding the Astrophysics Laboratory: Environment, Ecosystem, and Experiment
Feb. 28:
Jason Jackson (DUSP, MITl)
Moral Orders of Capitalist Legitimacy In India
Mar. 7:
Laura Diaz Anadon (Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance, Cambridge University)
Technology Spillovers in the Energy Transition
Mar. 21:
Michaela Thompson (HUCE, Harvard)
Speaking (for) Sharks: Contested Expertise in Marine Conversation
Mar. 28:
Louis Hyman (ILR School, Cornell)
Migrant Labor and the Origin of Silicon Valley
Apr. 4:
Mary Gray (Microsoft Research, NE)
The Trouble with Dogfood: Towards a Theory of Mutuality in Computing
Apr. 11:
Gordon Hanson (Harvard Kennedy School)
Spatial Economic Analysis
Apr. 18:
Nicole Sintetos (Brown, Harvard STS)
Bureaucratizing Settler Colonialism: Race, Labor, and the Origins of the Bureau of Reclamation
Apr. 25:
Ya-Wen Lei (Sociology, Harvard)
Upgrading the Nation: Promise and Peril of Techno-Developmentalism in China
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2021

Sep. 13:
Eric Beerbohm (Government, Harvard)
How to Gaslight Citizens
Sep. 20:
Jack Hensley (SEAS, Harvard)
Geoengineering the Climate with a Human-made Volcano
Sep. 27:
Marion Boulicault (Philosophy, MIT)
Gender, Time, and the Measurement of Fertility
Oct. 4:
Mathias Risse (Harvard Kennedy School)
The Truth Will Not Set You Free: Is There a Right to It Anyway?
Oct. 18:
Gabriel Dorthe (IASS Potsdam & Harvard STS)
Sociotechnical Promises and Their By-products
Oct. 25:
Abby Spinak (Harvard GSD)
Electricity and Empowerment: Towards a More Critical Energy History
Nov. 1:
Onur Ozgode (Harvard STS)
Fractals of Governance: The Management of Systemic Risk at the Limits of Liberalism, 1913–2010
Nov. 8:
Anna Lvovsky (Harvard Law)
Vice Patrol: Antigay Policing and the Politics of Knowledge before Stonewall
Nov. 15:
Elettra Bietti (Harvard Law)
A Genealogy of Digital Platform Regulation
Nov. 22:
Lily Hu (Applied Math and Philosophy, Harvard)
Categories and Causation in the Social Sciences
Nov. 29:
Alex Wellerstein (STS, Stevens Institute of Technology)
How to Lose a Lot of Weapons-Grade Uranium and Get Away with It
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2021

Feb. 1:
Dwai Banerjee (STS, MIT)
The Global Politics of Emergency Vaccines: A Primer on Decolonizing the Pandemic
Feb. 8:
Makoto Takahashi (MCTS, TU Munich)
The Improvised Expert: Performing Authority in Fukushima
Feb. 22:
Deborah Coen (History of Science, Yale)
What's the Use of Climate Science? Towards a History of the Usable Turn
Mar. 8:
Jessica Lynn Dickson (AAAS, Harvard)
Extracting Ghosts: 'Hollywood' World-building through Sites of Ruination in South Africa
Mar. 15:
Colleen Lanier Christensen (History of Science, Harvard)
Chemical Harmonies: The Politics of Standardized Practices and Controls
Mar. 22:
Roxana Vatanparast (STS, Harvard)
"Of Nations Linked Together": Cables, the League of Nations & the Construction of Imagined Global Communities
Mar. 29:
Jeannette Estruth (History, Bard)
Worker Coalitions in the Reagan-Era Silicon Valley
Apr. 5:
Lisa Messeri (Anthropology, Yale)
Technological Terroir: Tracing the Cultivation of "Tech" in Los Angeles
Apr. 12:
Marc F. Aidinoff (HASTS, MIT)
Digital Welfare Reform: The Constitutional Project of Computerizing Government
Apr. 19:
Elena Sobrino (HASTS, MIT)
Economy's Nature: Interrogating Green Chemistry from the Rust Belt
Apr. 26:
Ed Hackett (Sociology, Brandeis)
Sociological Ambivalence Revisited
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2020

Sep. 14:
Matthew Sample (STS, Harvard)
Imagining Responsibility, Imagining Responsibly: Reflecting on Our Shared Understandings of Science
Sep. 21:
Janet A. Vertesi (Sociology, Princeton)
Shaping Science: Organizations, Cultures, and Decision-Making on NASA's Teams
Sep. 28:
Whitney E. Laemmli (History, Carnegie Mellon)
"Alien Gesticulations": Movement Science in Germany, 1928-1936
Oct. 5:
Andre Uhl (Visual Studies, Harvard)
Shifting Baselines—Artificial Intelligence and the Ethical Singularity
Oct. 19:
Noah Walker-Crawford (Social Anthropology, University of Manchester)
The Politics of Personhood in Climate Change Litigation
Oct. 26:
Meg Perret (History of Science, Harvard)
"Climate Change Creates Female Super-Race": Male Extinction, Endangered Turtles & Coral Reef Collapse
Nov. 2:
Ben Hurlbut (Center for Biology and Society, ASU)
Can't Stop Progress: Inevitability as Authorization in the Politics of Genome Editing
Nov. 9:
Noelle Eckley Selin (MIT) and Henrik Selin (Boston University)
Mercury Stories: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Analyzing Sustainability Challenges
Nov. 16:
JoAnne Yates (MIT) and Craig Murphy (Wellesley)
Where Standards and Regulations Meet: Referring to Standards in US and European Regulation Since 1945
Nov. 23:
Daniel Hirschman (Sociology, Brown)
The Costs of Climate Change
Nov. 30:
Jayita Sarkar (Diplomatic History, Boston University)
Ploughshares and Swords: Technopolitics and Geopolitics in India's Nuclear Program
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2020

Jan. 27:
Shuang Lu Frost (Harvard, Anthropology)
Moralizing Disruption: China's Ride-Hailing Revolution
Feb. 3:
George Paul Meiu (Harvard, Anthropology)
Queer Objects and the Rush to Rescue: The Other Side of Sexuality Politics in Kenya
Feb. 10:
Jonathan Moch (Harvard, Earth and Planetary Sciences)
Black Carbon, Climate, and Air Quality: An Unwinnable 'Win-Win' Solution
Feb. 24:
Jacob D. Moses (Harvard, History of Science)
Remaking the Regretful Agent: Cancer Surgery, Medical Harm, and the Role of Affect in Therapeutic Reversals
Mar. 2:
Momin M. Malik (Harvard, Berkman Klein Center)
Critical Technical Practice Revisited: Towards ``Analytic Actors
Mar. 9:
Héctor Beltrán (MIT, Anthropology)
Code Work: Hacking Across the Techno-Borderlands
(Remaining meetings for Spring 2020 were cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.)
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2019

Sep. 9:
Moon Duchin (Tufts, Mathematics)
Computation and the Search for Fairness in Representative Democracy
Sep. 16:
Christopher Winship (Harvard, Sociology)
Viral Science and the Tragedy of the Scientific Commons
Sep. 23:
Karen Huang (Harvard, Organizational Behavior/Harvard STS)
Computational Social Science: 10 Years Later
Sep. 30:
Eden Medina (MIT, HASTS)
When Repair Becomes Harm: Science, Law, and the Pursuit of Justice in Chile
Oct. 7:
Eram Alam (Harvard, History of Science)
Foreign Bodies: On Medicine and Labor in the United States
Oct. 21:
Przemyslaw Palka (Yale Law School)
The (Non)Imaginaries of “Data” in Law, and their Politics
Note: CGIS S250
Oct. 28:
Michael Mendez (Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies)
Climate Change from the Streets
Nov. 4:
Luisa Reis Castro (MIT, HASTS)
“To Enter the Territory”: Mosquitoes, Health, and Science in the streets of Rio de Janeiro
Nov. 11:
Louis Gerdelan (Harvard, History)
Sin, Science and Seismic Shocks: The Jamaica Earthquake of 1692 and the Science of Disaster
Nov. 18:
Anne Pollock (King’s College, London)
Race and Biopolitics in 21st-Century America
Note: CGIS S250
Nov. 25:
Gili Vidan (Harvard, History of Science/Harvard STS)
The Way We Trust Today: Encryption as an Instrument of Decentralization
Note: CGIS S250
Dec. 2:
Beth Michelle Semel (MIT, HASTS)
Listening Like a Computer: Computational Psychiatry and the Re-coding of Psychiatric Screening
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2019

Feb. 4:
Benjamin Tyler Wilson (Harvard, History of Science)
Strategies of Conflict: Performing Responsibility in the Missile Age
Feb. 11:
Durba Mitra (Harvard, Women, Gender and Sexuality)
Abortion and the Forensics of Sexuality in Colonial India
Feb. 25:
Daniel Francis Zizzamia (Harvard, Solar Geoengineering)
American Geomimesis: The Earth's Past and Engineering Environments
Mar. 4:
Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney, History)
Negotiating Personhood and Precision in Recent Biomedicine
Mar. 11:
Marianne F. Potvin (Harvard, GSD)
Humanitarian Planners in the "Century of the Unsettled Man"
Mar. 25:
Eli Nelson (Williams College, Anthropology)
Repossessing the Wilderness: New Deal Sciences in the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation
Apr. 1:
Geneva Smith (University of New Mexico, Anthropology, and Harvard, STS)
The Law of the Land: Charting Exclusion Zones at the Limits of Argentina's Soybean Futures
Apr. 8:
Jia Hui Lee (MIT, HASTS)
"A Rat By Any Other Name": Practices of Naming and Classifying Rodents in Morogoro, Tanzania
Apr. 15:
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Simon Fraser University, School of Communication)
Discriminating Data
Apr. 22:
Natalia Gutkowski (Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies)
Materializing Time: The Techno-Scientific Transformation of Olive Agriculture in Israel/Palestine
Apr. 29:
Robin Celikates (University of Amsterdam, Philosophy)
Agency and Automation: Digital Disobedience and Its Infrastructure
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2018

Sep. 10:
Whitney Robles (Harvard, American Studies)
Natural History in Two Dimensions
Sep. 17:
StefanSchäfer (Potsdam IASS and Harvard STS)
Multiple Carbons: Ontologies and Governance in the Climate Regime
Sep. 24:
Eugene T. Richardson (Harvard, HMS)
Not-so-big Data and Ebola Virus Disease
Oct. 1:
Declan Kuch (University of New South Wales, Environmental Humanities)
Animals as Patients, Models and Infrastructure in Precision Bioscience
Oct. 15:
Nick Seaver (Tufts, Anthropology)
Interpretability, or Learning to Listen to Algorithms
Oct. 22:
Tito Brige de Carvalho (Harvard, STS)
A Rational Framework for What? Race and the Ethos of Science from the Modern Synthesis to Genomics
Oct. 29:
Hans Pols (Sydney, History and Philosophy of Science)
Nurturing Indonesia: Medicine and Decolonisation in the Dutch East Indies
Nov. 5:
Julie Wosk (SUNY Maritime College)
“Perfect Woman”: Female Robots, Alluring Androids, and Electronic Eves
Nov. 12:
Matthew Bunn (Harvard Kennedy School)
Cultures of Nuclear Security: How Different Countries Decide How to Protect their Nuclear Facilities
Nov. 19:
Caley D. Horan (MIT, History)
Investing in the Stars: The Astrology of Money and Markets in the Twentieth-Century United States
Nov. 26:
Moira Weigel (Harvard, Society of Fellows)
Survival of the Sexiest: NLP, EP, PUAs, and Other “Sciences” of Seduction on the Alt Right
Dec. 3:
Olga Breininger-Umetayeva (Harvard, Slavic)
Failed Sociotechnical Imaginaries: Chechnya as the “Second Kuwait”
Note: Bowie-Vernon Room, K262, CGIS North, 1737 Cambridge St
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2018

Jan. 29:
Alma Steingart (Harvard, Society of Fellows)
Democracy by the Numbers: The Twentieth-Century Fight over US Congressional Reapportionment
Feb. 5:
Devin Kennedy (Harvard, History of Science)
The Machine and the Market: US Financial Governance in the Age of the Computer: 1960-1975
Feb. 12:
Daniel Hirschman (Brown, Sociology)
The Stylized Facts of Inequality
Feb. 26:
Jeremy Ward (Université Paris-Sorbonne, Sociology)
Vaccine Criticism in France: Scientific Credibility and the Fragmentation of Social Movements
Mar. 5:
Robin Scheffler (MIT, HASTS)
Governing the Future: Cancer Viruses and the Growth of American Biomedicine
Mar. 19:
Patricia Williams (Columbia Law School))
DNA and Divination: On Yearning For Genetic Deliverance
Note: CGIS South S250, 1730 Cambridge Street
Mar. 26:
Maayan Sudai (Harvard Law School)
Sex in the Age of Medical Jurisprudence: The Law and Science of Hermaphrodites in the 19th century U.S.
Apr. 2:
Kasper Hedegård Schiølin (Harvard, STS Program)
Alpine Dreams, Earthly Realities: Epochalism, Continuity and Democracy in Imagining the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Apr. 9:
Ashawari Chaudhuri (MIT, HASTS)
The Good Seed: Braided Time and Meaning-Making on GM Seeds in India
Apr. 16:
Julie Guthman (Radcliffe Institute and UC Santa Cruz)
Becoming a Pathogen: On the Topology of Soil Disease in California’s Strawberry Industry
Apr. 23:
Gregg Macey (Brooklyn Law School/Harvard STS)
Once and For Now: The Science and Art of Ex Post Environmental Regulation
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2017

Sep. 11:
Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University, Sociology)
Nuclear Cultural Heritage in Russia: Politics, Community, Materiality
Sep. 18:
Evan Hepler-Smith (Harvard University Center for the Environment)
Molecular Government, Toxicological Information, and Environmental Protection
Sep. 25:
Tarun Khanna (Harvard Business School)
Crowdsourcing Memory: The 1947 Indian Partition
Oct. 2:
Alex Pentland (MIT Media Lab)
Social Intelligence, Not Artificial Intelligence
Oct. 16:
Buhm Soon Park (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
Making American Biomedicine: Science, Health, and the 'Paradox of NIH'
Oct. 23:
Gabriela Soto Laveaga (Harvard, History of Science)
(Dis)Locating Science: Scientific Agriculture in 1960s Mexico and India
Oct. 30:
Lucas Mueller (MIT HASTS)
Cancerous Environments and the Global Search for Cancer’s Causes
Nov. 6:
Paula Kift (Palantir)
Privacy Default(s) by Design? Personal Data in Cybersecurity Information Sharing
Nov. 13:
Moran Levy (Columbia, Sociology)
Splitting Up Diagnoses: A Sociological Study of Cancer Classification
Nov. 20:
James Parker (Melbourne Law School)
Sonic Lawfare: The Jurisprudence of Weaponized Sound
Nov. 27:
Ian McGonigle (Harvard, Anthropology)
Grapes from Zion: Biblical Prophesy and Quality Wine in the West Bank
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2017

Jan. 30:
Edward Hackett (Brandeis University, Vice Provost for Research)
Collaboration and Creativity: Lessons from Synthesis Centers (and Elsewhere)
Feb. 6:
Les Beldo (Williams College, Environmental Studies)
What is a Whale Stock? And Other Moral Questions in Large Cetacean Management
Feb. 13:
Caterina Scaramelli (MIT, HASTS)
Making Livable Natures: Caring for Wetlands in Turkey
Feb. 27:
Ateya Khorakiwala (Harvard, GSD)
Architectural Strategies and Infrastructural Landscapes of the Green Revolution in India in the 1960s
Mar. 6:
Matthew Hersch (Harvard, History of Science)
In-House to Outhouse: The Strange Life of Film-Return Spy Satellites, 1946–1986
Mar. 20:
William Deringer (MIT, HASTS)
The Social Rate of Discount and the Political Economy of the Future in the 1960s
Mar. 27:
Meera Subramanian (MIT, Knight Science Journalism Fellow)
Eco Swaraj: Can India’s Model of the Micro Transform Development for the 21st Century?
Apr. 3:
Kara Swanson (Northeastern University, Law)
Counting Black Inventors: The Historical Role of the US Patent System as a Political Resource
Apr. 10:
Sarah Richardson (Harvard, History of Science)
Can a Cell Have a Sex?
Note: CGIS South S050, 1730 Cambridge Street
Apr. 17:
Kenneth Oye (MIT, Political Science)
Assessing and Mitigating Synthetic Biology Risks: Exemplary Cases and Cautionary Tales
Apr. 24:
Daniel Wikler (HSPH, Ethics and Population Health)
Wrong Way After Nuremberg: Misconceiving Research Ethics
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2016

Sep. 12:
Elise K. Burton (Middle Eastern Studies & History)
Accidents of Geography: Creating Genetic Cartographies of the Middle East
Sep. 19:
Jeremy Baskin (University of Melbourne, Political Science)
The Competing Imaginaries of Solar Geoengineering
Sep. 26:
Phil Brown (Northeastern University, University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences)
Post-Belmont Research Ethics: Reporting Personal Exposure Data to Participants
Oct. 3:
Christopher Lawrence (Harvard, STS)
Normalization by Other Means: The Failed Techno-Diplomacy of Light Water Reactor Export to North Korea
Oct. 17:
Rachel Douglas-Jones (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Governance by Committee: Stem Cell Research Oversight and Deliberation in the USA
Oct. 24:
Scott Frickel (Brown, Sociology)
'Three Scientists Walk into a Barricade…' Expert mobilization in Two Boston-area Social Movements
Oct. 31:
Sunil Amrith (Harvard, History)
Coastal South Asia and the Technologies of Risk
Nov. 7:
Laura Martin (Harvard, HUCE)
Radiation and Restoration: The Politics of Ecological Care
Nov. 14:
Bettina Stoetzer (MIT, Global Studies and Languages)
Ruderal Ecologies: Re-Thinking Urban Infrastructure in a World of Rubble
Nov. 21:
Gökçe Gunel (Columbia University, Anthropology)
Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi
Nov. 28:
Jay D. Aronson (Carnegie Mellon, History)
The Promise and Peril of Human Rights Technology
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2016

Feb. 1:
Jill Lepore (Harvard, History)
The Past As Proof
Feb. 8:
Larissa Belcic (Harvard, GSD)
Playlist from the Terrestrial Analog: Towards an Ecology of Outer Space
Feb. 22:
Lisa Haushofer (Harvard, History of Science/Chemical Heritage Foundation)
“Pepsin Era” – Artificially Digested Foods and the Eating Body
Feb. 29:
Behnam Taebi (Harvard, HKS Belfer Center)
Responsible Innovation and Public Values in the Dutch Shale Gas Controversy
Mar. 7:
Shreeharsh Kelkar (MIT, HASTS)
Platformizing Higher Education: Computer Science and the Making of MOOC Infrastructures
Mar. 21:
Aziza Ahmed (Northeastern Law School)
Risk, Feminism, and AIDS
Mar. 28:
Yael Berda (Hebrew University, Sociology and Anthropology)
The File and the Checkpoint: Managing Citizenship in Israel and India after Independence
Apr. 4:
Alden Young (Drexel University, History and Africana Studies)
Sudanese Economics: Between an Environmental and a Political Imagination
Apr. 11:
Cara Kiernan Fallon (Harvard, History of Science)
Healthy Forever? Aging, Mobility, and the Transformation of Later Life
Apr. 18:
Arunabh Ghosh (Harvard, WCFIA))
No ‘Mean’ Solution: The Reformulation of Statistical Science in the Early People’s Republic of China
Apr. 20:
Yaron Ezrahi (Hebrew University), Andy Stirling (University of Sussex), & Shiv Visvanathan (Jindal Global University) With Comment From: Jane Mansbridge (HKS)
Science and Democracy Lecture:The Elusive Demos: Democracy in the Digital Age
Note: Will be held 5-7PM in Location TBA
Apr. 25:
Trevor Pinch (Cornell S&TS)
Stanley Milgram and the Sonic Imaginary
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2015

Sep. 8:
Andreas Mitzschke (Maastricht University, STS)
Competing, Conflicting, and Contested Futures: Temporal Imaginaries in the GM Crops Controversy
Note: Will be held in CGIS, K262
Sep. 14:
Megan Black (Harvard, Warren Center)
Rethinking Landsat: The American State and Big Oil in the Space Race
Sep. 21:
Thorsten Trimpop (MIT, Comparative Media Studies)
Meanwhile in Japan — Filming in the Nuclear Exclusion Zone
Note: Will be held in Milstein East A, 2036 Wasserstein Hall, Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Avenue
Sep. 28:
David A. Mindell (MIT, STS)
Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy
Oct. 5:
Michael Aaron Dennis (U.S. Naval War College)
Memex takes Manhattan: Vannevar Bush's other History of the Future
Oct. 19:
Myles Jackson (NYU-Gallatin)
The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS and Race
Oct. 26:
Susanne E. Freidberg (Dartmouth, Geography)
Obstinate Harvest: Corporate Food and the Technoscience of Supply Chain Sustainability
Nov. 2:
Andrew Jewett (Harvard, History)
Of Science and Scientism: Framing Science in the Postwar American Humanities
Nov. 4:
William Nordhaus (Yale University)
Science and Democracy Lecture: Climate Clubs: The Central Role of the Social Sciences in Climate Change Policy
Note: Will be held 5-7PM in Science Center A
Nov. 9:
Joseph Rouse (Wesleyan, Philosophy)
What is a Scientific Conception of the World?
Nov. 16:
Saptarishi Bandopadhyay (Harvard Law School)
What We Talk About when We Talk About Disasters: Early Modern Precedents for 21st-Century Disaster Management
Nov. 23:
Stu Marvel (Emory University)
The 'Nature' of Queer Families: Tracking the Socio-Technics of the Fertility Clinic
Co-sponsored with Women and Gender Studies (FAS)
Nov. 30:
John P. McCaskey (Columbia University)
Universal Laws and the Case of Cholera
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2015

Feb. 2:
Tom Özden-Schilling (MIT, HASTS)
Expertise in Exile: Indigenous GIS and the Precariousness of Professionalization
Feb. 9:
Arunabh Ghosh (Harvard, Weatherhead Center)
CANCELLED: No 'Mean' Solution: The Reformulation of Statistical Science in the Early People's Republic of China
Feb. 23:
Michael Bennett (University of Michigan, Risk Science Center)
The Ascent of Science Fictional Futurity in Anglo-American Legal Thought
Mar. 2:
Steve Caton (Harvard, Anthropology)
Experts in Cruelty: Interrogation in Abu Ghraib and After
Mar. 9:
Geert Somsen (Columbia/Maastricht, History)
'Science and World Order': Uses of Science in Plans for International Government, 1899-1950
Mar. 23:
Dan Navon (Harvard, Robert Wood Johnson Fellow)
Mobilizing Mutations: New Kinds of People at the Intersection of Genetics and Patient Advocacy
Mar. 30:
Margo Boenig-Liptsin (Harvard, STS/History of Science)
A New Literacy for the Information Age: Children, Computers, and Citizenship
Apr. 6:
Anna M. Agathangelou (York University, Political Science)
Emerging Legal and Forensic BioConstitutional Order(s) in Post-Conflict Cyprus
Apr. 13:
Emily Harrison (Harvard, History of Science)
Infant Science and Health Adventuring: Global Intervention around Infant Mortality
Apr. 20:
Rajesh Veeraraghavan (UC Berkeley/Harvard Berkman Center)
The Politics of Openness: Technology, Corruption and Participation in Indian Public Employment
Apr. 27:
Antoine Picon (Harvard, GSD)
Cities, Technologies and Political Imaginaries
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2014

Sep. 8:
Aaron Mauck (Harvard, History of Science)
Social Molecules: Biomarkers and the New Data Imaginary in Social Science Research
Sep. 15:
David Lazer (Northeastern, Political Science, )
Computational Social Science: The Use of 'Big Data' to Study Human Behavior
The event will meet in Pound Hall 200 at the Harvard Law School
Sep. 22:
Angie Boyce (Harvard, Robert Wood Johnson Fellow)
Chicken, Egg, or Cook? Foodborne Salmonellosis and Distributed Responsibility
Sep. 29:
Benjamin Morris (MIT, Catalyst Collaborative)
Science/Fiction: Dramatic Arts as a Medium for Translating Science
Oct. 6:
Scott Podolsky (Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital)
Antimicrobials and Public Health: From Serotherapy to Antibiotics (and Back)
Oct. 20:
Venkatesh Narayanamurti (Harvard, SEAS)
Bridging the Basic-Applied Dichotomy and the Cycle of Discovery and Invention
Oct. 27:
Zoe Nyssa (Harvard, HUCE/STS Fellow)
Ecologies of Paradox: A Typology of Scientific Surprise in the Anthropocene
Nov. 3:
Richard Rottenburg (University of Halle, Anthropology)
Emerging “Global Health” Institutions in Africa: Technologies and Significations
Nov. 10:
Naor Ben-Yehoyada (Harvard, Center for Middle Eastern Studies)
'I can feel the mafia but I can’t see it': An Anthropology of Forensic Knowledge
Nov. 17:
Heather Paxson (MIT, Anthropology)
Regulating Microbial Ecologies: Policy and Practice in Artisanal Cheesemaking
Nov. 24:
Canay Özden-Schilling (MIT, HASTS)
Economics Inside the Grid: Smart Grids, Power Systems Engineering, and Emergent Markets
Dec. 1:
Zara Mirmalek (Harvard, STS Fellow)
Democracy and the Deep-Sea: Telepresence and Public Participation in Remote Environments
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2014

Feb. 3:
David Engerman (Brandeis, History)
The Import of Expertise: Towards an International History of Indian Economic Planning
Feb. 10:
Rachel Rothschild (Yale, History of Science)
Modeling without 'Target' Maps: Scientific Cooperation on Atmospheric Pollution in the Cold War
Feb. 24:
Jana Cephas (Harvard, GSD)
'The Body is Like an Automobile Chassis': Visualizing Control at the Henry Ford Hospital
Mar. 3:
David Meshoulam (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Science Education Across Mass Ave: PSSC and the History of (Harvard) Project Physics, 1961-1970
Mar. 10:
Victor Seow (Cornell, History)
Carbon Technocracy: East Asian Energy Regimes and the Industrial Modern
Mar. 24:
Alberto Cambrosio (McGill, Social Studies of Medicine)
When drugs cross disease lines. (Dis)assembling clinical research in post-genomic oncology.
Mar. 31:
Rochelle Sharpe (Freelance Journalist)
Sex, Lies and Technology: A Journalist's Encounters with Bioethics and Big Data
Apr. 7:
Sherine Hamdy and Soha Bayoumi (Brown, Anthropology, and Harvard, History of Science)
'Doctors of the Revolution': Egypt's Political Uprisings and the Limits of Medical Neutrality
Apr. 14:
Joakim Juhl (Harvard, STS-SEAS)
Innovation Science in the Making: Theoretical Physics and Industrial Production in a Danish Factory
Apr. 21:
Susan Greenhalgh (Harvard, Anthropology)
Obesity, Inc.?: Fat Science and Policy in the People's Republic of China
Apr. 28:
Joyce Chaplin (Harvard, History)
Early Modern Climate Science: The View from British North America
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2013

Sep. 9:
Bridget Hanna (Harvard, Anthropology)
The Anthropologist and the Conspiracy Theory: Suspicion and Research after Bhopal
Sep. 16:
Daniel Kevles (Yale, History)
A, B, Seeds: Advertising, Branding, and IP in an Emergent Industry
Sep. 23:
Shobita Parthasarathy (University of Michigan, Ford School)
Making Democracy in the Patent System: Comparing the Life Form Patent Battles in the US and Europe
Sep. 30:
Alvaro Santana-Acuña (Harvard, Sociology)
The Three Sides of a Nation-State: Cadastral Triangulation and the Making of Modern France
Oct. 7:
Adam Bly (Seed Media Group)
A New Narrative for Science in America
Oct. 21:
Yanni Loukissas (Harvard, Berkman Center)
Data Narratives of the Arnold Arboretum
Oct. 28:
David Keith (Harvard, SEAS)
What we can learn from the failure of climate policy
Nov. 4:
James Bergman (Harvard, History of Science)
Working on Climatic Time: Climatology and Labor Practices in Postwar Industrial Agriculture
Nov. 11:
Sherry Turkle (MIT, STS)
The Dystopian Presented as the Utopian: Does the Internet lead us to forget what we know about life?
Nov. 18:
Nate Towery (MIT, STS)
(Not) Getting from Us to We: Expertise as a roadblock to change in U.S. environmental organizations
Nov. 25:
Andrew Barry (University College London, Human Geography)
Interrogating the Anthropocene
Dec. 2:
S.M. Amadae (University of Ohio, Political Science)
Imagining the Neoliberal Subject: Nuclear Deterrence and the Prisoner's Dilemma
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2013

Feb. 4:
Elizabeth Lunbeck (Vanderbilt/Harvard, History of Science)
Horrible Bosses: Analyzing Workplace Dysfunction
Feb. 12:
Jean Comaroff (Harvard, African and African American Studies/Anthropology)
Divine Detection: Crime and the Metaphysics of Disorder
Date and Location Change: Tuesday, HUCE Seminar Room, 24 Oxford Street
Feb. 25:
Hanna Rose Shell (MIT/STS)
SPEAKER CANCELLATION: Shoddy Heap: Textile Waste Processing and Alien Flora
Mar. 4:
Ryan Shapiro (MIT/HASTS)
'A Vote Against Beagles is a Vote Against Apple Pie': The Pentagon Poison Gas Experiments, 1973-1975
Mar. 11:
Charles Rosenberg (Harvard, History of Science)
The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Disease in History and History in Disease
Mar. 25:
Lukas Rieppel (Northwestern,STS)
Assembling the Dinosaur: Money, Museums, and American Culture, 1870-1930
Apr. 1:
Brice Laurent (Ecole des Mines, Paris and Harvard, STS)
A Common European Space? Harmonizing the Sustainability of European Biofuels
Apr. 8:
Stephanie Dick (Harvard, History of Science)
Coded Collaboration: Doing Mathematics with Computers in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
Apr. 15:
Henry Turner (Rutgers, Radcliffe Institute)
Corporations in the Scientific and Political Life of Early Modern England
Apr. 22:
Henry Cowles (Princeton, History)
Vocabularies of Method: Pragmatism and the History of Science
Apr. 29:
Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Chicago, Anthropology)
Courting Innovation: The Constitution(s) of Indian Biomedicine
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2012

Sep. 10:
Christopher Kirchhoff (Department of Defense)
Fixing the National Security State: Commissions and the Politics of Disaster and Reform
Sep. 17:
Steven Epstein (Northwestern, Sociology)
Sexual Health as Buzzword: Competing Stakes and Proliferating Agendas
Sep. 24:
Shi-Lin Loh and Kyoko Sato (Harvard, EALC/Stanford STS)
Narrating Fukushima: Scales of a Nuclear Meltdown
Oct. 1:
Erik Aarden (Harvard, STS)
Distributing Genetic Medicine: The Politics of Health Care Access in Western Europe
Oct. 15:
Paul Forman (Smithsonian Institution, Emeritus)
Politico-legal Proceduralism, Belief in Scientific Method, and the Elevation of Means Over Ends in Modernity
Oct. 22:
Martin Mahony (University of East Anglia/Harvard STS)
The Predictive State: Science, Autonomy, and the Future of the Indian Climate
Nov. 5:
John Horgan (Stevens Institute of Technology, Science Writing)
Against Bio-Determinism
Nov. 12:
Alfred Moore (University College Cork, Philosophy)
Epistemic Disobedience
Nov. 19:
Dan Schrag (Harvard, HUCE)
The Timescale of Climate Change
Nov. 26:
Jeremy Blatter (Harvard, History of Science)
The Street as Psychological Laboratory: Hugo Münsterberg, Harold Burtt, and the 1914 Street Lighting Committee
Dec. 3:
Rebecca Lemov (Harvard, History of Science)
The Fantasy of Total Information: A Brief History of the Microcard
Dec. 10:
John Dixon (Harvard, History)
A Trackful Ocean: Ships' Routes on the Eighteenth-century Atlantic
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2012

Jan. 23:
Catherine Bliss (Brown University, Africana and STS)
Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice
Jan. 30:
Irus Braverman (SUNY Buffalo Law School)
The Nature of Zoos: Captive Animal Networks in North America
Feb. 6:
Conevery Valencius (University of Massachusetts Boston, History)
Historians and Earthquakes in the Central United States: Making the Past Clear when the Future Isn't
Feb. 13:
Jonathan Kahn (Hamline University, School of Law)
Not Fade Away: Race and the Politics of the Meantime in Biotech Patenting and Drug Development
Feb. 27:
Jessica Wang (University of British Columbia, History)
Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self in the Nuclear Age: Merle Tuve's Cold War
Mar. 5:
Clapperton Mavhunga (MIT, STS)
Why is the 'Social,' Not 'Technology,' the Central Subject in African(ist) History?
Mar. 19:
Sergio Sismondo (Queen’s University, Philosophy)
Pharma's Key Opinion Leaders: Valuing Conflicts of Interest and Independence
Mar. 26:
Judy Wajcman (LSE, Sociology)
Life in the Fast Lane? Towards a Sociology of Technology and Time
Apr. 2:
Stephen Hilgartner (Cornell University, STS)
Dis·en·closing Science
Apr. 9:
Gregg Mitman (University of Wisconsin, History of Science)
Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record
Apr. 16:
Christine Leuenberger (Cornell University, STS)
Politics of Maps in Israel
Apr. 23:
Maggie Curnutte (Harvard, STS)
I Consume, Therefore I Am: The Construction of the Genetic Citizen in the United States
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2011

Sep. 12:
Ann Blair (Harvard, History)
The Role of Note-Taking in Intellectual Activity—Early Modern Europe and Beyond
Sep. 19:
Rajeswari Raina (NISTADS, India)
Norms of Expertise—Agricultural Production and the Environment in India
Sep. 26:
Lindsay Smith (UCLA)
"Genetics is a Study in Faith": The Disappeared in Latin America, Science as Development, and the Fragility of Identification
Oct. 3:
Daniel Barber (Barnard College)
Phase-Change: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Solar Energy, 1946-
Oct. 17:
Gary Edmond (UNSW School of Law)
Advice for the Courts? Science Studies, Criminal Justice, and the Forensic Science Crisis
Oct. 24:
Joanna Radin (University of Pennsylvania)
Frozen Human Tissue and the Problem of Indeterminacy
Oct. 31:
Emma Frow (Edinburgh)
Making Big Promises Come True? Articulating and Realizing the Value of Synthetic Biology
Nov. 7:
Lee Vinsel (Harvard, HKS)
The Politics of the Dummy Light: Liberalism and US Federal Regulation of Technological Risk, 1960-1980
Nov. 14:
Sebastian Pfotenhauer (MIT)
Between Cultural Transfer and National Innovation Strategy: A Study of MIT's Recent International Collaborations
Nov. 21:
Wanda Liebermann (Harvard, GSD)
Body Building: Architectural Narratives of Dis/ability
Nov. 28:
Cristina Grasseni (Radcliffe Institute)
Skilled Visions: Critical Ecologies of Belonging
Dec. 5:
Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law & HKS)
Minds for Sale
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2011

Jan. 31:
Patrick Taylor (Children's Hospital, Harvard)
Virtue, Probability, Relationships, and Confusion: Conflicts of Interest and Incompletely Theorized Notions of Scientific Sainthood
Feb. 7:
Jo Guldi (Harvard Society of Fellows)
Britain Invents the Infrastructure State
Feb. 14:
David Jones (STS, MIT)
'Strange Facts,'Evocative Maps, and the Puzzles of Geographic Variation in Medical Practice
Feb. 28:
Christopher Winship (Sociology, Harvard)
Genesis of Justice: Boston Cops, Black Ministers, and Youth Violence
Mar. 7:
William Hurlbut (Stanford University Medical Center)
Stem Cells, Embryos, and Ethics: A Continuing Controversy
Mar. 21:
John Mathew (History of Science, Harvard)
Encountering Fauna in Late 18th- and Early 19th-century Euro-colonial India
Mar. 28:
Talia Fisher (Law, Tel Aviv University)
Probabilistic Sentencing
Apr. 4:
Ghislain Thibault (History of Science, Harvard)
Communicating Electricity: A Media Archaeology of Wireless Power Transmission
Apr. 11:
Duana Fullwiley (Anthropology, Harvard)
When State Economy and Population Biology Meet: The Powers of Association and 'Mild' Sickle Cell Anemia in Senegal, West Africa
Apr. 18:
Ruha Benjamin (Sociology, Boston University)
A Lab of Their Own: Genomic Sovereignty as Postcolonial Science Policy?
Apr. 25:
Xaq Frohlich (STS, MIT)
Accounting for Taste: Regulating Diet and Health on Food Labels
May. 2:
Eddie Haam (Applied Mathematics, Harvard)
Pattern Recognition Algorithm for Climate Sciences
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2010

Sep. 13:
I. Glenn Cohen (Harvard Law School)
Well, What About the Children?: Best Interests Reasoning, The New Eugenics, and the Regulation of Reproduction
Sep. 20:
Alex Csiszar (History of Science, Harvard)
Managing Science by Numbers: The Emergence of the Modern Scientific Journal
Sep. 27:
Pablo Boczkowski (Northwestern University)
News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance
Oct. 4:
Christophe Bonneuil (CNRS and INRA-SenS, IFRIS, France)
To See or Not to See Transgenes in Mexican Landraces: Global Science and Cultural Domination
Oct. 18:
Sara Wylie (HASTS, MIT)
ExtrACT: Studying Chemicals and Corporations through STS in Practice
Oct. 25:
Shun-ling Chen (Harvard Law School)
Collaborative Authorship, from Folklore to the Wikiborg
Nov. 1:
Allison MacFarlane (George Mason University)
A Free-For-All? Impacts of Emerging Nuclear Energy Countries
Nov. 8:
Jamie Cohen-Cole (History of Science, Harvard)
Personifying Rationality: 1960s Social Science and the Problem of Objectivity
Nov. 15:
Ian Miller (History, Harvard)
Nov. 22:
Judith Layzer (Urban Studies and Planning, MIT)
Science and Storytelling in Environmental Politics
Nov. 29:
Joshua Greene (Psychology, Harvard)
The Moral Brain and How To Use It
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2010

Feb. 1:
Christopher Jones (Center for the Environment, Harvard)
Oil Landscapes: Pipelines, Environment, and Society, 1859-1900
Feb. 8:
Hallam Stevens (History of Science, Harvard)
What It Means to Be Productive: Seeing and Doing in a High-Throughput Genome Sequencing Center
Feb. 22:
Judy Norsigian (Our Bodies Ourselves)
Genetic Technologies and their Impact on Women's Health: Selected Case Studies
Mar. 1:
Sang-Hyun Kim (Hanyang University)
Seeing Beyond the Developmental State? Social Movements and the Politics of Science & Technology in South Korea
Mar. 8:
Jeff Skopek (Harvard Law School)
The Epistemology of the Commerce Clause
Mar. 22:
Laura Stark (Sociology, Wesleyan)
On Being Normal in Abnormal Places: A Scandal-Free History of Institutional Review Boards
Mar. 29:
Bill Rankin (History of Science, Harvard)
Standardization or Infrastructure? Cartography and the History of Geographic Space
Apr. 5:
Ben Hurlbut (STS, Harvard Kennedy School)
Representing Reason: Human Embryo Research and the Politics of Public Bioethics
Apr. 12:
Archon Fung (Harvard Kennedy School)
The Principle of Affected Interests: The Circle of Inclusion in Contemporary Democracy
Apr. 26:
Jeremy Greene (History of Science, Harvard)
Generic Medicines and the Science of Similarity
May. 3:
Evelyn Fox Keller (STS, MIT)
Climategate, Science and Democracy
May. 3:
Daniel P. Carpenter (Government, Harvard)
Book launch and panel: Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA
4pm-6pm, Tsai Auditorium; see full program for details
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2009

Sep. 14:
Sam Schweber (History of Science, Brandeis)
Hans Bethe: Writing a Sociological Biography
Sep. 21:
Jimena Canales (History of Science, Harvard)
A History of A Tenth of a Second
Sep. 29:
Etienne Benson (Center for the Environment, Harvard)
Leviathan and the Whale
Oct. 5:
Harriet Ritvo (History, MIT)
Making Animals Wild
Oct. 19:
Samuel Evans (STS Program, Harvard)
Anomalies in the Classification of Technology: Illustrations from the Military/Non-Military Divide
Oct. 26:
Ian Schillinger (U.S. Navy)
Sea Stories: What the Nuclear Navy taught me about Systemic Risk
Nov. 2:
Daniel Metlay (U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board)
Yucca Mountain: Reflections on a Repository Sixty Years in the Making
Nov. 9:
Sophia Roosth (STS, MIT)
Crafting the Biological: Open-Sourcing Life Science, from Synthetic Biology to Garage Biotech
Nov. 16:
Jay Aronson (History, Carnegie Mellon University)
Truth Commissions: Technologies of Repair or Social Autopsies?
Nov. 23:
Mary-Jo Good (Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School)
Technologies of Intervention and Trauma Treatment in Postconflict Aceh, Indonesia
Nov. 30:
Kris Saha (Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT)
Constructing and Deconstructing Disease in a Dish
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2009

Feb. 9:
Phil Loring (Harvard University)
Coaxing Black Boxes to Speak English: Verbal Computers as Boundary Machines in 1950s Linguistics
Mar. 2:
Michael B. McElroy (Harvard University)
Options for a Low-Carbon Energy Future
Mar. 16:
Andrew Jewett (Harvard University)
Before the Received View: Social Theories of Science in Interwar America
Mar. 30:
Harry R. Lewis (Harvard University)
Steps Toward an Undergraduate Concentration in Technology and Society
Apr. 6:
Nasser Zakariya (Harvard University)
Origins of Epic Authorship: A Vision of Scientific Synthesis in the 1990s
Apr. 13:
Claude Rosental (CNRS & Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
Public Demonstrations of Technology: Sociology and Politics
Apr. 20:
Vincent Lepinay (MIT)
Sketch of Derivation: Insights from Wall Street and Atlantic Africa
Apr. 27:
Andrew Lakoff (UCSD)
Cold War Systems in Crisis: The Concept of Resilience from Psychology to Ecology
STS Circle schedule poster

Fall 2008

Sep. 22:
Myles Jackson (Polytechnic University)
The History of CCR5: Intellectual Property and Human Genetics
Sep. 29:
Anders Blok (Copenhagen University)
Oct. 6:
Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School)
The Science of Cooperation and Progressive Social Theory
Oct. 20:
Robert Truog (Harvard Medical School/Children's Hospital)
Death, Brain Death, and the Ethics of Organ Transplantation
Oct. 27:
Alex Wellerstein (Harvard University)
Selling Secrecy: Laser Fusion, Classification, and the Turbulent 1970s
Nov. 3:
John Carson (University of Michigan)
Drawing Things Together: STS and the History of Science
    and at 4:00 pm, Science Center, Room 469,
    jointly sponsored by the Dept. of History of Science
What makes an "Unsound Mind"? Medicine, Law, and Competency in the Nineteenth-Century Courtroom
Nov. 17:
Sharon Traweek (UCLA)
Scientists' Career Narratives and Collaborative Research in Europe, Japan, and the US
Nov. 24:
Adelheid Voskuhl (Harvard University)
The Mechanics of Sentiment: Women Automata and the Culture of Affect in the European Enlightenment
Dec. 1:
Paul Shapiro (Humane Society of the United States)
Technology's Role in Factory Farming: Animal Welfare, Public Health, the Environment, and How to Make Progress
Dec. 8:
David Kaiser (MIT)
Searching for Stability: Nuclear Physics and Fraud at Cold War's End
STS Circle schedule poster

Spring 2008

Feb. 4:
Arthur A. Daemmrich (Harvard Business School)
Innovation in Degradation: Ecoflex at BASF, on the Market, and in the Compost
Feb. 13:
Mark Hauser (Department of Psychology, Harvard University)
Evolving a Moral Grammar: Domain-specificity, Origins, Universality and Moral Organs
Feb. 25:
Martyn Pickersgill (Institute for Science and Society, University of Nottingham)
The Neuroscience of Psychopathy: A Mundane Revolution?
Mar. 3:
Sara Shostak (Department of Sociology, Brandeis University)
Multiplicity in Practice: Towards a Genealogy of 'Gene-Environment Interaction'
Mar. 10:
Stuart A. Newman (Department of Cell Biology & Anatomy, New York Medical College)
Evolution: the Public's Problem, and the Scientists'
Mar. 17:
R. P. Hagendijk (International School for Humanities and Social Sciences, Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Modes of Public Engagement in European S&T Governance
Mar. 31:
Felice Frankel (Envisioning Science Program, Initiative in Innovative Computing, Harvard University)
The Visual Expression of Science: More than Pretty Pictures
Apr. 7:
Sarah Jansen (Department of the History of Science, Harvard University)
Managing Whales, Wolves, and Eastern Europeans
Apr. 14:
Barbara Herrnstein-Smith (Department of English, Duke University)
Explaining Religion: Naturalism With and Without Scientism
Apr. 21:
Ellen Bales (History of Science and Technology, UC Berkeley)
Working Levels, Working Knowledge: Indoor Radon and the Environmental Protection Agency

Fall 2007

Oct. 9:
Ulrike Felt (Department of Social Studies of Science, University of Vienna, Austria)
Biomedical Technologies, Citizens and Their Epistemologies: Comparative Analysis of Knowledge Narratives in Public Assessment of Biomedical Technologies
Oct. 15:
Allan Brandt (Department of the History of Science, Harvard University)
Science, Risk, and Regulation: Lessons from the Tobacco Pandemic
Oct. 22:
Justus Lentsch (Institute for Science and Technology Studies, Bielefeld University, Germany)
Scientific Advice to Policymaking: Relation between Organizational Form and Function
Oct. 29:
Chris Kelty (Department of Anthropology, Rice University; and Department of the History of Science, Harvard University)
Imagining Neutrality: Recursive Publics, Free Software and Electronic Voting Machines
Nov. 5:
Philip Campbell (Editor-in-Chief, Nature)
Gaps in the Sciences of Human Enhancement
Nov. 19:
Les Boden and David Ozonoff (Department of Environmental Health, Boston University School of Public Health; and Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy)
SKAPP: Scientists Look at Science and the Law
Nov. 26:
Daniel Sarewitz (Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Arizona State University)
New Tools for Science Policy Making
Dec. 3:
Claire Donovan (Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University)
The Governance of Social Science: The Social Science that Dare Not Speak Its Name
Dec. 10:
Stefan Helmreich (Anthropology Program, MIT)
How the Ocean Got Its Genome: Bodies of Knowledge and Bodies of Water in Marine Microbiology

Spring 2007

Feb. 5:
Rebecca Herzig (Women and Gender Studies, Bates College)
Feb. 12:

Reading Galison / Minow: "Our Privacy, Ourselves in the Age of Technological Intrusions"
Feb. 26:
Martha Minow (Harvard Law School)
Mar. 5:

Reading Graeber: "Revolution in Reverse"
Mar. 12:
David Graeber (Anthropology, Yale University)
Mar. 19:
Richard Levins (Harvard School of Public Health)
Apr. 2:
Kathryn Packer (Dept. for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, UK)
Apr. 9:
Yaron Ezrahi (Political Science, Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
Apr. 16:
Peter Galison (History of Science, Harvard)
Apr. 23:
Arun Agrawal (Natural Resources & Environment, University of Michigan)
Apr. 30:
Joan Fujimura (Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Fall 2006

Sep. 16:

Discussion: STS among the Disciplines
Oct. 12:

Discussion of Readings by Michael Fischer
Oct. 16:
Michael Fischer (Professor of Anthropology and STS, MIT)
Nov. 6:

Fieldwork and Ethics in Genetics and Society Discussion led by Sarah Wagner (Anthropology, Harvard), Lindsay Smith (Anthropology, Harvard), and Xaq Frohlich (STS, MIT)
Nov. 13:
Diane Paul (Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health/UMass Boston)
Nov. 20:
Barbara Costa (Museum of Science, Boston)
Nov. 27:

Discussion of Readings by Michele Lamont
Dec. 4:
Michele Lamont (Professor of Sociology, Harvard University)
Dec. 11:
Brock Reeve (Executive Director, Harvard Stem Cell Institute)