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 is a group of doctoral students and recent PhDs who are interested in creating a space for interdisciplinary conversations about contemporary issues in science and technology that are relevant to people in fields such as anthropology, history of science, sociology, STS, law, government, public policy, and the natural sciences. We want to engage not only those who are working on intersections of science, politics, and public policy, but also those in the natural sciences, engineering, and architecture who have serious interest in exploring these areas together with social scientists and humanists.

There has been growing interest among graduate students and postdocs at Harvard in more systematic discussions related to STS. More and more dissertation writers and recent graduates find themselves working on exciting topics that intersect with STS at the edges of their respective home disciplines, and they are asking questions that often require new analytic tools that the conventional disciplines don’t necessarily offer. They would also like wider exposure to emerging STS scholarship that is not well-represented or organized at most universities, including Harvard. Our aim is to try to serve those interests through a series of activities throughout the academic year.

All meetings will take place on Mondays, from 12:15–2 pm, at Room 100F, Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, unless otherwise noted. Sandwich lunches are provided. Please RSVP to sts@hks.harvard.edu by Thursday noon the week before.

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

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

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

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

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)

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)