Program on Science, Technology and Society at HarvardHarvard Kennedy School of Government | Harvard University |
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McQuillan Institute Launch SymposiumOctober 25, 2024, 9:00am-6:30pm AbstractThis symposium introduces the work of the McQuillan Institute for Science, Technology and the Human Future through a collaboration with the Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Harvard. The program highlights how STS scholarship, and research on science and technology more broadly, can inform some of the most important challenges currently facing human societies, from digital and climate governance to rethinking the role of technical expertise in law and democratic politics. We close with a reflection on reimagining the future of technological societies through conversations between artists and social scientists. Register and view the full program here. Re-centering Progress: Knowledge and Invention in Democratic SocietiesProvisional Program9:00 | Welcome and Introduction Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard Kennedy School) 9:30 | Panel 1: Digital Futures In the past quarter century, human interactions that were once conducted face-to-face have increasingly been transported into digital space. Alongside the benefits of quicker communication, wider reach, and asynchronous transaction, the spread of the digital sphere has brought new threats: to privacy, intimacy, security, civility, and truth itself. What steps are we taking to govern these challenges, and are our efforts rightly judging the nature and magnitude of the threats? Moderator: Margarita Boenig-Liptsin (ETH Zürich) 11:00 Coffee Break 11:30 | Panel 2: A Renewable Earth? Imaginations of a sustainable human future have increasingly focused on climate science and making progress with renewable technologies. Yet in this preoccupation with technology-based climate solutions, age-old ethical concerns of renewability, both environmental (biodiversity loss, resource depletion and nature’s rights) and social (poverty, inequality and harmful development) risk being overshadowed or forgotten. How might we remain attentive to the full range of social, moral and environmental challenges and, informed by environmental history, how else can we re-envision the human future on a renewable Earth? Moderator: Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard Kennedy School) 1:00 Lunch 2:15 | Panel 3: The Technologies of Law In well-ordered societies, law operates as a technology of governance, an active participant in constructing the rules that we live by and the worlds we want to live in. Laws interact with science and technology in providing settlements on expertise, facts, norms, boundaries, and transgressions. This panel challenges the unidirectional understanding of law as lagging behind technological innovation. Instead, panelists share their experience and insight on how legal analysis and adjudication can deliver on promises of progress and justice at a time when norms governing social interactions are increasingly made and contested through technological interventions, outside our traditional legal institutions. Moderator: David Winickoff (OECD; Sciences Po) 3:45 Break 4:15 | Panel 4: Between Expertise and Democracy Concerns about the relationship between expertise and democracy–about trust and distrust in science, post-truth, mis(/dis)information, and denialism–dominate our public discourse. For modern global democracy, it is clear that we need to consider not only the principles by which we delegate political power from the many to the few, but also how we delegate the power to know for the many to the few. Yet, the principles governing this second delegation, and its implications for public reason, have not been carefully articulated. Going beyond “speaking truth to power” as the right model of expertise and democracy, this panel asks both what and how democracies should know. Fittingly, it brings together high-level perspectives from Europe, India, and the United States. Moderator: J. Benjamin Hurlbut (Arizona State University) 5:45 | Closing Reflection: History, Memory, and the Modern in Art Imagining the human future must be a collective human enterprise, not limited only to the insides of labs, factories, legislative chambers, regulatory bodies or courtrooms. Since the earliest traces of human history, our societies have looked to the arts to situate us in relation to everything else in the human experience. In a closing lecture, renowned Norwegian artist Kjell Torriset shares his thoughts on the role of the arts in relation to science and technology, invoking his longstanding familiarity with STS@Harvard. Keynote speaker: Kjell Torriset 6:30 Reception |
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