Here are the titles and abstracts for our two keynote talks:
I. Rethinking STS and Culture
Rayvon Fouché, Purdue University
Though scholars in the field of Science and Technology Studies have spent decades exploring the relationships between science, technology, and the wider society and culture, we have reached a historical moment where it may be necessary to reconsider what these relationships mean for future scholarship. By asking how and why cultural communities consume, use and are subjugated by technoscience, we can garner a deeper understanding of how these communities, based on collective cultural needs, desires, aesthetics, and priorities, produce and redefine artifacts, practices, and knowledge that transform the architectured meanings of technoscience. By focusing on anime and hip hop, black history month and sneaker design, oil embargoes and limited-edition automobiles, and material science and athletics, this talk will prod us to collectively rethink these connections and build unfamiliar linkages between culture and technoscience.
II. The Role of STS in the Post-Truth Era: Doubling Down on the Politics of Knowledge
Shobita Parthasarathy, University of Michigan
Public trust in government, and specifically in science and technology policymaking, has been eroding for decades. In the 1960s, feminists and environmentalists began to question the evidence and expertise used in policymaking, arguing that it did not adequately reflect their concerns. These types of concerns have multiplied in recent years, as citizens worry about the racial bias built into big data and algorithms and the lack of regulatory oversight, and question the safety of vaccines and science of climate change. Science and technology studies (STS) scholars have responded to this citizen engagement by carefully identifying how these concerns are based in alternative forms of knowledge and expertise, and arguing that our governing institutions must consider these alternatives more seriously through more inclusive and deliberative democratic approaches. But what should we make of these efforts in an era of “alternative facts” and “fake news”? Some STS scholars suggest that we should step back from our analyses of the social construction of science, worrying that it will be misconstrued to catastrophic effect in a post-truth era. This talk argues the opposite. It will articulate an STS research agenda designed to develop a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between science, knowledge, politics, and policy. In particular, it will explore how STS can help us identify the structural limitations of democratization efforts, and ultimately help produce science and technology policies that are more socially just and democratically legitimate.