This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Figure 1: Emma Kowal writing her thesis in 2006 with 7-month old Maya in Darwin, Australia. Image: supplied.
One evening in December 2021, in a small South African coastal town where my best friend’s bustling wedding preparations were underway, I got goosebumps. I turned off the music, looked up from my reading, and said “please listen to this”. Then I …
It is a testament to the distilled clarity and prescience of Julie Livingston’s parable of a book that its title, Self-Devouring Growth, can strike one immediately as both so true and suddenly so evident that everything that follows in its slim 120 odd pages will then appear as the confirmation of all that the title had come to pre-organize …
Over the last decade, indigenous Marind communities in the rural district of Merauke, West Papua, have seen vast swaths of their forests and savannas razed to make way for monocrop oil palm plantations. These developments are promoted by the Indonesian government as part of efforts to achieve national self-sufficiency in basic commodities, including palm oil, sugar, and rice. On the …
What characterises STS in different regions? What kinds of research projects, educational programs, and people are doing STS around the world? What problems exist in different regions? Can we draw comparisons and remark on differences between regional practices unproblematically? And, inevitably, what is STS? These are some of the questions that recurred in this year’s 4S conference. We may …
This article is part of the following series: Critical Histories, Activist Futures
The papers in this series, “Critical Histories, Activist Futures,” have captured some of the exciting conversations that took place during a conference titled “Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Science, Medicine, and Racial Violence,” which was held at Yale University in February 2017. As my colleague Sarah M. Pickman has explained, the conference was intended to create a space for …
This article is part of the following series: Top of the heap
For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, who is a medical anthropologist and lecturer in the Cultural Anthropology program at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Reading in the Antipodean Summer
In May, as the winter winds whipped through Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, I ordered a few books from …