In June 2021, more than 180 early-career Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars and participants congregated at this year’s Australasian STS Graduate Network Conference (henceforth AusSTS2021) to reflect on the theme of “situated practice.” The third event since the network was founded in 2017, this year’s multi-sited gathering comprised local nodes in the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne, and Darwin, …
The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories
University of Chicago Press, 2020. 344 pages.
A book about participation? Chris Kelty’s delightful new book begins by giving voice to his audience’s likely incredulity. Mimicking the standard response to the project, he launches with the question, “Participation in what?” In everything and nothing, of course. He notes …
This article is part of the following series: Excavating and (re)creating the biosocial: Birth cohorts as ethnographic object
The McGill Group for Suicide Studies (MGSS) has garnered significant attention for its epigenetic models of suicide risk. These models suggest that early life adversity may set people on pathways of neurobiological vulnerability and, ultimately, suicide risk, which are correlated with distinctive epigenetic traits. While the core of this epigenetic and neuroscientific research is carried out on the donated brains …
This article is part of the following series: Excavating and (re)creating the biosocial: Birth cohorts as ethnographic object
Precious Material
Over the past decade, the Canadian university-based Epigenetics Lab has become increasingly central to the production of knowledge about human health and development.[1] During my first visit there, Daniel, one of three technicians in the lab, is visibly stressed. He apologizes for not being more relaxed. He has been up all night worried about a shipment of …
This article is part of the following series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
I went to a Science and Technology Studies (STS) conference in Melbourne recently and listened to a panel of social scientists share their work about psychological disorders. There was no doubt I had stakes in being there; I study embodiment and trauma and so I knew what I was hoping to hear. I sat, in anticipation, waiting to hear about …
Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life.
Duke University Press, 2019. 416 pages.
“How might we craft a justice-oriented approach to technoscience?” asks Ruha Benjamin in the introduction to Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (11). This question is at the core of the book’s project, knitting together …