The social sciences and humanities have long been engaged in the study of matter, materiality and materialisms. So what to make of recent announcements of the arrival of a variety of “new materialisms”? This conference brings together scholars from across the university to discuss a multiplicity of orientations and critical approaches to the use—and in some cases misuse—of the term and conceptual apparatus of “new materialisms” in their own work. Intentionally named as a question, What’s New About New Materialisms? is intended as an exploration of the benefits and limitations to “new” modes of thinking about and through the material. The four questions that guide contributors’ presentation are: What is new about matter? What is a method adequate to a new matter? Do ‘new materialisms’ mark the limit of discourse? How might we attend to materiality as a property of the digital?

With keynote presentations from Karen Barad & John Borneman

Faculty Presenters: Jenna Burrell :: Kim TallBear :: Benedikte Zitouni :: Rosemary Joyce :: Mel Chen :: Jean-François Blanchette :: Donna Jones :: Ruth Tringham :: Jenny Reardon ::Tim Choy

For a full list of presenters and schedule,click here.

Organizing Committee

Eric Plemons
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, UC Berkeley
eplemons@berkeley.edu

Michael D’Arcy
PhD Candidate, Medical Anthropology, UC Berkeley
darcy@berkeley.edu

Daniela K. Rosner
PhD Candidate, School of Information, UC Berkeley
daniela@ischool.berkeley.edu

Faculty Sponsor: Cori Hayden
Associate Professor, Anthropology, UC Berkeley
cphayden@berkeley.edu

Find out which events will be streamed live by visiting our Current Events page.

Ethics, Engineering, and Society (E125) is a new seminar-style course offered this semester through the College of Engineering (Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11-12:30, Wheeler Hall).

poster design: Daniela Rosner

The Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society (CSTMS) at UC Berkeley has begun a new Special Project to explore the social and cultural dynamics of contemporary design. It is a chance to foster dialogue among the design studies community, professional designers and architects, historians, and science and technology studies scholars. These communities often engage very similar objects and problems, and through a continuing series of workshops and events, CSTMS seeks to strengthen their interaction, analytic insights, and practical implementations.

From urban planning to the design of everyday objects to creating our digital landscape, questions of design lead each of these communities to rethink how the social is embedded in and shaped by our built environment. Some of the themes that we would like to engage with in this Project include: materials and their politics; fabrication, labor, and craft; the built, the made, the real, the discursive; changing conditions of knowledge- and thing-production; new and old; innovating, imitating, and replicating.

CSTMS affiliated members are welcome to propose events, working groups, or other activities to be included under this Project.  The CSTMS office is here to help you make those events happen as well.

 Inaugural Event:

Friday, December 2, 2011

David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way # 100 Berkeley, CA 94704-1376

Click here for more information

PhD students at Berkeley now have the option to add a Designated Emphasis in Science & Technology Studies (STS).  STS is a multidisciplinary field with the capacity to rethink the relationship between science and society in social and political life. To find out what the Designated Emphasis involves, and how to enroll, click here.

This essay by CSTMS Fellow Jake Kosek examines the rise of the honeybee as a tool and metaphor in the U.S. “war on terror.” At present, the largest source of funding for apiary research comes from the U.S. military as part of efforts to remake entomology in an age of empire. This funding seeks to make new generations of bees sensitive to specific chemical traces—everything from plastic explosives, to the tritium used in nuclear weapons development, to land mines. Moreover, in an explicit attempt to redesign modern battlefield techniques, the Pentagon has returned to the form and metaphor of the “swarm” to combat what it takes to be the unpredictability of the enemy in the war on terror. At the same time, honeybee colonies are collapsing. Rethinking material assemblages of bees and humans in the war on terror, this essay moves beyond the constrained logic and limited politics of many epidemiological investigations of colony collapse. Honeybees are situated within a more expansive understanding of the role of and consequences for the animal in modern empire building.