Two UC Berkeley graduate students, and a post-doc fellow, affiliated with CSTMS have secured tenure-track academic positions for the following year.

Read more about the event

Representations and expressions of love between humans and non-human animals suffuse contemporary U.S. culture. There is the love-at-a-distance of the feral cat rescuer, the often- deadly love of the cattle rancher, and the everyday love of the poop-scooping dog owner. There is the loving precision of the wildlife biologist tracking elk populations, the loving compassion of the veterinary laboratory technician, and the loving violence of the dog fighter. And then there is the love expressed by animal advocate Jessica Dolce in light of the reality of overcrowded shelters and underfunded sanctuaries: “putting them to sleep, in your arms, can be the greatest act of love you can give to your pet.” These are undoubtedly funny kinds of love.

Kind is important here, for kind indexes the different kinds of love and the frequently mixed affects –care, compassion, violence –involved in these relationships. However, kind also indicates varying kinds of ethics, for the researcher who carefully, even lovingly follows protocols for the humane treatment of animals in a lab arguably engages with different ethics than those undertaken by the animal shelter worker who carefully, even lovingly administers a temperament test to determine if an animal should be euthanized. And kind is also crucial to understanding the roles of category differences at play in these loves, for while the species divide of human/non-human looms large, divisions of breed, sex, gender, and race also deeply shape these loves.

This conference seeks to explore these funny loves and the kinds of ethics and affects, as well as categorical kinds, in which they are caught up.

Contributions emphasizing feminist, critical race, indigenous, queer, and transgender studies are particularly welcome, as are contributions with connections to science and technology studies. Contributions from non-academic writers and thinkers are also very welcome. Confirmed conference participants include Professors Donna Haraway, Colin Dayan, Carla Freccero, Mel Chen, Eduardo Kohn, Irene Gustafson, and Eva Hayward.

Visit the Working Group’s page for more information.

This working group is made possible through a grant from the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

Time: 11:00 am – 6:00 pm.

Location: 470 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley, ADA accessible

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The Spring 2013 Sciences and Society Symposium strives to open up lively debate around new forms of knowledge, boundary-drawing practices, and aesthetics in part by experimenting with the form that undergraduate research and presentations can take. Read more at the official event page.

Undergraduate Coursework

History 30. Science & Society

Monday Wednesday Friday  9:00-10:00
Instructor: Dr. Samuel A. Weiss EVANS
101 Barker

Scientific thought and society have always been interwoven. In this course, you will explore the various facets of this interrelationship, from deciding what counts as science to the ways that science has shaped and been shaped by the social, political, economic, religious, and natural environments it sits within. The focus for the course is providing historical grounding to the contemporary relationship between science and society.

For more undergraduate courses, please visit the Townsend Center’s website for the Undergraduate Coursethread in Science and Society.

Graduate Coursework

These courses are examples of ones that satisfy the elective requirement for the PhD Designated Emphasis in STS.

Anthropology 250X. The Anthropology of Reason, Science and Modernity

Tuesday 12:00-2:00
Instructor: Paul Rabinow
219 Kroeber Hall

This graduate seminar is a challenging, high level overview of the relations of reason, science and modernity. It provides a genealogy of these topics taken up as an anthropological problem. It does so through close readings of major 20th Century thinkers (Max Weber, John Dewey, Georges Canguilhem, Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault), taken up in an anthropological perspective. The course focuses on the problem of science and rationality understood as practices of reason and their troubled relations with ethical and political registers.

ESPM 249 P001. Bioethics, Law and the Life Sciences

Wednesday 10:00-12:00
Instructor: David Winickoff
12 Boalt Hall

Developments in biotechnology and the life sciences are unsettling legal and policy approaches to intellectual property, reproduction, health care, medical research, and the criminal justice system. Through reading primary materials and relevant secondary sources, this course investigates ethical, legal, and policy problems associated with these developments, and explores possible solutions.

Geography 255 P001. Topics in Political Geography

Thursday 2:00-5:00
Instructor: Jake Kosek
575 McCone Hall

Research seminar on selected topics in political geography.

Health and Medical Sciences 298 P004. Directed Group Study

Monday 6:00-8:00
Instructor: Guy Micco
470 Stephens

Group study for graduate students. Intensive examination of health-related topics.

History 280.002. Enlightenment, Science, and Technology

Wednesday, 10:00-12:00
Instructor: Massimo Mazzotti
123 Dwinelle Hall

The Enlightenment is more than a name for the eighteenth century in Europe and in its colonial networks. The term has been used to refer to a more or less coherent set of values and beliefs, to a historical process whose moral and political legacy continues to be fiercely contested. This seminar explores the intersection of these two meanings of Enlightenment, through the lenses of the transformation of scientific practice and of the very notion of rationality during the long eighteenth century. We shall discuss key works in the historiography of the Enlightenment and the cultural history of science, following the demise of the ‘grand narrative’ and the many moves from the transcendent to the mundane: from the mind to the body, from humanity to society, from the universal to the local. Keeping our focus on the universality of modern science as a historical construction, we shall be able to address effectively a set of questions have been defining the modern world ever since, and especially the tension between universality and locality, artificial and natural, centers and peripheries.

History 285U.001. Research Workshop with an Emphasis on Institutions of Culture and Structures of Cultural Exchange

Wednesday, 10:00-12:00
Instructor: Thomas Laqueur
3205 Dwinelle Hall

This is a workshop course on cultural history. All are welcome. But I invite especially projects that examine the institutional infrastructure for the making, transformation, and exchange of knowledge, art, technology, or ethical norms: printing and publishing; education; translation; travel; museums and concert halls; law and intellectual property, for example. I offer step-by- step guidance through the process of identifying, researching, and presenting the fruits of a manageable research project. In the first few weeks we will concentrate on basic structural and esthetic choices: a first paragraph, a last paragraph, deciding on an audience and on a narrative voice. Later, the seminar will constitute itself as an editorial collective that will read rough drafts and suggest revisions aimed at making the paper acceptable to our imaginary “journal.” The aim is to have a draft of a publishable paper for a real journal by May. For those topics on which I can offer no expertise we will rely, as I have in the past in my 285s, on the expertise of colleagues in this and other departments. Small grants-in-aid for research material will be available as needed.

Information 203 P001. Social and Organizational Issues of Information

Tuesday Thursday, 11:00-12:30
Instructor: Jenna Burrell
170 Barrows Hall

The relationship between information and information systems, technology, practices, and artifacts on how people organize their work, interact, and understand experience. Individual, group, organizational, and societal issues in information production and use, information systems design and management, and information and communication technologies. Social science research methods for understanding information issues.

Information 214 P001. Needs and Usability Assessment

Tuesday Thursday, 11:00-12:30
Instructor: Nancy Van House
210 South Hall

Concepts and methods of needs and usability assessment. Understanding users’ needs and practices and translating them into design decisions. Topics include methods of identifying and describing user needs and requirements; user-centered design; user and task analysis; contextual design; heuristic evaluation; surveys, interviews, and focus groups; usability testing; naturalistic/ethnographic methods; managing usability in organizations; and universal usability.

Abstracts due: 1 February 2013

Development, understood as a set of aspirations, an organizational field, sets of expertise, or a guiding imaginary has shifted in response to the post-colonial growth of democracy in the South, the rise of multi-stakeholder partnerships and sustainability discourses, and the frenzied search for innovative models by policy makers worldwide. The North to South transfer of aid and tools, a process in which Northern experts were central, has opened up to the transfer of policies – like impact assessments, ecosystem services, or public health programs – in which Southern experts are increasingly involved. A ‘local’ view of the world has been promoted as more sensitive and appropriate to local, real-world needs and customs for many decades by development scholars and practitioners. However, we are now seeing not only ‘local’ models and policies being developed in situ in democratic countries such as Chile, but we are also seeing the rise of ‘Southern’-led international cooperation agreements, and ‘Southern’ models travelling to the ‘North’. For example, transport policies from Bogota are being implemented in San Francisco, while multiple African nations are receiving development aid from Brazil and technical advice from Bolivia.

Debates about local specificity versus global or universal truths have been central to STS scholarship. In this symposium, we wish to examine these new ‘local’-universals. What does it mean for Mayor Bloomberg to bring conditional cash transfers, developed in rural Mexico, to address poverty in New York? Are South Korean missionaries practicing a different Christian evangelism in Kenya? More generally, should we be analyzing the practices of representation, translation, and reconciliation, central to development programs and policies with an eye to shared ‘peripheral’ histories? In what ways do the epistemic roots of knowledge matter?

This symposium invites scholars to reflect on the dynamics of science, technology and expertise in international development, domestic development practices, and how these two interact. Despite its ambivalent history, development is still framed as an aspiration for millions. Thus these questions are central to critical investigations of legitimacy, epistemic authority, and democracy. We hope that, in bringing together a diverse collection of scholars, we may productively challenge our own assumptions and approaches to studying expertise, representational practices, and circulations unfolding in the name of development.

Keynote Speaker:

Richard Rottenburg is Chair of Anthropology at the Institute for Anthropology and Philosophy at Martin-Luther University and a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where he heads the Law, Organization, Science, and Technology Research Group. Among his many publications, he is the author of “Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid” (2009), and is co-editor of “Rethinking Biomedicine and Governance in Africa. Contributions from Anthropology” (2012), and “Identity politics and the new genetics – re/creating categories of difference and belonging” (2012).

Call for Papers

The New Development symposium will explore questions raised by the growing STS literature on development practices and postcolonial relations.  Themes will cut across notions such as innovation, provincializing expertise, democracy, and im/mutable mobiles.  Researchers and students from any discipline interested in the intersections of knowledge production, science and technology, development, and postcolonial studies are invited to participate in the New Development symposium.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Sustainability technologies, such as biofuel programs or ‘green city’ models
• Public health and urban infrastructure programs in slums/auto-constructed neighborhoods
• Policies and politics of poverty measurement and reduction
• Agricultural policies, including genetically modified organisms or aquaculture
• New intellectual property regimes
• Impact and risk assessment policies
• New and old extractive industries
• Climate change adaptation strategies
• Environmental policies, including multilateral environmental agreements
• Disaster planning, relief and economy
• Transportation policies and technologies

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words by February 1, 2013 to Freyja Knapp or Javiera Barandiaran

Undergraduate Coursework

For undergraduate courses, please visit the Townsend Center’s website for the Undergraduate Coursethread in Science and Society.

Graduate Coursework

Anthropology 219. Bodies, Moralities, Medical Ethics, and Humanitarian Reason

Wednesday, 10:00-12:00
Instructor: Nancy Scheper-Hughes
219 Kroeber Hall (Gifford Room)

This seminar for graduate students in medical anthropology, medical students in the UCSF-UCB joint medical program, and related disciplines. It is loosely linked to the ongoing moralities project led by Didier Fassin at the Institute for Advanced Study at IAS and at the EHSS. It is the graduate advanced version of Anthropology 119: Moralities, Bioethics and Human Rights. The seminar will examine the anthropology of moralities, ethical subjectivities, moral and political economies. It endeavors to bring together various currents, approaches and issues in this emerging subfield of anthropology-medical anthropology. We will explore genealogical and epistemological issues related to the fragile borders between the moral, the ethical, and the political, between ordinary ethics and professional medical ethics. Together, we will read, discuss, and examine the work that morality and ethics do in response to life crisis events – sexuality, reproduction, birth, nurturing, illness, disability, addiction, epidemics, disasters, political conflagration, individual death and mass death. I have selected several new ethnographies that capture and chronicle the way ordinary people in extraordinary situations resolve moral quandaries during critical events. We will look at the emergence of the field of medical bioethics following medical experiments during the Holocaust and WW11 more generally. We will discuss current debates regarding : choice, coercion, the politics of care vs. indifference, the ethics of selfless love (Levinas) vs. the cultural politics of hatred and repugnance as these, too, are shaped by moral reason and ethical subjectivities ( The Holocaust, apartheid South Africa, the Dirty War). What are the moral and ethical ideals to which people at different times, places, political situations and professions aspire? Are there any global or universal ethical principles? Under what circumstances do they arise? How do religious beliefs enter and impact ethical and moral reasoning? We will end with Didier Fassin’s potent critique of humanitarian reason.

Anthropology 250X. Anthropology of the Contemporary

Friday, 2:00-5:00
Instructor: Paul Rabinow
221 Kroeber Hall

Anthropology 250X. Science and Power

Wednesday, 10:00-12:00
Instructor: Laura Nader
180 Barrows

This seminar is about science and power. The readings cover both ethno-science and techno-science in order to raise questions about the production of scientific knowledge. The key assumption is that science is not autonomous, rather linked to social and cultural organizations. It is also not bounded, e.g., the sole product of a geographic area. The complex threads of debates over science need a more global and historical context and in order to enrich our understanding a more inclusive approach. An anthropological contribution to these debates requires a relocation and a future rethinking of the future of Western science. Traditions, such as the myth of Western superiority, are shrinking.

STS 200 (also History 280S.002) Introduction to Science and Technology Studies

Tuesday 12:00-3:00
Instructor: Massimo Mazzotti
3104 Dwinelle Hall
Office Hours: Thursday 2:00-3:00
mazzotti@berkeley.edu

This course is designed to provide a rigorous foundation in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). It will reconstruct the emergence of the major themes and issues in the field, and offer an overview of leading theories and research methodologies. Students will explore the relationship between science, technology, culture, and politics through exemplary case-studies from different periods and contexts. Attention will focus on the tension between expertise and democracy, and on the ways in which new scientific and political futures are produced. The course will equip graduate students with theoretical and practical tools for analyzing complex problems at the science, technology, and society interface.

This course will function as the required core course for the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies (STS).

History 280/285H. Africa: Material Culture

Tuesday, 2:00-4:00
Instructor: Abena Osseo-Asare
115 Barrows Hall

Fabric is at the heart of cultural production in African spaces. From birth, to initiations, to weddings, to funerals, fabric binds together communities, adorning families, and providing the basis for personal wealth. This course explores emerging research on the social history of textiles and clothing, with special reference to cases in Africa and comparative work in South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. It seeks to integrate this work with ongoing debates in the field of science and technology studies on innovation, and technology transfer and appropriation. Through the lens of fabric, we will examine the meanings of diaspora, empire, modernity, post-colonialism and globalization for everyday people. Case material addresses the history behind fibers, dyes, weaving, and construction techniques, as well as issues of industrialization, intellectual property rights, sustainability, and workplace health. Course participants will also learn to ìreadî fabrics, clothing, and textile technologies for historical information through museum and field visits.

Information 290. Multimedia Narrative for Professional Practice and Field Research

Prof. Nancy Van House
School of Information
TuTh 11-12:30
205 South Hall
CCN: 42623

This course is concerned with collecting, interpreting, editing, summarizing, and presenting visual and audio media.  Specifically:

•  Collecting field data via still images, video, and/or audio
• Interpreting, editing, summarizing these
• Creating summaries for oneself and for others
• Creating multimedia presentations (not necessarily from field data — e.g., prototype videos — but mostly from the media that you have made and now need to compile into a short, effective presentation)

We will address both the practical and intellectual issues of making and using such media.  We’ll do a lot of hands-on work with photography, video, and audio recording and editing.

This class is appropriate both for researchers (e.g., PhD students doing qualitative research) and professionals (e.g., people doing UX research and design or making and presenting media as part of other professional practice).

Visual and other media are central to professional practice and research in many fields.  Data collection, reports and presentations, face-to-face and distant, online and off, often rely heavily on video, audio, and photography.

Because we are a media-literate society, with accessible hardware and software plus easy online distribution, it seems that everyone “knows” how to make and critique such media. However, our knowledge about how to effectively make, use, and present these media trails far behind our ability to create hours and gigabytes of content. Anyone can make media but how to do it well? An what does it mean to do it well?

In this seminar, we will address both theoretical and practical issues of capturing and creating narratives with video, audio, and photography. We will draw on photojournalism, visual narrative, visual anthropology, visual studies, and related areas.  We will get hands-on experience creating and editing our own media, while we reflect on them with the help of theoreticians and scholars in relevant areas. We will also consider how accessible media production and presentation are changing professional and research practice.

This course is relevant to students in professional schools and to doctoral students interested in and qualitative research, including user experience research; technology designers who produce video scenarios and concept videos; and anyone concerned with collecting and presenting information via multiple media.  It is particularly suitable for people doing field work, using audio, video, and still images to record and summarize their research.

No prior experience is necessary, but students already grappling with visual (and audio) media will find this course especially useful.  We will use entry- and intermediate-level hardware and software; even smart phones and cheap cameras are now capable of producing good-quality output. Students who already have experience in these areas should find much in this course that is useful.

Public Health 203A. Theories of Health and Social Behavior

Thursday, 2:00-5:00
Instructor: Seth Holmes
240 Mulford Hall

Abstract

Walter D. Valdivia

Samuel A. W. Evans

In the U.S.A., advocates of academic freedom—the ability to pursue research unencumbered by government controls—have long found sparring partners in government officials who regulate technology trade. From concern over classified research in the 1950s, to the expansion of export controls to cover trade in information in the 1970s, to current debates over emerging technologies and global innovation, the academic community and the government have each sought opportunities to demarcate the sphere of their respective authority and autonomy and assert themselves in that sphere. In this paper, we explore these opportunities, showing how the Social Contract for Science set the terms for the debate, and how the controversy turned to the proper interpretation of this compact. In particular, we analyze how the 1985 presidential directive excluding fundamental research from export controls created a boundary object that successfully demarcated science and the state, but only for a Cold War world that would soon come to an end. Significant changes have occurred since then in the governance structures of science and in the technical and political environment within which both universities and the state sit. Even though there have been significant and persistent calls for reassessing the Cold War demarcation, a new institutionalization of how to balance the concerns of national security and academic freedom is still only in its nascent stages. We explore the value of moving from a boundary object to a boundary organization, as represented in a proposed new governance body, the Science and Security Commission.

Artwork: Futoshi Miyagi (2007) “Hours of Silence [on wall]; Science Teacher [on floor]“. Source: ArtSTOR.