The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas Laqueur The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed… Read more

The Center welcomes faculty members, student and fellow affiliates to submit activities to be reported in affiliate news each month. Please email cstmsnews@berkeley.edu. Gretchen Gano, The Center’s Associate Director of Research, coauthored a policy report with Experts and Citizens Assessing Science and Technology (ECAST) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) based on a citizen-… Read more

The Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, is seeking a postdoctoral scholar with excellent credentials in Science and Technology Studies (STS), History of Science, or Anthropology of Science, and a strong interest in the social study of algorithms/big data. By this we mean both the social impact of… Read more

Mirrors, arguably the first “virtual reality” technology, lie at the intersection of nature, culture, and self-recognition. Once small, rare, and coveted items owned only by the wealthy, today mirrors are as common as a pencil and are key to many modern tools, from HDTVs to solar-power plants and space telescopes. On Thursday, October 1, 2015… Read more

As a new “multidisciplinary research and design/build center,” the Center for Technology, Society & Policy at UC Berkeley is excited to seek proposals for short-term collaborative projects from a wide range of disciplines and with a wide range of outcomes. Projects may include publishable research, a design or engineering prototype, a whitepaper or regulatory proposal,… Read more

Assistant Professor, “Humanities Computing and Big Data”  The University of California, Davis invites applicants for a tenure-track assistant or advanced assistant professorship in Humanities Computing and Big Data. The appointee will join a growing interdisciplinary team of researchers engaged in collaborative work on media ecologies and digital humanities. Applicants should submit a cover letter, CV,… Read more

This summer the New Books Network interviewed CSTMS’ Charis Thompson about her book Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013). In this book, Charis Thompson investigates the evolution of the controversy over human pluripotent stem cell research in the United States and proposes a new ethical approach for “good science.” She traces political,… Read more

On the occasion of his 70th birthday, Professor Thomas Laqueur, Co-Director of the Program for the Medical Humanities, was honored for his decades of contributions to a wide range of academic communities in an event at the Social Science Matrix. Professor Laqueur is a historian of immense range and creativity who has set intellectual landmarks across a… Read more

This fall the Center’s Special Project area “The Cloud and the Crowd” convenes a new reading group. Following on from Cori Hayden’s course by the same name offered last year we will expand the exploration of relevant texts in literary, social and political theory and data science. Among those texts will be the newly published A Prehistory of… Read more

Gretchen Gano joins the Center this fall as the new Associate Director of Research and the Interim Director for the Ph.D. Designated Emphasis in STS. She is a scholar of Science, Technology and Society with research and practitioner experience in participatory technology assessment of emerging technologies. Her research explores the practices, dynamics, and structures of sociotechnical innovation systems. She is interested… Read more