Global STS I – Transnational Network Building in Asia, Oceania and Beyond

Date/Time
Thursday
20 May 2021
5:30 pm

Event Type
Workshop


Zoom Link

Meeting ID: 975 0574 7092

Passcode: 436821

In recent years, the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) has been undergoing what some have called a “global turn” through greater attention to knowledge production, scientific practices, and therapeutics outside of North America and Western Europe. Regional and transnational academic networks have been established to support nascent STS communities around the world. As junior scholars, many of us are interested in exploring transnational network-building, collaborative research, and decolonial praxis in STS. To facilitate dialogue on the intellectual and political stakes of this “global turn” and how we might become involved, we will be hosting a two-part series on Global STS.

This first workshop, “Global STS I: Transnational Network Building – Asia, Oceania, and Beyond,” will feature STS leaders who have pioneered new academic networks in Australia, Asia, and globally. We will learn about their work and discuss how grad students can become involved. The second workshop, “Global STS II: Decolonial Praxis in STS,” will continue the conversation, featuring STS leaders who are pioneering new publishing opportunities in STS, expanding the Euro-American “canon” in STS, and building STS communities in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. 

 

Joining us will be the following speakers:

Kim Fortun is a cultural anthropologist with research and teaching focused on environmental risk and disaster, experimental ethnographic methods and research design, and the poetics and politics of data infrastructure.  2017-2019, Fortun served as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science, with a strong commitment to the transnational character of the society and STS as a field.  

Casper Bruun Jensen is an anthropologist of science and technology currently residing in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is the author of Ontologies for Developing Things (Sense, 2010) and Monitoring Movements in Development Aid (with Brit Ross Winthereik) (2013, MIT) and the editor of Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology with Kjetil Rödje (Berghahn, 2009) and Infrastructures and Social Complexity with Penny Harvey and Atsuro Morita (Routledge, 2016). His work focuses on climate, environments, infrastructures, and speculative and practical ontologies. 

Aalok Khandekar is an assistant professor of Anthropology/Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India. Khandekar’s recent research has focused on infrastructures of environmental health governance in southern cities; as part of the Cool Infrastructures consortium, his current research examines thermal knowledges and practices as marginalized groups in the urban global South adapt to rising temperatures in their cities. Khandekar was lead curator of the STS Across Borders and Innovating STS exhibits at the 2018 and 2019 4S annual meetings and is a founding member of the Transnational STS and TransAsiaSTS networks. Khandekar currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, the Open Access journal of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).

Grant Otsuki is a lecturer in cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has a PhD in anthropology (Toronto), and an MS in STS (RPI). Previously, he was assistant professor of anthropology, University of Tsukuba, Japan. His work is in the anthropology and history of technology. Grant has written about human-machine interfaces and the history of cybernetics in Japan, postcolonial anthropology, translation, and the anthropology of ethics in Japanese and English.

Thao Phan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. She is a feminist STS scholar who analyses the technologization of gender and race in algorithmic culture. Her work on Amazon Echo and the aesthetics of whiteness received the Nicholas C. Mullins Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) and the Most Distinguished Paper Prize by the Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA). She is also the co-founder and convenor of AusSTS—a network that brings together STS researchers across the Australasian region.

Fadjar Thufail is a senior researcher at the Research Center for Area Studies of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. He got his Ph.D from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the University of Tokyo, and the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Dr. Thufail is currently working on digital maritime heritage and the intersection between area studies and STS.

 

Global STS I: Transnational Network Building in Asia, Oceania, and Beyond

Hosted by the STS Futures Initiative

Co-moderated by Dr. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez and Dr. Jaimie Morse
Thursday, May 20, 2021
5:30pm PDT (LA time)

Zoom Link

Meeting ID: 975 0574 7092

Passcode: 436821 

We hope to see you there!

This event is sponsored by CSTMS.
Additional sponsorship comes from:  The STS Futures Initiative • University of California Humanities Research Institute
University of California Humanities Research Institute