Science and technology studies

So this week, I had the opportunity to speak with a Dr. Shao Chang Lee.

She is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford and an affiliate faculty member in the program in Science, Technology, and Society, as well as the program in Modern Thought and Literature.

This is a really interesting one, and we kinda take a weird angle, so I apologize, uh, to you for that, Dr. Lee, but hopefully the audience, uh, hopefully you guys all at home find it really just as interesting as I did.

Uh, she has a new book out.

Yeah.

Absolutely, yeah.

I mean, of course there's a lot of really wonderful work coming out of, um, people who work on history of technology, history of science, as well as, um, STS, right? Science, technology, and society, or science and technology studies, depending on how you wanna interpret that acronym.

Um, that, that really tried to figure out, right, what are the kinds of underlying assumptions that are being built into these technological processes-

Thank you so much.

[upbeat music] Sheila Jasanoff is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School.

And Noah Khan is with us again in studio this time.

He's been listening to the whole episode.

[laughs]

[laughs] And before that, he was at the Harvard Kennedy School in the Science Technology, uh, Studies Program, or Science Technology and Society program.

Yeah.

Um, so he's got a wealth of experience.

So and, and on and on and on with these other, other aspects of actually deploying the reforms in practice.

Now, if you cluster them in these ways, um, you start to see that it kind of looks like a, like a design, build, test, learn cycle.

I, I spent several years working in a school of engineering, and, like, the, one of the ways, one of the things that I had to do there was figure out how to run a red thread through the whole undergraduate engineering curriculum on ST- on science technology studies, on the ethical, societal security, and other aspects of, of engineering.

And one of the ways that I happened on it was like, well, like a design, build, test, learn cycle, you know, has all of these moments where you're asking a question of like, is this a good idea? Let's try this, see what works, and, and, um, and if it doesn't work, then we, we learn and we, we try something else.

And today we're joined by Jason Ananda-Josephson Storm.

Jason is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and Chair of the Science and Technology Studies at Williams College.

Please see the forum for a more extensive overview and bio of Jason.

But he is also, I will add, the author of Metamodernism, Future of Theory, which is sort of the main source text for a lot of the ideas that he presented on and that we'll be discussing here.

It's a topic I've been thinking about for a long time, and it's something I will be exploring in future work and in conversations with friends and colleagues.

I gave this talk at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia, at an event featuring a great group of historians and science and technology studies scholars.

The event was organized by Jacob Brueggemann.

Very fine and promising young scholar who is already doing great work.

But jokes apart, it's one of the papers that he wrote, one of the last papers that he wrote, which was why is critique running out of steam? Something like that.

And I think the question that excites me most right now is really how best can we shift our understanding of critique? in historiography, especially where history of science and science and technology studies meet.

Because if you're doing the history of 20th century and recent history of science, then in many ways, some of the questions they bleed in from science and tech studies, like history of science questions or transform the history of science methods, don't transfer onto STS just as easily.

But I think we... might want to, especially when writing about India, because that's something I've done so far.

I don't know if I'll continue to do that.