Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard
STS Circle at Harvard logo. It's not shaped like a circle.

STS Circle at Harvard

The STS Circle at Harvard is a group of doctoral students and recent Ph.D.s who are interested in creating a space for interdisciplinary conversations about contemporary issues in science and technology that are relevant to people in fields such as anthropology, history of science, sociology, STS, law, government, public policy, and the natural sciences. We want to engage not only those who are working on intersections of science, politics, and public policy, but also those in the natural sciences, engineering, and architecture who have serious interest in exploring these areas together with social scientists and humanists.

There has been growing interest among graduate students and postdocs at Harvard in more systematic discussions related to STS. More and more dissertation writers and recent graduates find themselves working on exciting topics that intersect with STS at the edges of their respective home disciplines, and they are asking questions that often require new analytic tools that the conventional disciplines don't necessarily offer. They would also like wider exposure to emerging STS scholarship that is not well-represented or organized at most universities, including Harvard. Our aim is to try to serve those interests through a series of activities throughout the academic year.

All Meetings will take place on Mondays, from 12:15–2 pm, at 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106, unless otherwise noted. Sandwich lunches will be provided. Please RSVP to harvard.sts@gmail.com by Friday noon the week before.

The Spring 2009 schedule can be downloaded as a poster by clicking here (PDF, 1.5MB).

Spring 2009 Calendar

Date Event
February 9Phil Loring (Harvard University)
Coaxing Black Boxes to Speak English: Verbal Computers as Boundary Machines in 1950s Linguistics

February 23 Kenneth Prewitt (Columbia University)
Social Science Evidence for Use
     and jointly sponsored by the Dept. of Sociology
Does (Should) Racial Counting Have a Future in America?
with panelists:
     Duana Fullwiley (Anthropology, Harvard University)
     Jennifer L. Hochschild (Government, Harvard University)
     Mary C. Waters (Sociology, Harvard University)
4:00 pm, Starr Auditorium, Belfer Center, 79 JFK Street

March 2Michael B. McElroy (Harvard University)
Options for a Low-Carbon Energy Future

March 11 Science & Democracy Lecture Series
Connected Publics: Power and Politics in a Networked Age
A panel discussion between:
Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School)
Antoine Picon (Harvard Graduate School of Design)
Lucy Suchman (Sociology, Lancaster University & MIT [visiting])
Sherry Turkle (STS, MIT)
Moderator: Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard Kennedy School)
NOTE: 5:00-7:00 pm, Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street

March 16Andrew Jewett (Harvard University)
Before the Received View: Social Theories of Science in Interwar America

March 30Harry R. Lewis (Harvard University)
Steps Toward an Undergraduate Concentration in Technology and Society

April 6Nasser Zakariya (Harvard University)
Origins of Epic Authorship: A Vision of Scientific Synthesis in the 1990s

April 13Claude Rosental (CNRS & Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
Public Demonstrations of Technology: Sociology and Politics
NOTE: 4pm, William James Hall Room 1550

April 20Vincent Lepinay (MIT)
Sketch of Derivation: Insights from Wall Street and Atlantic Africa

April 27Andrew Lakoff (UCSD)
Cold War Systems in Crisis: The Concept of Resilience from Psychology to Ecology

Fall 2008 Calendar

Date Event
September 22 Myles Jackson (Polytechnic University)
The History of CCR5: Intellectual Property and Human Genetics

September 29 Anders Blok (Copenhagen University)
Turning around Latour, or: What is "Cosmopolitical" about Environmental Objects, like Whales?

October 6 Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School)
The Science of Cooperation and Progressive Social Theory

October 20 Robert Truog (Harvard Medical School/Children's Hospital)
Death, Brain Death, and the Ethics of Organ Transplantation

October 27 Alex Wellerstein (Harvard University)
Selling Secrecy: Laser Fusion, Classification, and the Turbulent 1970s

November 3 John Carson (University of Michigan)
Drawing Things Together: STS and the History of Science
     and at 4:00 pm, Science Center, Room 469,
     jointly sponsored by the Dept. of History of Science
What makes an "Unsound Mind"? Medicine, Law, and Competency in the Nineteenth-Century Courtroom

November 12 (W) Science & Democracy Lecture Series
Ulrich Beck (University of Munich)
Risk Society's Cosmopolitan Moment

November 17 Sharon Traweek (UCLA)
Scientists' Career Narratives and Collaborative Research in Europe, Japan, and the US

November 24 Adelheid Voskuhl (Harvard University)
The Mechanics of Sentiment: Women Automata and the Culture of Affect in the European Enlightenment

December 1 Paul Shapiro (Humane Society of the United States)
Technology's Role in Factory Farming: Animal Welfare, Public Health, the Environment, and How to Make Progress

December 8 David Kaiser (MIT)
Searching for Stability: Nuclear Physics and Fraud at Cold War's End

A list of previous schedules of the STS Circle (as far back as Fall 2006) can be found here.

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