InSIS at 4S Boston

A group of InSIS researchers will be delivering a closed panel session at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).  Dr Chris Goldsworthy, Dr Louise  Bezuidenhout and Dr Sara de Wit will host the panel session entitled: “Sense Making Across Ecological Boundaries”.  It will question how alternative forms of science relate to traditional scientific research. In particular, they ask how do the variety of normative underpinnings of alternative forms of science impact upon key issues such as knowledge creation and scientific consensus? And how does mainstream science make sense of this?  The constitutive papers will examine the utility of boundary-discourse in understanding scientific knowledge creation and application – whether the liminal spaces between traditional and emergent knowledge creation niches facilitate or hamper the development of robust imaginaries of scientific research.

This year’s conference is being held in Boston, Massachusetts from 30th August – 2nd September.   Its theme of “STS (In)Sensibilities” poses the questions “if sensibility is the ability to grasp and to respond, how might we articulate the (in)sensibilities of contemporary technoscience?  How, similarly, can we reflect on the extent and limits of our own sensibilities as STS scholars, teachers, and activists?”  The aim is to explore “how the world is made differently sense-able through multiple discourses and practices of knowledge-making, as well as that which evades the sensoria of technoscience and STS”.

The conference is also being attended by Dr Javier Lezaun (InSIS Deputy Director) and Dr Cesar Enrique Giraldo Herrera, with all attendees from InSIS contributing papers to panels as follows:

  • Dr Sara de Wit: “The Futurology of Forecasting” (session: Disaster Prediction and Preparedness)
  • Dr Chris Goldsworthy: “Synthetic Relationships: Affective Flexibility in the Diagnostic Genetics Laboratory” (session: Synthetic Actors II: Algorithms and Databases as Synthetic Actors)
  • Dr Cesar Enrique Giraldo Herrera: “Shamanic Microscopy” (session: Indigenous Knowledges and Technologies II
  • Dr Javier Lezaun: “‘Post-truth’ and the indirection of political speech” (session: The politics of “facts” and science in an age of “post-truth”)

The program for the 4S conference can be viewed here>