Colloquium Series

The STSC Colloquium is an ongoing, informal series featuring one speaker who will open a common conversation via a short presentation of their current work. This series is a space for lively discussion across disciplinary lines. 

Fall 2011 Line Up

15 Sep (Thursday) 4:00-6:00pm
Open Forum :: Science and technology studies: the matter of critique

In its concern with the dark days of war, the often cynical exploitation of scientific uncertainty, and the consequences of political and intellectual demands to "choose sides," Bruno Latour's 2004 Critical Inquiry article, "Why has critique run out of steam?" remains strikingly resonant today. (Article can be found by clicking here)

Using the article as prompt and provocation, we kick off this Fall's Colloquium series with an open conversation on the possibilities of and for science and technology studies today, and on the matters of concern to members of our growing intellectual community, especially but not only at UC Berkeley. Please come having read the article. We look forward to the conversation.

This event is sponsored by OHST, STSC & The Program for the Medical Humanities

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21 Sep (Wednesday) 12:00-1:30pm
Brownbag :: Technoscienza

Alessandro Mongili & Paolo Magaudda, Università di Padova

Tecnoscienza (www.tecnosceinza.net) is a new online peer-reviewed journal of science and technology studies started in 2010 by the Italian STS community. During this brownbag meeting two of the editors of the journal Tecnoscienza will present an overview of the journal’s birth, its developments and aims. Moreover they will narrate about the growth of the Italian STS community that in 2005 has initiated STS Italia, the Italian society for the social studies of science and technology and that, among other recent activities, in 2010 has organized the international conference of the EASST (European Association for the Study of Science &Technology).

This event is sponsored by OHST

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22 Sep (Thursday) 4:00-6:00pm
Colloquium :: "Greening" Chemistry: A Missing Affective Dimension

Professor Alastair Iles
Environmental Science, Policy and Management, Division of Society & Environment

Green chemistry includes the redesign of chemical molecules, processes, and products to be less toxic and more sustainable. Yet green chemistry has failed to make widespread inroads into the chemical industry over the past 20 years. While there are many reasons such as weak regulation and chemistry education that does not include toxicology, one surprising reason may be that the role of emotions has been marginalized even though the history and consumption of chemistry is replete with relationships of affect. I consider how emotions may play a role in shaping the responses of a range of actors to the presence of chemicals in their lives and how chemicals have come to be accepted as a marker of modernity. More recently, relationships of affect have helped propel new calls for toxic chemicals such as bis-phenol A to be phased out from products. By claiming that their concerns are legitimate inputs into greening chemistry, consumers and communities are increasingly asserting that they should be participants too. Finally, I review some possible ways in which thinking about the role of emotions could contribute to greening chemistry. This is a speculative talk meant to catalyze discussion and feedback

This event is sponsored by STSC

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28 Sep (Wednesday) 12:00-1:30pm
Brownbag :: Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from the Plague of Athens to AIDS

Samuel Cohn, University of Glasgow

The paper confronts an enigma: why do certain epidemic diseases tend to stigmatize victims, provoke mass hatred, or class violence, while others do not, and some end by healing rifts within communities, bringing them together? I challenge the untested assumption widespread in the historiography that the usual consequence of epidemics was blaming, hatred and social violence and that it was worse in pre-modern times before the sixteenth-century ‘decline of magic’ than afterwards. These conclusions derive largely from considering less than a handful of diseases in the past and usually by coupling only two as with Black Death in 1348 and cholera in 1832 or syphilis in the sixteenth century and AIDS in the 1980s. Historians have yet to present and analyze the data comparatively over time, place, and disease. They have not confronted questions such as why cholera could continue to spark class hatred and riots from its first appearance in the West to as late as 1912 in Italy and to the 1960s in Peru and Venezuela, while yellow fever never did, even though its symptoms were as gruesome as cholera’s, its transmission and pathology took longer to discover, its victims were centered more on the poor and recent immigrants, and its mortality rates could soar as high as 70 percent among new immigrants. Nor do the underlying social and political conditions explain it: in New Orleans in 1853 and Memphis in 1878, for instance, yellow fever failed to spark racial tensions then running high; instead blacks and whites worked together to relieve the suffering and to secure the functioning of social services, while cholera’s class violence in New York in 1832 bucked against the tide of Jacksonian rationalism and an easing of class tensions. As yet, this project has no easy answers, but unlike the current literature on disease and blame finds that the usual single-factor answers--the mysteriousness of the disease, high contagion, gruesomeness of the symptoms, high clusters of the victims among the poor and other outsiders--fail to solve the puzzle.

This event is sponsored by OHST

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CANCELLED DUE TO FLIGHT DELAYS!

29 Sep (Thursday) 4:00-6:00pm
Colloquium :: Against Intellectual Monopoly

Michele Boldrin, Washington University in St. Louis

Pamela Samuelson, UC Berkeley, Berkeley Law School & School of Information

David Winickoff, UC Berkeley, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

This event is sponsored by OHST & STSC

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6 Oct (Thursday) 4:00-6:00pm
Colloquium :: The Worm, the Apple and the "Consumerization" of Hacking Practices and Culture

Professor Paolo Magaudda, Università di Padova

This presentation focuses on the emerging practices involving the hacking of some of Apple's devices and it analyzes them as a new form of consumer culture that develops around users' manipulations of consumer technologies. More specifically, the talk describes two different forms of widespread hacking practices of Apple's devices. The first consists in doing a so-called "hackintosh", which modifies non-Apple hardware to work with Apple operating systems and software. The second is the practice of "jailbreaking", which modifies Apple's iPhone and iPad by allowing users to install un-authorized software on these devices and utilize the devices in ways unintended by the manufacturer.

These two forms of hacking are discussed in terms of what they can tell us about the blurring boundaries between consumer culture, hacking practices, and the modification of technologies. I emphasize that these practices of modification can be interpreted as a form of "hackerization" of the use and consumption of digital devices. On the other hand, these forms of hacking can be also considered as part of a step toward the "consumerization" of hacking culture and activities, whereby hacking becomes a more popular and widespread activity and is integrated into consumer behaviors, market production, and capitalistic exchange.

The talk will focus on the roles of the web 2.0 and user-generated content in the evolution of these practices. Thus, I will discuss how these emerging forms of consumer hacking fit into and foster the ongoing debate regarding the consequences of the "participatory web" on the production of knowledge and on the exploitation of consumer activity and labor.

This event is sponsored by OHST & STSC

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7-8 Oct (Friday & Saturday)

Conference :: Enlightenment 2.1.3

7 OCT (Friday)

Keith Baker, Stanford University

Antoine Lilti, École normale supérieure (ENS)

Thomas Ahnert, University of Edinburg

Dan Edelstein, Stanford University

Jacob Soll, Rutgers University

Daniel Rosenberg, University of Oregon

8 OCT (Saturday)

Theodore Porter, UCLA

John Tresch, University of Pennsylvania

This event is sponsored by OHST, STSC & The Program for the Medical Humanities

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13 Oct (Thursday) 4:00-6:00pm
Colloquium :: How to Knit a Popular History of Media

Kristen Haring, Auburn University

As part of a study of the cultural history of binary systems, Kristen Haring undertook an unusual hands-on project. Her talk will explain how her knitting of Morse code serves to engage a general audience in discussion of communications theory, binary systems, and the history of media. She will also recount the surprising ways that physical production deepened her historical understanding. The talk will highlight the rich answers that can come from explorations that are at once artistic and technical, popular and scholarly, historical and contemporary. (Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media.)

This event is sponsored by BCNM, OHST & STSC

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14 Oct (Friday) 12:00-1:30pm
Colloquium :: "Our Environment in Miniature": Dust and the Early 20th-Century Forensic Imagination

Ian Burney, University of Manchester

The high-tech world of crime scene investigation has captured the public imagination. Stimulated in large part by the introduction of DNA profiling in the mid-1980s, and repeatedly reinforced through heroic representations in newspapers, crime novels and highly-rated television show, we are fully aware of the contours of this investigative landscape: its iconography – the white-suits of anonymous scene of crime officers; its challenges – hyper-vigilance against material contamination; and its spaces – especially the highly disciplined crime scene and its promise of yielding bio-trace evidence.

But what do we know about its history? In today’s talk I want to take us back to the time when two of the core principles for modern “CSI” were first articulated: first, the need to suspend the crime scene in time and space; second, the systematic “excavation” of crime scene as an archaeological/ecological site. These twin imperatives featured prominently in the writings of the most prominent early twentieth-century theorists of the crime scene – Hans Gross (1847-1915) and Edmond Locard (1877–1966). For both Gross and Locard, crime scene investigation centered on the disciplined search for minute, and ostensibly insignificant, trace evidence – blood, hair, fibre and – most evocatively – what they called “dust.” Ubiquitous and, to the uninitiated, characterless, dust represented the exemplary object of a modern forensic analytic. For them dust symbolized the furthest reach of the new forensic capacity that they were championing, one that – like the mixed representational sources underpinning our own understanding of a world of infinitesimal evidentiary traces – could legitimately draw upon contemporaneous imaginative discourses which invested dust with meaning.

Dust’s place in the making of the modern crime scene, I will argue, was indeed suspended in interesting ways between fact and fiction, its status in practitioner manuals supplemented by its circulation in the plots of contemporary crime novels. To follow this analytical path I will focus on Richard Austin Freeman’s (1862-1943) “scientific” detective, Dr John Thorndyke. It was in the Thorndyke stories that dust enjoyed its most systematic, and unencumbered, exposition, and, explicitly positioned at the intersection of public education and public entertainment, brought to a wide reading public the powers and possibilities of modern crime scene investigation.

This event is sponsored by OHST

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18 Oct (Tuesday) 5:00-7:00pm
Launch Party :: Sciences and Society Undergraduate Course Thread Launch

Professor Thomas Laqueur, History

Professor Cori Hayden, Anthropology

Dr. Guy Micco, M.D., Clinical Professor, UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program (JMP)

The Sciences and Society Course Thread has launched!

Please join us for an introduction to this innovative multi-disciplinary tool for undergraduates. The Sciences and Society Course Thread maps connections across departments, helping undergraduates to investigate questions that are simultaneously scientific and social, technological and political, ethical and economic.

This event will include food, conversation and a series of short reflections by students and professors on objects that reflect the dynamic relationship between science and the social in our changing world. All interested students and faculty are welcome.

The Course Thread Program is supported by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

This event is sponsored by The Townsend Center for the Humanities, OHST, STSC, & PMH

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26 Oct (Wednesday) 12:00-1:30pm
Brownbag :: "Access" and the Digital Library

Mary Murrell, UC Berkeley

Today, in the midst of expanding distribution networks for electronic information, “access” is a proliferating idiom. Associated with democratic principles ranging from freedom to human rights, equality, and distributive justice, “access” is nonetheless a complex and underanalyzed concept. In this talk, which is meant to provoke conversation, I seek to open “access” up for analysis rather than accept the concept as natural and positive. Taking the case of mass book digitization, I will examine the practices and politics sheltered under its promise of “access” and then contextualize them within the ongoing shift in libraries from print ownership to digital access. I will end with some speculations about the place of “access” within a copyright regime when the commodity in question is no longer a book but access to that book. If “access” is replacing the copy, how might it be regulated, if at all?

This event is sponsored by STSC

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27 Oct (Thursday) 4:00-6:00pm
Colloquium :: A Tenth of a Second

Jimena Canales, Harvard University

In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn’t until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, their impact on modern science and society was profound. Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies—telegraphy, photography, cinematography—Jimena Canales locates the reverberations of this “perceptual moment” throughout culture. Once scientists associated the tenth of a second with the speed of thought, they developed reaction-time experiments with lasting implications for experimental psychology, physiology, and optics. Canales traces such developments and the resulting technologies and laboratory practices to provide a provocative new perspective on our device-driven existence. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval, "A Tenth of a Second" sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries.

This event is sponsored by OHST & STSC

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2 Nov (Thursday) 4:00-6:00pm
Brownbag ::

Miguel Sánchez Romero, Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley

This event is sponsored by OHST

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3 Nov (Thursday)
Performance :: On Aging

Readers' theater is a technique used in the performance of literature in which texts are staged with minimal production values and scripts are not fully memorized. This semester's Reader's theater class, along with four to six elders from Salem Lutheran Home, will perform stories, plays, and poems that have to do with aging and old age, emphasizing the pleasures as well as the problems and concerns brought to us by aging in our society.

We anticipate a lively intergenerational and interdisciplinary dialogue among Berkeley graduate students in healthcare professions, humanities, and social sciences, and a group of elders at Salem Lutheran Home, a continuing care retirement community in Oakland. The performance will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

This event is sponsored by OHST, STSC & the Program for the Medical Humanities

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16 Nov (Wednesday) 12:00-1:30pm
Brownbag :: Comstock Creations: The Properties of an Industrial Watershed

Robert Chester

Discovered in 1859, the Comstock Lode was the largest silver strike in United States history. In stark contrast to the diffuse deposits of California's Mother Lode, the Comstock's mineral deposits were geographically and geologically concentrated; this massive concentration of ores also demanded a concentration of workers, capital, and machines never seen before in the history of precious metals mining. Northwestern Nevada's aridity, isolation and scarcity of usable timber all posed considerable obstacles to the lode's development. These challenges precipitated the creation of immensely expensive and elaborate technological systems to surmount environmental constraints. However, the disruptive effects of mining and milling unleashed unstable and unpredictable forces that reshaped working environments above and below ground.

The organization of labor, technological innovation and economic scale that emerged in dialogue with environmental forces on the Comstock Lode ultimately propelled mining towards the corporate, hard-rock paradigm that would define precious-metals mining for the remainder of the nineteenth century. These forces also reconfigured the hydrology and topography of northwestern Nevada's high desert by removing countless tons of earth from below ground, as companies created artificial hills of mining waste. While people scrambled to find adequate water above ground, workers struggled to combat vast quantities of scalding water below. Expensive pumps consumed massive quantities of fuel in attempts to drain the mines and prevent flooding. In addition, extraordinarily hot air taxed worker health and limited a company's productivity, even after the adoption of mechanical drills. Crumbling, water-soaked quartz encased the Comstock's rich veins of silver and gold. Thus, in the process of removing so much earth, gravity acted upon interdependent strata and seams of clay shifted repeatedly and frequently broke and fragmented boulders and rocks that collapsed timber supports, caved tunnels, and injured and killed workers.

By necessity, those who processed the Comstock's ores enlisted gravity as an ally. Entrepreneurs built mills that mechanized centuries-old techniques pioneered by Mexican and Spanish metallurgists. In the process, they ordered the interior space of these industrial "extractories" to conform to the laws of gravity. From stamping and amalgamation to settling, each subsequent stage moved downward to a station below. An elaborate system of hundreds of miles of sluices lined with blankets, copper riffles, iron nails and large quantities of quicksilver protruded from these mills and extended the distance over which gravity continued extracting precious metals from the tailings that mills expelled. Mill men grafted a new industrial hydrology atop the older watershed originally shaped by nature. Their actions created new, unstable hybrid systems, as they built dams and reservoirs to store thousands of tons of tailings. Ultimately, Adolph Sutro's grandiose drainage tunnel proved the most ambitious engineering scheme that sought to harness rather than combat gravity in efforts to prevent flooding.

By manipulating environmental processes in such ways, these men literally created an industrial watershed, as mounds of ore rose, shrunk and grew again amidst the clangor and din of immense machinery and the ordered symmetry of railroads and smokestacks. The Comstock also proved a historic watershed by providing templates for industrial technologies and corporate economies of scale that shaped the fates of future mining districts throughout the West and the World.

This event is sponsored by OHST

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30 Nov (Wednesday) 12:00-1:30pm
Brownbag :: Kant's Telescope, Beethoven's Telephone

Deirdre Loughridge, UC Berkeley, Department of Music

In a letter of 1823 to his patron and student Archduke Rudolph, Beethoven advised keeping a notebook by the piano and swiftly sketching one's musical inventions, for in this way one "learns to capture immediately the most remote ideas." By "the most remote" (*die entlegenstent*), we might think Beethoven meant "the most original" — the most unlike anything heard before. These implied meanings are indeed relevant, but "the most remote" also invokes a trope of musical inspiration based on listening at a distance. This trope emerged in the late eighteenth century, together with an interest in technologies of looking at a distance. In his anthropology lectures, for example, Kant likened the "assisted eye" of an observer at a telescope to the "assisted hearing" of an improviser at a keyboard: both instruments brought to awareness something previously below their users' threshold of consciousness. For early Romantics, such analogies between vision and hearing supported new ways of thinking about music. Inaudible worlds could be revealed by composers much like invisible worlds could be revealed by astronomers: the latter had their telescopes, the former some species of telephone.

My presentation will focus on the trope of composers listening at a distance, the role of mediating technologies in this trope, and the relevance of the trope to Beethoven's music. I hope, however, that my presentation will stimulate a broader discussion of the status of listening (as object of knowledge and observational technique) in the history of science and technology; and of what is to be gained by historicizing music and science together as ways of knowing ourselves and our world.

This event is sponsored by OHST

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Spring 2011 Line Up