2022-2023 Colloquium Series

September 26, 2022

Science Studies Program Meeting
SSP faculty and students only 

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October 3, 2022 

Bharat Venkat

Assistant Professor, Institute for Society & Genetics

Department of History, UC Los Angeles

Surrogations of Sensation: Scales, Manikins, and the Science of Body Heat

 

In the 1920s, researchers at the American Society of Heating and Ventilation Engineers developed a seven-point scale for assessing what was described as “thermal sensation.” This scale was utilized to elicit responses from research subjects about what was taken to be their perception of how their bodies were affected by their thermal environments. Almost immediately, researchers were confronted by the difficulties posed by human subjectivity and cognition for generating useful data: amongst them, that humans could not reliably discriminate between the points on the scale, each of which was associated with a thermal perception (e.g. “warm,” “slightly warm,” “slightly cool,” and so on). In turning to what they described as “thermal comfort,” which researchers described as a “state of mind” or “state of feeling,” these concerns only multiplied.
The seeming inability of humans to adequately and consistently identify thermal sensation opened the door for what I’ve come to think of as surrogations of sensation. How might thermal sensations be “felt” or “perceived” by non-human means, but in a way that paralleled human modes of feeling? In other words, how could researchers know what a human felt without involving humans, without having to rely on their answers? One possible solution involved the development of thermal manikins, abstracted mechanical sculptures of the body that could emulate specific human physiological function (in this case, the capacity for thermoception).
In this talk, I trace the history of the science of body heat in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing primarily on the use of both scales and thermal manikins in the United States. In so doing, I pay particular attention to the deeply racialized, gendered, and classed conceptions of the body that underpinned this research. In responding to military and industrial demands for research about how various kinds of bodies were affected by their thermal environments, I suggest that scientists and engineers aimed to develop what we might think of as surrogate bodies that could sense, without the epistemological problems posed by the intervention of human cognition: in other words, sensate bodies without brains.Surrogations of Sensation: Scales, Manikins, and the Science of Body Heat” 

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October 17, 2022

Stephen Molldrem

Assistant Professor, Bioethics and Health Humanities

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

 

“"Against “Real-Time,” for a Materialist Data Ethics in Biomedicine and Health”

Everything takes time. Despite this, a range of initiatives in contemporary biomedicine and health go out of their way not to account for this basic fact of social life. In fact, many programs that aim to hasten the pace of discovery and practice in health frame their goals using the idiom of “real-time.” To critically assess the ideology of “real-time” and the underlying conditions that motivate its use in health contexts, I draw on the method of historical materialism in the Western Marxist tradition. I situate the drive to erase time in the conduct of health research and practice within larger developments in contemporary capitalism that aim to accelerate the pace of production through processes of datafication. In response to these conditions, I propose a “materialist data ethics” as a set of strategies for conceptualizing, studying, and (re-)organizing labor in health research and practice – particularly in ways that emphasize the time-intensive processes that make biomedical innovation and public health action possible. A materialist data ethics would center the time, labor, people, technologies, infrastructures, and struggles that allow health-related programs to be implemented at all. Such an approach to ethical action in biomedicine and health would thus oppose itself to “real-time” and the conditions that support it as an ideology that informs contemporary policy and practice

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October 24, 2022 (Zoom)

Alex Csiszar

Professor, Department of History of Science

Harvard University

 

"Data and Academic Discrimination in the 1970s"

This talk will trace the entangled history of new attempts to fight sexual discrimination in academia and the rise of technologies and algorithms for measuring scientific productivity during the 1970s. New legislation passed in the United States in 1972 opened the door to a string of lawsuits against universities claiming discrimination in hiring and tenure decisions. This happened just as scholars and entrepreneurs were beginning to develop tools to use citation data to evaluate and compare not only scientific fields but individual scientists. Early optimism that these new tools might provide objective proof of discrimination were tempered by an increasing realization that citations weren't quite the neutral and unobtrusive markers that some hoped they might be. What emerged from these entanglements by the early 1980s was not only a great deal of research in the field of scientometrics, but the beginnings of a theory of the politics of citation and calls for citational justice.

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October 31, 2022 (Zoom)

Krystal Tribbett McCants

Curator, Orange County Regional History

UC Irvine

 

"Into the Archives: My Path from UCSD to UCI"

Currently the Curator for Orange County Regional History for UCI Special Collections and
Archives, Krystal's role as a curator is to research, identify, preserve, and make accessible
materials that document the history of OC. She is especially focused on supporting histories
traditionally underrepresented in the historical record through community-centered archives
partnerships. During this informal conversation, Krystal will discuss her path to librarianship
which included a short stint as a corporate research for PETA. She will reflect on her
experience working at PETA and UCI, as well as how she applies research interests, skills,
and knowledge gained while a doctoral student at UCSD to her work

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November 21, 2022

Christopher Willoughby

Visiting Assistant Professor

History of Medicine Health, Pitzer College

UC San Diego

"Masters of Health: Slavery, Racial Science, and the Making of U.S. Medical Education"

Early American medicine operated on a paradox that Black people were anatomically distinct, and yet, their cadavers were used interchangeably in anatomical education. In this talk, Chris Willoughby will analyze the history of racial science’s influence on medical education, unpacking how this contradiction became internalized by medical professionals. Specifically, Willoughby will chart the rise of both medical schools and bio determinist racial science in the United States before the Civil War. Moreover, he argues that anatomical faculty were critical in spreading bio determinist racial science, giving physicians greater power and influence during the growing sectional debate over slavery in the United States

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December 5, 2022

No Colloquium
Finals Week

January 9, 2023

Science Studies Program Meeting
SSP faculty and students only 

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January 16, 2023

No Colloquium
Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday 

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January 23, 2023 (Zoom Lecture) 

Katie Hale

PhD Candidate

Sociology and Science Studies

UC San Diego

“Chronic Crisis and Uncertainty within Food Safety; A Machine Learning-Assisted Survey of Toxicity Politics in the Food System”

As technically-managed hazards proliferate in late modernity, states and other institutions have elaborated processes of risk assessment to reckon with a world where our exposure to toxicants is inevitable, albeit uneven. Case studies in agnotology show how uncertainties around hazards are seized upon and exaggerated to stir public controversy. But to better separate intentionally manufactured doubt from the necessary specification of ignorance, in this talk I argue we should closely attend to patterns of uncertainty expression within the routine documentation of regulatory sciences, while nonetheless recognizing the blind spots of a toxic politics too focused on quantifying “wayward molecules behaving badly” (Liboiron et al. 2018).

To this end, I report on an ongoing mixed qualitative/quantitative coding project where I apply human-supervised natural language processing (NLP) to survey uncertainty expression across food safety and environmental risk assessments conducted by government agencies in the United States and the European Union. In this talk, I focus on the European Food Safety Authority and efforts to train an NLP system to recognize EFSA's highly routinized specification of uncertainties around hundreds of different chemical and biological hazards. Although the EU's approach to risk management is generally regarded as far more precautionary than that of the US, over 4,200 emergency use authorizations have been issued within the EU since just 2016, allowing hundreds of potential toxicants to enter the market in ways that lack full authorization. In addition, by applying the NLP model trained on EFSA discourse to the discursively-similar yet distinct case of American food safety assessments, I interrogate the challenges to analytic validity when applying new ML technologies for content analysis.

 

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January 30, 2023 (Zoom Lecture)

Jill A. Fisher

Professor of Social Medicine

UNC Center for Bioethics

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

““Your Health is Your Wealth”: The Role of Race and Social Inequality in Healthy Individuals’ Participation in Phase I Trials”

Phase I clinical trials test the safety and tolerability of new pharmaceuticals and typically pay healthy people to enroll as research participants. In addition to the risks of taking investigational drugs, healthy volunteers are confined—and often literally locked in—to residential research facilities for some portion of the clinical trial. Although participants are often assumed to be young, white college students, Phase I clinics actually tend to recruit men of color in their late 20s to early 40s. Motivated by larger social contexts of economic insecurity and racial discrimination, healthy volunteers often enroll serially in Phase I trials to stay afloat or try to get ahead. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the US and 268 interviews with research participants and staff, this talk illustrates how decisions to take part in such medical research studies stem from profound racial and economic inequalities in the US. 

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February 6, 2023 (Hybrid Lecture)

Akshita Sivakumar

Ph.D. Candidate

Communication and Science Studies

UC San Diego

“Model Production, Model Reproduction: On Mediating Environmental Justice and
Governance via Envirotech”

Technocrats and scientists working in state-sanctioned programs for environmental
governance increasingly use a portmanteau of envirotech tools (Pritchard and Zimring 2020),
including monitors, computer models, and digital sensors, to fulfill a plurality of legislative
mandates. These mandates include assessing regulatory actions in terms of environmental
justice (EJ), prompting experts to invite historically disadvantaged groups to participate in
governance processes. Critical environmental scholars have pointed out that such procedural
justice (Schlosberg 2003) rarely leads to liberatory outcomes. Instead, they more often
subsume the work of social movements under the dominant regulatory regime in an age of
financial capitalism (Pulido 1994). However, my analysis of the work of a group of EJ
activists from across California, the Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (EJAC),
working towards developing a decarbonization plan for California under the State Assembly
Bill 32, shows how the EJAC successfully challenged the benumbing of participation within
the envirotech-dominant regulatory regime. Through participant observation of the EJAC’s
response to the state agency that curated their participation through a suite of computer
models, I propose that their successful and resistive outcomes become legible when analyzed
as an active struggle of social reproductive work rather than merely technocratic or productive
practices. As such, I show how envirotech tools, typically analyzed in STS in terms of
boundary objects for coordinated action, can be transformed into tools of power to provoke
forms of resistance. Results from this study will enhance theories of civic participation in

technoscientific forms of governance.

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February 20, 2023

No Colloquium
Presidents' Day Holiday 

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February 27, 2023

Theodora Dryer

New York University 

“Between Water Artifice and Water Justice: On Demystifying Algorithms and Artificial
Intelligence in Water Management”

 

Theodora Dryer, PhD is a writer, historian, and critical policy analyst. Her research centers on
data and technology in the climate crisis and the political functions of algorithms and artificial
intelligence in water and natural resource management. She teaches on technology and
environmental justice at New York University.

This talk contends with a dominant myth in histories of algorithmic water management that
optimization-led planning systems are the best way to manage water resources. In
demystifying the form and function of optimization logics in water management, I link the
process of algorithmic computing with the place of the Colorado River. I argue that
quantitative water law and algorithmic water management are coconstitutive historical
processes, as they derive from the same formulation of settler colonial space and time
identified as settler computing. Settler computing clarifies how the settler theft of Indigenous
natural resources is formalized within projects of data-driven resource management. I engage
this history by interrogating a major water planning project led by the Bureau of Reclamation
called the Central Utah Project (CUP), which was formally enacted in 1956 and continues
today.

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March 6, 2023 (Zoom Lecture)

Miruna Achim

Professor
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa

“Tenacious Stones and Surface Tensions: The Making of Mesoamerican Jade”

Jade, a natural and cultural entity, oily and smooth to sight and touch, yet incredibly hard to
carve, is distinctly associated with Mesoamerica, predominantly with the Olmecs, Mexico’s
so-called “original” culture, cultura madre. Mesoamerican jade came into being as a tenacious
category of study in the course of the past two centuries, as the stone became alternately the
object of mineralogical, prehistorical, and archeological classifications. The science of
Mesoamerican jades obfuscates their entanglements with jades from other parts of the world
(especially China, but also New Zealand and Neolithic Europe) and the ways in which the
aesthetic, scientific, and commercial appreciation of jade bring the sites of its extraction into
unexpected arrangements with transregional actors. This paper focuses on the recent discovery
of jadeite deposits in the Motagua River Valley in Guatemala, in the wake of a series of
(climate-change-induced) disastrous storms, which destroyed tropical vegetation, laid the
ground bare, and resulted into archaeological looting and illegal trafficking of the raw mineral
to China and Taiwan. Specifically, in this paper, I inquire into the conceptual and political
arrangements that have sustained the differential production of knowledge and ignorance
about jades, making it possible for certain narratives of the stones’ use and value to become
prominent, while the social and environmental violence pending on their extraction has been
silenced and opaqued. I conclude by suggesting the colonial critique of museums has flattened
understanding of complex local, regional, and transregional ecologies, where jade is both
ancient and contemporary, natural and artificial, inalienable and exchangeable, shaped by
commercial values dictated elsewhere.

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March 13, 2023 

Daniel Menchik

Associate Professor
School of Sociology, University of Arizona

“Managing Medical Authority"

Despite our interest in determining our health decisions, physicians have great control over our bodies, minds, and lives. How do doctors manage this privileged authority? This talk, based on my recent book, draws on over six years’ worth of ethnographic data to answer this question, incorporating factors internal and external to medicine. I argue that doctors manage their authority in the context of competing for status among doctors who share with them an interest in developing new knowledge. Specifically, the terms for status among doctors will be closely tied to the expectations of these peers regarding how knowledge is produced, and public expectations for the practice of medicine. Physicians compete with peers for status by making a case for the quality of the knowledge they have developed and would like to have orient practices profession-wide. Those seeking to have their knowledge widely adopted are observed by peers in a range of venues, and judged in terms of qualities that they would like to have represent the profession’s authority with outside stakeholders. Those doctors who put medicine’s authority at risk though engaging in behavior deemed culturally inappropriate are denied the opportunity for visibility that comes from being given access to medicine’s key venues. Consequently, these doctors’ knowledge is unlikely to become dominant, ensuring that these physicians potentially able to place the group at risk are denied positions that would enable them to represent the collective in a negative light. This dynamic and contingent model, I argue, better explains how authority is gained and lost in medicine than the static, institution centered, and hierarchical model thapresently dominates.

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March 20, 2023

No Colloquium
Finals Week

April 3, 2023

Science Studies Program Meeting
SSP faculty and students only  

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April 10, 2023 (Zoom Lecture)

Louise Hickman

Research Associate
Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy
University of Cambridge

“The Tricks of Cloud Captioning: the promise of speech-to-text transcription in Southern California"

Realtime captioners, like courtroom reporters, are specifically trained to transcribe spoken speech with few mistakes and at speed. Trained at the same schools, captioners and reporters share a kinship that grounds their practice in maintaining the integrity—and thereby the legitimacy-- of the transcripts they produce. However, this has not always been the case for Southern California. This talk contends with the legal stipulation (colloquially known as the SoCal Stip) first introduced in the mid-1970s to ease freeway congestion and save witnesses the trip to the court reporter’s office to review and sign the original transcript. Yet the same law still stands today, despite the advancement of digital infrastructure. Without witnesses’ signatures, the accuracy of the transcripts can be questioned, and legal representatives can still evoke the ‘So Cal Stip’ to delegitimize the court transcript. In recent years, court reporters have organized against these actions to protect the,certification of their transcription. In their argument, being “on the record” is synonymous with staying “on code” for,court reporters, where going by the ‘code’ represents a professional mandate to justify public trust in handling legal documents. Yet, the stubborn popularity of the ‘SoCal Stip’provides another example of speech-to-text technologies being routinely ‘devalued, valued and revalued’ according to sociotechnical changes in the past forty years. (Downey 2009) Expanding on these histories, I engage with the emergence of newer models of speech-to-text technologies (ranging from person-dependent software and cloud-based solutions) to understand both the presence and absence of the transcript certification process. In doing so, I ask what harm is caused by transcription generated by cloud-based software without any meaningful association with authorship.

 

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April 17, 2023 (Hybrid Lecture)

Sophie Stachus

PhD Candidate
Communication and Science Studies
UC San Diego

" “Safe Abortion is an Oxymoron”: The Reconceptualization of Patient Autonomy in U.S. Abortion Regulation”
Before the Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the 21st century anti-choice movement was focused on establishing informed consent statutes as a means to discourage or prevent abortions. Often titled “A Woman’s Right to Know”, these laws require thatpatients are warned of alleged risks of breast cancer, infertility, and psychological trauma following an abortion. In some states, patients must undergo an ultrasound and wait at least 24-hours before undergoing the procedure. These requirements are part of what legal scholar Reva Siegel (2008) termed the “Woman Protective Anti-Abortion Argument” (WPAA), an anti-choice strategy that legitimizes abortion restrictions on the basis that the procedure harms patients. Bioethicists and legal scholars decry these bills for misusing the informed consent doctrine and for deviating from its theoretical aspirations and legal applications.

This talk, based on my fifth dissertation chapter, interrogates how anti-choice legislators were able to appropriate a doctrine meant to promote patient autonomy in their quest to decrease abortion access. I analyze the Louisiana’s “Women’s Right to Know” Act and its resulting informational booklet and resource directory as an example of this appropriation. My critical legal analysis shows how the shifting notions of patient autonomy, choice, and coercion in these resources lend themselves to the anti-choice movement’s efforts to (re)criminalize abortions. I contend that the informed consent doctrine’s concept of autonomy, which is qualified by the noun “patient”, enabled statutes that nominally expand reproductive choices while infusing informational requirements with religious views of well-being that confuse motherhood and health. In practice, these informed consent statutes delay or hinder time-sensitive care, frame motherhood as patients’ preferred choice despite their abortion decision, and reify the conditions of oppression under which some pregnant people make their reproductive decisions.

 

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April 24, 2023

No Colloquium - Science Studies Review

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May 1, 2023 (Zoom Lecture)

Jonathan Ruiz

PhD Candidate
Sociology and Science Studies
UC San Diego

“Pharmaceutical Identity: Depression, ADHD, and Stimulant Therapy”

This talk looks at how drug investment and development shape medical and psychiatric
classification. Whereas sociologists have largely explained pharmaceutical development and
expansion in terms of unidirectional flows of power from drug companies and medical experts, I
argue that a more dynamic process is at work. To do so, I draw on two case studies examining the
clinical history of amphetamines. I begin by looking at the work of psychiatrist Abraham Myerson in
1930s, whose clinical studies treating depressed housewives with Benzedrine sulfate led to a
softening of clinical understandings of depression that would apply to a much broader patient pool. It
is argued that Myerson’s work with Benzedrine sulfate informed the pharmacologic profile that
subsequent generations of antidepressants would need to meet. Following this, I look at a series of
pediatric clinical trials in the 1960s that led to the pairing of psychostimulants with hyperactive
patients. Here it is argued that the dominant description of psychostimulants as attention-enhancing
drugs and the profile for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) emerged in tandem through
a recursive process in a series of randomized-control trials (RCTs). To make sense of both cases,
pharmaceutical compounds are treated as what Ian Hacking calls an ‘engine for making up people.’
While Hacking describes pharmaceuticals in the context of medicalizing and normalizing people,
this talk demonstrates how drugs also interact with human kinds in ways that modify both over time.

 

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May 8, 2023

Martha Lincoln

Assistant Professor
Department of Politics
San Francisco State University

“Epidemic Politics in Contemporary Vietnam: Public Health and the State”

From independence through anti-colonial and anti-imperial wars to the present day, public health
achievements in north Vietnam have been profoundly politically significant. Domestically, disease
eradication and health promotion campaigns symbolized the ambitions of the Vietnamese state for
establishing a new social contract. Internationally, Vietnam’s health successes have often been
hailed as exemplifying what a socialist government could accomplish on behalf of an impoverished,
mostly rural, and formerly colonized populace.
This talk examines the cultural politics of public health in contemporary Vietnam, both in the
national context and more broadly in the domain of global health. Focusing on sequential outbreaks
of urban cholera—a waterborne illness associated with poverty and compromised sanitary
infrastructure—I suggest that the reappearance of this disease reveals the significant compromises in
Vietnam’s present-day political economy: the semi-privatization of the health sector, increasing
levels of socioeconomic inequity, and the partial withdrawal of the state under late socialism. The
recent experience of COVID-19, I suggest, presents an importantly complementary case to the
cholera outbreaks in Vietnam's capital—revealing the formidable capacities of the state as well as
the casting of pandemic response as a de facto opportunity structure for high-ranking officials.

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May 15, 2023 (Zoom Lecture)

Alison Kenner

Associate Professor
Department of Politics
Center for Science, Technology and Society
Drexel University

“What Counts As (An Energy) Right? An Inquiry Into How Users Engage In Deregulated Markets”

“Do you think you have a right to energy?” It’s a question our research group posed to more than
300 energy users in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, shifting our inquiry from a focus on vulnerability to
the regulatory and market structures that condition the terms of energy use. A prominent finding that
emerged from this work was that energy scams are one of the most familiar ways in which
community members interact with the energy industry. Why are energy scams so common and why
has residential energy become such a fruitful venue for fraudulent activity? In this paper, we
examine how deregulated energy markets produce conditions that exacerbate and create new forms
of vulnerability – in the material sense of not having access to affordable energy, but also in a
political and cultural sense of doubt. We highlight key feedback loops between social actors and
social structures – including our own work as researchers – to make sense of how deregulated
markets create inequity by cultivating distrust. This includes a brief look at regulatory history in
Pennsylvania, analysis of community interactions with Alternative Energy Suppliers, and a review of
public education campaigns that the utility industry has launched to combat the impacts of energy
scams. We conclude the paper by raising questions about the relationship between discourses of
rights and deregulation, pointing to resonances and tensions.

 

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May 29, 2023

No Colloquium
Memorial Day Observance

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May 15, 2023 

Lisa Mendelman

Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities
Menlo College

“Green Skinned Goddesses: Chlorosis and the Shapeshifting Modern Girl in Science and Literature”

This paper chronicles the spectacular rise and fall of an understudied illness in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US, chlorosis. Also known as “green sickness,” chlorosis is an illness in which adolescent white women’s skin turns green or, in another definition, appears waxen (in which case “green” refers to sexual inexperience). Now referenced in histories of eating disorders, chlorosis emerges in the late sixteenth century, reaches epidemic heights in the nineteenth century, and seemingly disappears—to widespread consternation—in the early twentieth century. I focus on the age-based, gendered, racialized, and socioeconomic logics at work in chlorosis’s turn-of-the-century etiology: the anemia “peculiar to virgins” was chalked up to changes in women’s lives and treated by marriage long after doctors recognized that iron supplements also appeared to resolve its symptoms.

I reevaluate the cultural history of this sexualized nutritional illness with the help of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) and Katherine Anne Porter’s “Old Mortality” (1934). These texts, I argue, stage the high-stakes confusion that attended to young women’s cognitive and corporeal health, particularly as these concepts hinge on sexuality and heteronormative protocols of marriage and maternity. In flirting with the diagnosis of chlorosis, James and Porter link their literary projects to an evolving cultural crisis in which the white, male medical profession confronts the rapid changes in women’s lives and comes up largely empty-handed, only to flip the blame and point the finger back at women’s choices—and then claim scientific success in eradicating illness all the same. The chlorotic girl thus offers these modern writers a fitting subject for thinking with and against diagnosis as a project of authoritative interpretation and cultural meaning.

Bio: Lisa Mendelman is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Menlo College. She holds a PhD in English from UCLA and BA and MA degrees from Stanford University. She works in the health humanities, with a focus on gender, race, and affect in the twentieth-century US. Her first book, Modern Sentimentalism (Oxford UP, 2019), chronicles the emotional history of the modern woman and the corollary reinvention of sentimentalism in US interwar fiction. This talk comes from her new book project, on the history of mental health. Her writing has been published in such venues as American Literary History, Modernism/modernity, The Journal of Cultural Analytics, Games and Culture, ASAP/J, Arizona Quarterly, and Modern Fiction Studies.