2026-27 Colloquium Series
The Science Studies Colloquium Series takes place on Mondays from 12:15pm-1:45pm in Room 0472 of the Arts and Humanities Building in the Ridge Walk Academic Complex or on Zoom.
To be added to our colloquium email list please email ssadmin@ucsd.edu.
Fall Quarter 2026
September 28, 2026
Science Studies Program MeetingSSP faculty and students only
October 5, 2026
Prof. Lily Irani
Associate Professor of Communication, UCSD
The kinds of “social science” enabled by “AI” takes many forms. This paper argues that the “intelligence” produced as “AI” depends on the infrastructural layers on which AI is built, and that the knowledge functions of AI can shift over time as new people and institutions take up the infrastructures, updating, refitting, and transforming them as parts of shifting political projects. In the legal environments and political economies of the US in the early 21stcentury, I articulate the concept of “carceral creep” as a revision to theories of “function creep” to better explain the trajectories of public data analytics infrastructures. I give the example of the City of San Diego’s Smart Streetlights system over a decade, from 2016 through 2026, tracking how the system morphs from a “smart cities” system for city planning and civic innovation industries to police surveillance and the work of“governing through crime”(Simon 2007).
October 12, 2026
Dr. Alex Hack
UC President’s & Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Gender Studies and English, UCLA
The Black Body and its Many Histories - Corroborating Black Health and the Death of Medgar Evers
The 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers and the many accounts that followed demonstrate the ambivalent nature of racial trauma and the ways in which patient circumstance is hidden, shaped, and dispersed via fact, feeling, and social bias. The lack of verifiability of the circumstances surrounding the death of such an influential civil rights leader speaks to a larger problem that continues within the American healthcare system: its inability to recognize more holistic and collaborative forms of evidence, especially those less interested in hegemonic knowledge, “genetic predisposition,” or formulaic concerns. Taking this into account, I incorporate my father’s ICU medical records, placing the supposedly “factual” nature of these documents in conversation with my own experience—ultimately looking to question the methods by which grounded understanding and familial knowledge are wiped away to make room for the “objective.” Working within the rich tradition of Black feminists who have made strides to consider the body and its information, I utilize Sylvia Wynter’s discussion of the programming power of language and Audre Lorde’s own autotheory of illness to examine how ambiguity and a continued lack of understanding intractably remain within hegemonic health systems.
October 19, 2026
Dr. Pariroo Rattan
Postdoctoral Fellow in Science in Human Culture, Department of Sociology, Northwesten University
Technologies of Populism: The Moral Politics of Digital Governance in India’s Informal Economy
Why do marginalized citizens in India continue to embrace biometric identification and digital payment technologies even when these systems routinely fail to deliver their promised economic inclusion? Digital India is a flagship policy of the Government of India to foster “economic growth combined with social inclusion.” Central to Digital India is the Aadhaar card, a biometric identification now distributed to over 1.3 billion Indians, and a real time mobile payment technology, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), that has significantly replaced cash transactions. Technological promises to improve governance and economic opportunities are often not fully realized and create new sources of friction, especially for citizens in the informal economy such as street vendors. Nevertheless, many street vendors regard digital identification and payments as signs of economic and national progress. Why does there continue to be faith in techno-utopia even when its promises fall short, and what can this tell us about the nature of contemporary populist politics? Through interviews, archival work, discourse analysis and ethnographic research with street vendors in Delhi from 2020–2024, I argue that digital technologies acquire political force for marginalized citizens not simply through coercion or what they enable materially, but through the political relationships they establish between marginalized citizens and the nation-state. While the bureaucratic state was historically built as an instrument for advancing national development and extending citizenship rights, contemporary populist politics increasingly represents bureaucratic mediation itself as an impediment to democratic responsiveness and national progress to be circumvented through digital governance. I use technology to illuminate some of the core tensions in the moral relations, state obligations, and forms of political belonging that constitute citizenship in India for the urban poor. In doing so, I further STS debates on technology, state-making and political power in relation to contemporary populism, and draw out its implications for democracies in other comparative settings.
October 26, 2026
TBD
November 2, 2026
Janet EniraeyetanGraduate Student, Philosophy, UCSD
November 9, 2026
Prof. Pablo F. Gomez
Professor of History and the History of Medicine, University of Wisconsin (Madison)
The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality
This talk examines how early Atlantic slave trading communities made human corporeality articulable with a new set of ideas about finance, facts, objectivity, and measurable risk that emerged in the early modern era. These communities drew on centuries of legal, commercial, financial, and maritime material customs and ideas. Through their violent procedures, Iberian Atlantic slave trading communities abstracted and assimilated groups of human bodies to numbers. They did so to protect their financial interests rather than caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks. The model for understanding human bodies these communities created foreshadows and shares basic notions with those sustaining the intellectual edifice of disciplines as varied as political arithmetic, economics, population health, demographics, epidemiology, and contemporary biomedicine.
November 16, 2026
Coffee and Cookies
November 23, 2026
Prof. Anna Feuer
Assistant Professor, School of Global Policy and Strategy, UCSD
November 30, 2026
Prof. Torin MonahanProfessor of Communication, UNC (Chapel Hill)
Winter Quarter 2027
January 4, 2027
Science Studies Program Meeting
SSP faculty and students only
January 11, 2027
Davide Carpano
January 18, 2027
MLK Day
January 25, 2027
Daniel Akselard
February 1, 2027
Tal Golan
February 8, 2027
Isodoro Gonzales Granados
February 15, 2027
Presidents' Day
February 22, 2027
March 1, 2027
March 8, 2027
Eyal and Epstein
Spring Quarter 2027
March 29, 2027
Science Studies Program Meeting
SSP faculty and students only
April 5, 2027
April 12, 2027
Student Choice Week
April 19, 2027
Patrick Brian Smith
April 26, 2027
May 3, 2027
Martine Lappé
May 10, 2027
Britt Paris
May 17, 2027
May 24, 2027
May 31, 2027
Memorial Day Holiday
