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2024-25 Colloquium Series
The Science Studies Colloquium Series takes place on Mondays from 12:15pm-1:45pm in the Arts and Humanities Building or on Zoom.
To be added to our colloquium email list please email ssadmin@ucsd.edu.
Fall Quarter 2024
September 30, 2024
Science Studies Program Meeting
SSP faculty and students only
October 7, 2024
Amy L. Non
Associate Professor
Associate Professor
UC San Diego Anthropology Department
Misuse of Genetic Ancestry and Race and the Promise of Epigenomics in Resolving Health Inequalities
Biomedical researchers in the US, and often globally, tend to make assumptions about the meaning and use of race and genetic ancestry that can lead to bias in our understanding racial health inequalities. These assumptions include 1) presuming the terms race, ethnicity and ancestry are the same, and conflating these concepts; 2) assuming genetic differences behind chronic diseases without testing relevant alleles; 3) assuming adequate diversity among participants of genetic (and epigenetic) studies, and 4) ignoring social factors, such as structural racism, that can confound associations with a health outcome. These problematic assumptions will be demonstrated through case studies of research on the etiology and treatment of hypertension both in the US and Puerto Rico. Finally, an epigenome-wide study of stress among children of Mexican descent will be briefly discussed as an example to identify mechanisms for racial inequalities in health.
October 14, 2024
Coffee and Cookies: Drop-In Hour with SSP Faculty
SSP Grads only
October 21, 2024
T.J. Perkins (Read-ahead)
University of Utah
deLaubenfels Untested: Testability and the End-Cretaceous Impact
October 28, 2024
Ana Muñiz (Zoom)
Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor
UC Irvine Department of Criminology, Law and Society
Borderland Circuitry: How Racist Gang Profiling on the Street Becomes Hard Data and Enables Land Destruction
Discourse on immigration in the United States has often focused on what is most visible, such as border walls and detention centers, while the information systems that undergird immigration enforcement remain obscure. Tracing the evolution of several surveillance-related systems, Borderland Circuitry investigates how this information infrastructure has shaped immigration enforcement practices since the late 1980s. Specifically, this book talk illuminates three phenomena that are becoming increasingly intertwined: digital surveillance, immigration control, and gang enforcement. Using ethnography, interviews, and analysis of never-before-seen documents, I uncover how information-sharing partnerships between local police, federal law enforcement, and foreign partners collide to create multiple digital borderlands; and how those in power deploy the specter of violent cross-border criminals to justify intensive surveillance, detention, brutality, deportation, and the destruction of land for border militarization.
November 4, 2024
Imani Howard (Graduation Talk)
MD/PhD Candidate
School of Medicine and Department of Philosophy
UC San Diego
The Role of Racial Pluralism in Racial Health Disparities Research
Recently, many professional medical organizations in the United States have taken to describing race as solely a “social construct”. They claim that, as a mere social construct, race should have no bearing on our understandings of racial health disparities. Instead, they argue, racism should be the focus of racial health disparities research. I agree with their conclusion that racism is the predominant causal factor for most racial health disparities, but will argue that this doesn’t mean we can do away with race altogether where racial health disparities are concerned. When considering “race” as a possible cause of racial health disparities, it is essential to specify the particular race concept that is deployed. Most of the physicians and scientists who argue for eliminating the use of race in the context of medicine and medical research tacitly operate with the racialist concept of race.
In the first part of this talk, I explain and endorse the arguments made by these physicians and scientists and make my own case for the elimination of ‘race’, as fixed by the racialist concept, from racial health disparities research, which I call ‘the threat of the null hypothesis’. Next, I argue that the concept of racialized groups captures a large part of the phenomenon of racism and, therefore, membership in racialized groups can be used as a proxy for exposure to racism. Finally, I argue that not all racial health disparities are easily attributable to racism. Because at least some disparities are due to the diversity of physical features among racialized groups, I argue that membership in phenotypically marked ancestry groups—which count as minimalist races—is a potential causal factor for at least some racial health disparities, in addition to racism. The upshot of this account is that practitioners of Western medicine need to embrace racial pluralism—the idea that the word ‘race’ describes more than one thing—in order to achieve a comprehensive account of racial health disparities.
November 11, 2024
No meeting, Veterans Day Observed
November 18, 2024
Verónica Uribe del Águila (Graduation Talk)
Ph.D. Candidate
Communication and Science Studies
UC San Diego
Answering the Call to Sovereignty: Open Hardware and the Endurance of Tecnología Propia in Mexico
In the past twenty years, open technologies communities have expanded the meaning of "public domain" to include deliberately protected commons, like open-source software and hardware. Often described as participatory spaces of value production, these protected commons organize around a principle of improvement or innovation. Furthermore, they are part of a new wave of non-state-led sovereignty struggles over technological infrastructures.
In this presentation, I combine archival, ethnographic research, and political-economic analysis to connect current sociotechnical imaginaries of technological sovereignty based on open hardware cultures to the history of computing technology as a public resource in Mexico during the import-substitution industrialization era (ISI) (1940-1980). ISI was a protectionist development model whose economic notions and organizational forms still proliferate in the country’s state apparatus and Mexican society imaginaries. Specifically, the Computer Program and El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (CTS) carried into Mexico’s post-ISI or internationalization era (1981-1994) the concept of tecnología propia and the organizational forms that produce it.
By mapping how actors use the term “tecnología propia” to speak of technological sovereignty in two public debates apart in time, I analyze the endurance of technological sovereignty as a goal in Mexico’s industrial policies and imaginaries and, hence, in Mexicans’ economic and political lives. Ultimately, I argue, open hardware developers respond to the call to discuss technological sovereignty as a strategy to ensure their participation in articulating policies that concern them as a technological community.
November 25, 2024
Rachel Fox (Graduation Talk)
Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Grand Valley State University and Ph.D. Candidate, Communication, Science Studies, & Critical Gender Studies, UC San Diego
Selling Stigma: Afflictive Power and Fat Oppression
In recent years, a number of scholars and commentators have asserted that the medicalization of fatness is destigmatizing – that portraying fat people as suffering from the disease of obesity will reduce negative societal attitudes and discrimination against them. Even critical Foucauldian theories of medicine have been mobilized to support this claim, rooted in analyses of disciplinary power and biopower. To assess these claims, I investigated the way fat people are depicted and framed in weight stigma research and advocacy that explicitly claims to fight obesity and weight stigma simultaneously. I present one piece of this broader project: an analysis of weight stigma-related media funded by the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic. I argue that understanding how medicalization contributes to the oppression of fat people requires going beyond the existing frameworks of disciplinary power and biopower. Rather, weight-stigma related media frequently exerts what I call afflictive power: the capacity to define a way of being as a source of harm or suffering. The exercise of afflictive power stigmatizes fat people by devaluing their way of being and portraying it as antithetical to a good life. Because the medicalization of fatness necessarily depends on afflictive power, it contributes to fat oppression, even if it simultaneously reduces the extent to which individuals are blamed for being fat. Thus, portraying fatness as a disease and combating stigma against fat people are fundamentally incompatible goals.
December 2, 2024
Kate Metcalf (Graduation Talk)
Graduate Student
Communication Department
UC San Diego
Details to come.
Winter Quarter 2025
January 6, 2025
Science Studies Program Meeting
SSP faculty and students only
January 13, 2025
Matt Soleiman (Graduation Talk)
Graduate Student
History Department
UC San Diego
January 20, 2025
No Meeting: Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday
January 27, 2025
Christoph Hanssmann
UC Davis
February 3, 2025
Emily Baum
UC Irvine
UC Irvine
February 10, 2025
Kim TallBear reading group (details to come)
February 17, 2025
No Meeting: President's Day
February 24, 2025
Holly Okonkwo
UC San Diego
March 3, 2025
Coffee and Cookies
March 10, 2025
Mohammad Bin-Khidzer
Postdoctoral Researcher
Institute for History, Leiden University
Spring Quarter 2025
Details to come
