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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

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

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

Kathryne Metcalf (Graduation Talk)
Ph.D. Candidate
Communication and Science Studies

UC San Diego

Health Data and the Politics of Classification

Biobanks, electronic health records systems, and other large health data infrastructures are proliferating, driving transformations in biomedical research and practice. Beyond the clinic, these datasets are also increasingly seen as the solution for other sorts of problems, and are deployed as training data to develop ML/AI models and algorithmic tools used in insurance markets, in the management of labor, and even in surveillance and policing. 

In this talk, I argue that it is not simply the newly-available quantity of health data, but the relentlessly particular qualities of individual datasets that have been most impactful—and which raise trenchant concerns for social equity and justice. As I will show, decisions about whose data is collected and how they are measured have cyclically reshaped our understanding of human diversity along a number of dimensions. In doing so, these infrastructures are changing our understanding of clinical classifications, and resourcing new ML/AI tools which seek to classify people and populations for other purposes. I make the case that health data represent a unique challenge for both extant data ethics and bioethics frameworks, demanding urgent attention as they are increasingly used to train socially consequential ML/AI technologies in and beyond the clinic.


 

Winter Quarter 2025

January 6, 2025

Science Studies Program Meeting
SSP faculty and students only 


January 13, 2025

Matt Soleiman (Graduation Talk)
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of History

UC San Diego

Mechanisms of Experience: How Pain Became Personal

This talk will trace how scientists of the twentieth century came to equate pain with personhood. It was in the postwar years that the North American mind and brain sciences reconfigured the nature of pain. Rather than a sensation of injury, or a symptom of disease, pain became understood as an integrative state of the entire nervous system—of the whole person, including their past experiences, thoughts, emotions, and culture. This post-Cartesian vision of the self, I will argue, had far-reaching consequences for medical science, racialization, and public health. For one, it rendered patients’ reports of their experiences of pain, especially chronic pain, more visible to scientists and clinicians than ever before. At the same time, it allowed for a new and more implicit form of racialization that did not appeal to genetics but to the top-down relationship between culture and the mind/brain. Finally, a holistic concept of pain made possible the opioid crisis in the United States. It grounded efforts by neuroscientists to expand the prescription of opioids years before the introduction of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin. This history not only complicates dominant portrayals of the neurosciences, but also points to more ethical and racially equitable responses to the ongoing opioid epidemic.


January 20, 2025

No Meeting: Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday

 


January 27, 2025

Christoph Hanssmann
Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, UC Davis

Sick of it All: Care & Depathologization in Trans Health

Trans depathologization has often centered around the claim, “We’re trans, we’re not sick.” However, activists’ efforts to push back against psychiatric diagnoses are increasingly being identified as ableist in their work to distinguish trans wellness and sanity from “true” forms of mental pathology. Given these critiques, what’s useful now about thinking with depathologization? Rather than focusing solely on disavowals of disability, this talk examines depathologization as a more expansive set of phenomena. Drawing on ethnographic and document-based research in New York City and Buenos Aires between 2012-2018, it analyzes varying strands of trans depathologization activism, their specific objectives, and their dispersed effects. Centering the activist-advanced desire for “care without pathology”, the talk examines how activists have developed distinct orientations to depathologization depending on their understanding of what comprises pathologization in the first instance. Looking to interviews, historiography, and activist writing and art, I show how activists theorized pathologization and depathologization in different ways, leading to a range of political visions. Bringing together critiques of trans normativity, feminist science and technology studies, and analyses of care and political economy, I argue that depathologization must be recognized diffractively and in a broader historical and political landscape. In so doing, I focus on how coalition-focused activists approached depathologization with a desire not only to change medicine, but also to intervene in structures of racialized immiseration and to transform care politics.


February 3, 2025

Emily Baum
Associate Professor of History, UC Irvine

“A Most Efficient Treatment”: Acupuncture and Pain Relief in 1970s China and the United States

In 1971, acupuncture suddenly burst into the American consciousness. In that year, the New York Times journalist James Reston underwent an emergency appendectomy in Beijing and was treated with acupuncture to relieve his postoperative pain. From that point on, American fascination with the procedure continued to grow, particularly as the Chinese government promoted a new technique known as "acupuncture anesthesia." In this talk, I trace the circulation of acupuncture from China to the United States in the 1970s, showing how American conceptions of acupuncture were crucially influenced by political developments in China. Specifically, I pose the question: Why do we tend to associate acupuncture with pain relief in the United States when the procedure has historically been used for so many other conditions in China? I argue that the link between acupuncture and pain in American medicine is largely a result of two overlapping factors: how the Chinese government marketed the therapy to the American public starting in the 1970s, and the rising attention to pain as a discrete medical condition within American healthcare. Together, these factors combined to solidify acupuncture as a form of pain relief in the American imagination, despite the fact that pain was never a principal target of acupunctural interventions in Chinese history.


February 10, 2025

Kim TallBear reading group (details to come)


February 17, 2025

No Meeting: President's Day 


February 18, 2025

4:00-6:00 PM, Price Center Marshall College Room

Kim TallBear 
University of Alberta

From Feminist Science Studies to Native-Led Science for Land and Life  

Indigenous peoples are often at the receiving end of the colonial gaze, including that of scientific researchers working in disciplines co-constituted with the development of colonial states. The social science examinations of settler science for which I am best-known interrogate longstanding anti-Indigenous narratives such as that of the “Vanishing Indian” in human population genetics research. Over the past decade, I have worked with a collective of scholars to channel critiques developed in feminist and Indigenous science studies to reorient and train Indigenous scientists in critical approaches to genomics. The goal has been to go beyond critique of colonial science to help transform science to support rather than undermine Indigenous governance. Our training program surpasses efforts to diversify and include Indigenous people into genomics. It reaches toward decolonization to support the return of Indigenous and life via critical Indigenous genomics. This talk touches on both the disciplinary/theoretical underpinnings and programmatic details of such training. 


February 24, 2025

Holly Okonkwo
UC San Diego


March 3, 2025

Coffee and Cookies


March 10, 2025

Mohammad Khamsya Bin Khidzer
Postdoctoral Researcher

Leiden University

From the Thrifty Gene to Epigenetic Justice: Diabetes, Metabolic Moralities and Postcolonial Development in Singapore and the Pacific Islands

In 1962, American geneticist James Neel introduced the thrifty gene hypothesis. According to Neel, the high prevalence of diabetes in certain populations can be traced to a genetic adaptation which allows them to store fat reserves during times of abundance, and expend them during famines. For societies that progressed to a condition where food became consistently plentiful, this adaptation became harmful, leading to obesity and diabetes. Scientists and public health officials in Singapore and in the Pacific Islands, who collaborated with each other, adopted this idea but reframed it to assert that Asians and the indigenous populations of the Pacific were biologically ill equipped to adapt to 'Westernization' and rapid global development. The solution to this genetic maladaptation was a lifestyle change that included exercise, dieting and in some cases, a return to 'traditional' life. Tracing the scientific networks that researched diabetes etiology (causal mechanisms) in Singapore and the Pacific Islands, I analyze how the discourse of the thrifty gene in medical research, public health and international health organizations in the second half of the twentieth century contributed to racial narratives that overlapped with notions of developmental capacity, racial hierarchy, and eugenics. These processes engender what I call metabolic moralities, a form of biopower which draws from the interaction between the body and environment, targeting less developed populations and specific ethnoracial groups to sustain national and global racial hegemony. Lastly, I explore recent developments in epigenetics that have reanimated the thrifty gene hypothesis and enabled the framing of colonialism as being accountable for the contemporary diabetes epidemic in Asia and the Pacific, thereby reshaping the contours of metabolic moralities. 

Spring Quarter 2025

Details to come