2025-26 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 2025

September 29, 2025

Science Studies Program Meeting
SSP faculty and students only

October 6, 2025

David Pedersen
Associate Professor

UC San Diego Anthropology Department

Explanation/Meaning/Critique: Anthrohistory Confronts the Trumpist Take-Over

This paper draws on scholarship at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Anthropology and History to develop a modality of ‘reconstructive explanatory critique,’ which it brings to bear on the continuing Trumpist self-coup or autogolpe. The paper introduces new research conducted in southern California, including interviews with recently freed participants in the January 6, 2021 take-over of the US Capitol Building. The paper focuses on how events that day, along with aspects of their lead-up and aftermath, are congealing into key dramatic features of a durable and wide-spread popular narrative of the broader Trumpist take-over. The paper argues that the compelling quality of this story is achieved in part through hiding the practical process of its congealing and the rule-like relations that shape this.

David Pedersen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSD and an instigator of his department’s affiliation with the Science Studies Program beginning in fall 2019. He currently is writing a book titled Capitol Crisis that moves from Washington, DC, to southern California, to El Salvador, to Silicon Valley, and back to contemporary DC in its combined historical and ethnographic study of the Trumpist takeover and struggles against it. The book examines how both the unfinished auto-coup and some of its opposing forces are related to broader geohistorical transformations in capitalist relations, especially regarding money and political violence.

October 13, 2025

Stuart Geiger

Assistant Professor
UC San Diego Communication / HDSI

The Domains of Data Science

Over the past two decades, we have seen the rapid rise of "data science" in both the tech industry and academia, with a more recent explosion around the latest wave of AI. “Data science” went from a ridiculed industry buzzword in the early ‘00s ("what science doesn't use data?") to what Harvard Business Review called "the sexiest job of the 21st century" in 2012. Now in 2025, data science is one of the largest departments on many campuses, especially in the U.S., while much of the humanities and social sciences have been in perpetual crisis and are facing unprecedented precarity.

While there are endless internal and external debates about what “data science” and “AI” actually are, recent STS work identifies one common thread across many academic and industry forms, which Ribes et al. (2019) call “the logic of domains.” Echoing earlier moves in cybernetics and other ways of knowing with universal ambitions, this logic splits all experts and/or expertise into two halves: the universal or "domain-agnostic" (e.g. math, statistics, computer science, informatics, design, operations research) versus the particular or "domain-specific" (the other 75-90% of academia). Such a distinction is often a foundational organizing principle of academic and industry data science and AI efforts, which often insist they are not trying to be a new traditional academic discipline or industry business unit, but rather a "hub" that transcends and interconnects all other units.

The hope and hype of data science and AI is often premised on assumptions about such a distinction, such as the belief that investment in a domain-agnostic core will ultimately benefit and advance the domain-specific periphery as well. In this talk, I discuss how this distinction between the universal and particular is more an ongoing accomplishment than a natural, inherent, or epistemic fact. I argue that the domain-agnostic/specific split is a political-economic design, which can be practiced in quite different and often contradictory ways. I present in-progress work on the tension between the universal and the particular in various academic and industry data-science and AI efforts. I focus on how infrastructures, imaginaries, and investments make particular versions of universalist solutionism feel inevitable, by remaking the world into one that is more “AI-ready” and amenable to such “data-driven” approaches.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Stuart Geiger is an Assistant Professor at UCSD, jointly appointed between the Department of Communication and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. He is a qualitative humanistic social scientist in the traditions of STS and situated practices, as well as a practicing data scientist, computational social scientist, and software developer. In both modes, his work centers around the ways in which computation, quantification, and automation are modes of governance --- especially on digital platforms like Wikipedia and Twitter, where he spent the first phase of his career on more community-centered approaches to algorithmic content moderation. He is currently working on a book project titled The Domains of Data Science. On the data science side, his current work involves building software platforms to help people with little programming or statistics background audit generative AI systems for bias and discrimination.

October 20, 2025

Adam Aron
Professor
UC San Diego Psychology

What Now for Social Science, Teaching and Local Collective Action On Climate and Planetary Boundaries?
Our social mobilization for climate action has been too tiny to leave fossil fuels in the ground, global heating is accelerating, fossil finance and extraction are at record levels, the green technical transition is deeply inadequate when done for profit and assuming growth-as-usual, international law is trashed, and there is now in the US, and elsewhere, a backlash against the already meager policy gains; and beyond the problem of carbon pollution we are superseding 7 of 9 planetary boundaries. At this coffee and cookies event I will invite a discussion of the implications of these facts for our emotional lives, our teaching about climate and polycrisis, the kinds of struggles we might wage collectively, and the kind of social science we might do.

Coffee and Cookies will be served

October 27, 2025

Karen Kovaka
Assistant Professor

UC San Diego Philosophy

Epistemic pollution in forestry science

Some environmental sciences—notably conservation biology—began with an explicitly pro-environmental mission. But others developed with the express purpose of furthering the aims of natural resource extraction industries. Forestry science is one such case. In this talk I explore how, as a result of this legacy, the forest products industries have been able to pollute the epistemic environment around issues such as logging, clear-cutting, endangered species, and wildfire policy.

November 3, 2025

Reading Group on 'Relationships That Matter' by Narayan and Shestakovsky

Program Members

November 10, 2025

Discussion with Narayan and Shestakovsky

November 17, 2025

Jennifer Watts and Natalie Lawler

Huntington Library

November 24, 2025

OPEN