Harvard STS conference videos

Somatosphere has posted several videos from the Science and Technology Studies: The Next Twenty conference that took place at Harvard on 7-9 April 2011. It includes the following:

Does STS Matter, and to Whom? 
Theodore Porter (UCLA) and Andrew Jewett (Harvard) discuss the relationship of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to other academic fields, policymakers, and practitioners.

STS and the Law: Reframing Rights 
Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard) and Douglas Kysar (Yale) discuss the recent edited volume “Reframing Rights.” The discussion centers on the biological sciences and their associated technologies as providing moments for society to ask fundamental questions about their “bioconstitutional” rights.

STS, Economics, and Sociology: Do Economists Make Markets? 
Pierre-Benoit Joly (Paris-Est and IFRIS) and David Stark (Columbia) discuss how STS research has affected work in economic sociology, and what other STS tools might be usefully applied.

Defining the Boundaries 
Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Chicago) gives a provocation for STS scholars to think again about STS’s close ties to post-colonial studies, with specific references to Indian life sciences in relation to the Western sciences. Discussants Javier Lezaun (Oxford) and David Winickoff (UC Berkeley) debate other “elsewheres” STS travels to, whether it could travel everywhere, and how best it travels.

STS on Difference
Steven Epstein (Northwestern) delivers a provocation on whether or not STS has made a difference, arguing that it has not done as much as it could. Nelly Oudshoorn (Twente) suggests some productive ways forward, and Sherine Hamdy (Brown) argued that STS scholars have missed opportunities by ignoring the linkages between science, religion, and difference.

Science and Technology Studies and the Public Sphere‬ 
Beginning with a provocation from Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard) this session discusses how the public sphere is viewed from within STS, followed by reflections from Myles Jackson (NYU Polytechnic) and Brian Wynne (Lancaster).

Opening the Black Box 
Trevor Pinch (Cornell) provokes this session by looking at where STS has gone and where it is going. David Kaiser (MIT) continues the conversation by focusing on the problem of scale in “black box” studies. Antoine Picon (Harvard) pushes back by suggesting that perhaps STS hasn’t opened the black box after all.