Conference dispatch: The 34th annual Society for Social Studies of Science meeting

Washington, D.C. autumn by ehpien

Last month I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, or “4S” for short.  This was the 34th annual meeting of the Society, and was held right outside Washington, DC, at the Hyatt Regency in Crystal City.  There was no overarching theme of the meeting, and so it had a wide range of panel topics.  It lasted for three days, had almost 1000 participants, and included nearly 200 panels.

But, what you may be asking, were all these panels about?  What are “social studies of science” anyway?  Also known as “science and technology studies” (or STS), this field probably has as many definitions as scholars, but in essence, it is focused on critically investigating the ways in which politics, culture, and the institutions we call “science” intersect and influence each other.  Rather than assuming that scientists and the technologies they create are politically neutral, STS scholars study the ways in which ideologies and values motivate scientists and become embedded in the things they create.

I was first exposed to STS in a seminar I took in my master’s program that was led by one of the field’s leading scholars, Sheila Jasanoff, and it has had a big effect on my own thinking.  My undergraduate degree was in ecology and evolutionary biology, and I have always had a strong faith that science and reason can help us rise above our partisan politics and collectively solve society’s problems. But the STS literature, from Bruno Latour’s work on laboratories to Donna Haraway’s writing on museum exhibits, showed me how science and politics actively “co-produce” each other, to borrow a term from Professor Jasanoff.  While I still believe that science is a unique human institution that can and has greatly benefited humanity, I have come to appreciate its limitations and the need to look critically at its claims.

So panels at the conference discussed the politics of water knowledge and expertise, sustainability and climate science, medical information and ethics, internet cultures, computer code, food technology, chemical regulation, nano-technology, Asian bio-politics, genomics, and more.  More theoretical topics included the philosophy of science and technology studies, subjectivities, actor network theory, citizen participation, peer review and expertise, and the privatization of science.

My own panel was entitled “Agents of Sustainable Innovation and Design,” and included talks on actor networks behind geothermal heating and cooling, bioplastics, engineering consulting firms, and the electric car.  My own talk discussed actors driving the growth in environmental certifications and ratings of products and companies – the subject of my dissertation.  My goal for attending the conference was to articulate and get feedback on ways to apply to STS theories to my dissertation topic, and so it was nice that several people had some positive and insightful comments afterwards.

One of the truths about conferences is that it is the informal times between events that are the most rewarding, and this was no less true for me at this meeting. It is in these interstitial periods that you can make connections that can help you with your research or your career path, or just make new friends.  They can also help you deepen existing relationships as well.  For example, on the last night of the conference, I went out to dinner with a group of grad students from the Bay Area  — 1 UCSF student, and several Berkeley students from my department, sociology, and history (some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t) — and we had a great time sharing our research interests and swapping stories from the conference.

I also connected with some interesting people from other places that were doing research relevant to my own (on environmental standards, regulations, etc.), and I hope to stay in touch with them as well.  One of the great things about 4S is that it is very international – one of these people was from the Netherlands, and another was from Japan.

This experience underscores the underlying value of these types of conferences – of course they are great opportunities to present your work, get feedback, provide deadlines to push your research forward, etc., but I think they are primarily about building and maintaining a lifetime of relationships.  Whether or not you go into academia or not, you can be a member of these communities and share in their growth and development.

The value and dynamism of the 4S community of scholars was particularly apparent in the plenary session, where both young and old researchers discussed their hopes for the future of science and technology studies – how to become more institutionalized on college campuses, how to more effectively reach policymakers, etc.  I realized that you don’t feel this energy from just reading journal articles – you really do have to attend these gatherings to understand the intellectual life of these communities.  And so I am grateful for having the opportunity to experience the vibrancy of the STS community, and hope to stay connected to it in the future.