Professor Jane Calvert from the University of Edinburgh Science, Technology and Innovation Studies group gave the second Andrew Webster Memorial Lecture in the historic National Centre for Early Music, York on 7th September 2023. This public lecture is organised by the University of York and its Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU) to commemorate the contribution of Professor Andrew Webster, who established the department.
Jane’s talk, entitled ‘Synthetic biology and the social sciences: making room for collaboration’, examined the close but contradictory relationships that Science, Technology and Innovation Studies scholars have with scientists, engineers, policymakers and diverse publics, around Synthetic Biology. Jane used the metaphor of different rooms (laboratory, ivory tower, policy room) to examine the challenges of undertaking theoretically-informed critical research while engaging with interdisciplinary collaborative programmes and with public policy. These ideas form the basis of a book to be published by MIT Press next year. There were also two respondents to Jane’s lecture: Dr Ros Williams‘ (University of Sheffield) work spans across Science and Technology Studies (STS), critical media studies, sociologies of race and ethnicity, and of health and illness. Dr Koichi Mikami (Keio University in Japan) is interested in exploring the role of social sciences and humanities in the governance of science and technology.
A big thank you to everyone who was involved in our Biennial conference, held at the Manchester Alliance Business School on 4th and 5th of September – invited speakers, the conference organising team, conference helpers and of course those who attended as participating speakers or audience members. The 58 attendees from 24 different organisations – with every major STS centre represented. This year’s theme was Dis-Ruption, with various strands and subthemes around disruption emerging, including disruptive and disrupting technologies, disruptions of and with ‘nature’ and the environment, disruptive methods and processes – in research, music, education, healthcare and society.
Through our biennial conference we aim to offer our members, STIS researchers and aligned friends and colleagues, fantastic opportunities to meet new people, showcase new work and ideas, and to debate current issues facing the science, technology and innovation studies community (broadly defined). Thank you again to those who attended for your financial support – AsSIST-UK is free to join, and this is our only money raising activity. The profits raised will go straight back into putting on future events for you, our STIS community. And thank you for those who provided feedback. We want our future events to be well-run, enjoyable, inclusive and good value, so we will take onboard your comments, keep the good bits that worked well and will work on addressing any issues where we can make improvements. We were lucky to receive a diverse variety of submissions and as a result we had a diverse programme of traditional and disruptive formats. Highlights included: An STS DJ set: Using Lego to think about concerning emergent technologies and ‘moving slow and fixing things’
Getting outside to tackle real ‘troublesome’ trees and that challenge our ability to account for them
ECRs making use of the rent-a-mentor scheme
A meet-the-author and meet-the-publisher session
We were delighted too that Maja Horst, President of EASST and Professor of Responsible Technology at Technical University of Denmark (DTU), formally opened the conference with a thought-provoking keynote speech on the subject of Disruption as narrative, in which she reflected on how collective narratives serve as sense-making tools. Narratives enable us to understand the world, help us form and maintain identity and suggest ways of interpreting both technologies and the role of science in society. The talk drew particularly on resources from rhetoric, cultural theory and controversy studies and her slides featured a range of Maya-inspired and AI-generated ‘artworks’.
We were lucky to receive a diverse variety of submissions and as a result we had a diverse programme of traditional and disruptive formats. Highlights included:
An STS DJ set
Using Lego to think about concerning emergent technologies and ‘moving slow and fixing things’
Getting outside to tackle real ‘troublesome’ trees and that challenge our ability to account for them
ECRs making use of the rent-a-mentor scheme
A meet-the-author and meet-the-publisher session
Manchester’s weather was particularly kind to us during the event which meant that we were able to hold the evening reception on the first day outside in glorious warm sunshine. We took it as a measure of success that we had to shepherd people towards the next part of the programme – perhaps next time we need a gong!
We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at our 2025 AsSIST-UK conference. In the meantime, we hope to see some of you in Amsterdam next year at EASST’s 2024 Biennial Conference. A copy of the organiser’s post event report is available on request from the organising committee.
AsSIST-UK awards an annual prize for a Ph.D. thesis that demonstrates outstanding quality in the STS/Innovation Studies field. The prize has been dedicated to the memory of AsSIST-UK co-founder, Prof. Andrew Webster, who died in 2021.
The 2023 prize of £250 was awarded to Dr. Rodrigo Liscovsky for his thesis awarded by the University of Edinburgh entitled “Internationalisation Dynamics in Contemporary South American Life Sciences: the Case of Zebrafish”. The judges agreed that Rodrigo’s thesis develops a novel critical perspective on academic discourse and practices of research internationalisation, bridging fields, methods and views from the Global North and South, with relevance both to academic discourse on the internationalisation of research and education and to science policy and practice, in the best traditions of Andrew Webster’s own work.
This year several theses scored very close, and the judges therefore also commended the following authors for their impressive and novel work: Dr. Andrey Elizondo Solano – Orchestration Spaces in Inter-Organizational Developments of Information Infrastructures: Early orchestration of a large-scale regional interoperability infrastructure in NHS England Dr. Julius Kob – Realising Catastrophe: The Financial Ontology of the Anthropocene Dr. Benjamin Weil Bad Blood: A Critical Inquiry into UK Blood Donor Activism
