“The organised irresponsibility of artificial intelligence”
Speaker: Professor Jack Stilgoe, University College London Date: Thursday 5 September 2024 Location: Tempest Anserson Hall, Museum Street, York, YO1 7FR
Prof Jack Stilgoe
As the promises of artificial intelligence attract growing social, political and financial attention, risks and responsibilities are being imagined in ways that serve the interests of a technoscientific elite. In the UK and elsewhere, organisations are starting to institutionalise a mode of governance that presumes to know and take care of public concerns. And new research communities are forming around questions of AI ’safety’ and ‘alignment’. In this talk, I will draw on research into public and expert attitudes and reflect on my role as a proponent, analyst and actor in debates about ‘Responsible AI’.
Andrew J Webster Annual Lecture on Science, Technology and Society
To commemorate the life and work of Professor Andrew Webster, the Department of Sociology and SATSU established an annual lecture series that will showcase research in the broadly conceived area of science, technology and society.
Professor in the Sociology of Science at the University of York since 1999, Andrew was the founder and director of the Science and Technology Studies Unit, which he established originally at Anglia Ruskin University in 1988.
He was Head of the Department of Sociology at York between 2004-2009 and then the Dean of Social Sciences. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Science in 2007.
He co-founded the UK Association for the Study of Innovation, Science and Technology (AsSIST-UK).
Manuela Perrotta has launched the Remaking Fertility research digest series.
These concise briefs offer a summary of key findings and policy implications from her ongoing British Academy Innovation Fellowship. The first research digest focuses on ‘Evidence Gaps and Information Provision in Fertility Care: Addressing Key Needs, Priorities, and Challenges.’
“Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies” has published an English-language book review by Dr. Robert Williams, senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at The University of Akron, of “La Servitude Electrique: Du reve de liberte a la prison numerique” by French scholars Gerard Dubey and Alain Gras.
Informed by a philosophical anthropology of science and technology studies, this review queries the authors’ thesis that although electricity appears innocent, especially as light, power and information, it nonetheless relies on fossil fuels for its generation.
Science, technology & innovation studies archive looking for a home.
A shipping container full of 20c material from the Technology Policy Unit library and collection will be consigned to the tip this year unless it finds a new home. Includes many pre-digital policy documents 1970s-1990s on technology assessment, science and technology policy, innovation policy, environmental policy.
A lot of brochures and correspondence on academic organisations and teaching & research centres. Research project records. A large library of books. A collection of early MBA management of innovation material. etc. etc. Must be taken as one lot. Located in the midlands.
Contact Fred Steward if interested. f.steward@westminster.ac.uk
The AsSIST-UK Early Career Researchers (ECR) Group and the Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation (ISSTI) at the University of Edinburgh are pleased to announce the annual week-long writing retreat between 16th and 23rd February 2024.
This year, the retreat will be hosted at Castle Brodie near Forres in Moray / Scottish Highlands, which is a Category-A-listed historic building owned by the National Trust of Scotland. We have space for 11 early career academics and scholars working on pieces of writing related to core topics in science, technology and innovation studies (irrespective of what department they are based in).
Alongside writing, there will be opportunities for informal feedback and discussion of cross-cutting topics and issues, as well as film nights, nature walks, etc.
There is no travel funding available this year, but as before, the attendance is free of charge.
Apply now – deadline 21st January 2024 at 5pm.
To apply for a space, please complete our online form below:
You must have a writing project to work on and be a Masters or PhD student, or early-stage academic within 5 years of receiving your PhD, engaging in research in a topic relating the broad fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Innovation Studies.
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
