Bridging the "Two Cultures": Interdisciplinary, Public, and Digital Humanities Approaches to STS workshop

The STS Futures Initiative, a University of California-based project that has received funding from the UC Humanities Research Institute, is pleased to continue its year-long series of workshops and events dedicated to professionalization, engagement, and community building for graduate students specializing in the Humanities and/or Science, Technology and Society (STS).

The second panel discussion event for the 20-21 academic year is titled Bridging the "Two Cultures": Interdisciplinary, Public, and Digital Humanities Approaches to Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS). How can humanities' methods and foci can act as a "bridging discourse" between scientists, culture workers, and the wider public? How can students and scholars engage critically and usefully with science and technology from a humanities point of view, and what might be the implications and importance of bringing together these traditionally separate disciplinary discourses--both within and outside the academy?

Bridging the "Two Cultures": Interdisciplinary, Public, and Digital Humanities Approaches to STS

Facilitated by Rebecca Baker

Thursday, March 4, 2021

4-6pm (PST)

Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/9717309292

Meeting ID: 971 730 9292

This event brings together the following scholars (in order of presentation), working at the intersections of STS-oriented pedagogy, the public/digital humanities, and feminist/antiracist approaches to research.

Lindsay Thomas (U of Miami)

The "Big Humanities": Collaboration and Team-Based Open Research in the Digital Humanities

Lindsay Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami. Her research and teaching focus on cultural and media studies, contemporary US literature, and the digital humanities. Her book, Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11, will be published in March 2021 by the University of Minnesota Press. She is also a co-director of WhatEvery1Says, a digital humanities project that employs a variety of methods in data science, ethnographic research, and textual analysis to examine contemporary public discourse about the humanities on a large scale.

Abigail Droge (Emory University)

Reading with Scientists

Dr. Abigail Droge is an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow in the Department of English at Emory University. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2018 and subsequently collaborated on the Mellon-funded digital and public humanities project "WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse" as a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the history of reading in nineteenth-century Britain, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Victorian Periodicals Review, the Journal of Literature and Science, and Victorian Studies. She is particularly interested in considering how literature might help us to bridge specialized fields, and her teaching emphasizes connections between academic disciplines, time periods, and reading communities.

Nicky Rehnberg (UC Santa Barbara)

Alone, I Am Just One Tree: Community Science and the Archangel Tree Archive

Nicky Rehnberg is a UC Santa Barbara graduate student in History, studying 19th- and 20th-century Environmental Public Histories. Her dissertation explores the development of national and state parks in California, particularly focusing on the areas surrounding Sequoia National Park and Redwood National and State Parks. She works on the History and Relevancy Project with the California State Parks Service, researching and creating public tours of Carpinteria State Beach and, since COVID-19, a virtual field trip week-long event with the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation for Santa Barbara junior high schoolers.

Kalindi Vora & Sarah McCullough (Dir & Assoc Dir of Feminist Research Institute, UC Davis)

The Science We Are For: Feminist Antiracist STS Approaches to STEM

Kalindi Vora is Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and Director of the Feminist Research Institute at UC Davis. She is author of Surrogate Humanity: Race Robotics and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke 2019), co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, and Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (2015, recipient of Rachel Carson Book Prize 2018), and is one of the authors of the multigraph Technoprecarious (2020). She has published numerous ethnographic articles about gestational surrogates in India, appearing in journals such as: Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Social Identities, The South Atlantic Quarterly, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.

Sarah McCullough, PhD, is the Associate Director at the Feminist Research Institute. She is Co-PI on a NSF study that integrates justice-oriented frameworks from STS/ethnic studies into STEM graduate education. She participates in a multi-racial collective of transportation professionals dedicated to mobility justice and is the founder of the Mobility Justice Research Network. She applies her expertise in ethnographic methods, discourse and power analysis, and science & technology studies to create research partnerships between social science/humanities scholars, STEM researchers, and community partners. She earned her PhD in Cultural Studies with a DE in Feminist Theory & Research at UC Davis.