About event
A free, interactive, online workshop series for PhD/ECR researchers interested in STS, hosted by AusSTS
The AusSTS Workshop is an annual workshop meeting aimed at PhD/ECR researchers from across Australasia interested in STS research. Like many events this year, our AusSTS2020 workshop plans (originally scheduled for July in Darwin) have inevitably been postponed. While we’re sad we won’t be able to see you all in person, we’re still committed to providing opportunities for STS researchers to meet new people and connect with each other, especially at a time when there are fewer occasions than ever to do so.
This online workshop series is broken into 4 weeks: 1 x keynote session, 3 x interactive workshop sessions.
Register for a single event or all of them. Whatever works for you 🙂
Each session has a different theme and is facilitated by a different group of STS researchers. These sessions broadly ask: what does “participating” in research look like since COVID-19? While COVID-19 has closed access off to some archives, how might new archives now be made available? And finally, how might we use this current moment as a starting point to rethink what “business as usual” research might look like?
Schedule Overview
Thurs 16 Jul, 10am – 11:30am AEST:
Keynote address: Associate Professor Adia Benton (Register here)
Thurs 23 Jul, 10am – 11:30am AEST:
Session 1: Participating in research now (Register here)
Thurs 30 Jul, 10am – 11:30am AEST:
Session 2: Digital life as an archive (Register here)
Thurs 6 Aug, 10am – 11: 30am AEST:
Session 3: Disruption, opportunity and re/arranging STS research (Register here)
This week:
Keynote Address
Presenter: Associate Professor Adia Benton
Title: Epidemic projections: Race, risk and capital during a health emergency
Abstract: In this paper, I build on earlier research about infectious disease models developed to analyze and predict Ebola transmission dynamics in West Africa to ask: What kinds of assumptions about people and places, about time, and about danger underlie these projections? What are the stakes of using these models not only to predict disease dynamics and speculate about effective interventions, but also to monetize them for the purposes of generating profit for private investors and delivering financial assistance to cash-strapped governments in the midst of an epidemic? When epidemic models are used to define the parameters of pandemic bond payouts, risk and uncertainty have been harnessed to generate profits and move capital into cash-strapped health markets (Erikson 2015; Sridar and Stein 2015). Formally, proprietary models underwrite the pandemic emergency financing facility (PEF), a financing mechanism developed to rapidly and efficiently fund responses to a select number of epidemics in low-income countries. This financing framework, devised by the World Bank under physician-anthropologist Jim Yong Kim’s leadership, raises deep ethical questions about the commodification and financialization of suffering (Erikson 2019). Via a close reading of the instruments’ documentation (“the terms”), investigative reporting on its deployment in an Ebola outbreak, and ethnographic interviews with modelers, I recast these ethical questions not through a political economic critique of financialization per se (Erikson 2015; Sridar and Stein 2016) or of theories of biovalue (Waldby 2002; Sunder Rajan 2006), but rather of racial capital and risk ideologies embedded in relationships among international financial institutions, corporatized mathematical expertise, insurers and health organizations (Kish and Leroy 2015; Melamed 2015).
About the speaker:
Dr. Adia Benton is Assistant Professor in the department of anthropology at Northwestern University, Chicago. She is a cultural anthropologist with interests in global health, biomedicine, development and humanitarianism and professional sports. Dr.Benton focuses on patterns of inequality in the distribution of and the politics of care in settings “socialized” for scarcity. This means understanding the political, economic and historical factors shaping how care is provided in complex humanitarian emergencies and in longer-term development projects – like those for health.
Her first book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development Through Disease in Sierra Leone (University of Minnesota, 2015), explores the treatment of AIDS as an exceptional disease and the recognition and care that this takes away from other diseases and public health challenges in poor countries.
Watch the seminar:
Seminar will be available to stream on YouTube live. Access using the live link: https://youtu.be/AiPEiznTOPQ
Date/time: Thursday 16th July, 10am – 11:00am (Australian Eastern Standard Time, GMT+10)
Q&A with the speaker to follow. To send questions/participate in the chat, you’ll need to sign-in using a YouTube account.
The seminar will be recorded and available to watch on the SSN YouTube channel after the Livestream.
If you have any questions, please send to ssn-info@deakin.edu.au
Event Contact:
ssn-info@deakin.edu.auShare