SSN Book talk “A Place for Science and Technology Studies” by Jane Calvert

About event

Join the SSN as we open our 2025 programme with an online book talk about Jane Calvert's important new STS book.

Join the SSN as we host Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Jane Calvert (University of Edinburgh) for an online-only seminar about her new Open-access book “A Place for Science and Technology Studies” (MIT Press, 2024). Jane will be joined in conversation by the SSN’s Radhika Gorur (Deakin University) and Elin Sundström Sjödin (Mälardalen University, Sweden) after her talk, chaired by Emma Kowal. Join in the conversation and Q and A via YouTube Live chat, or on BlueSky with #SSNbooktalk.

“A Place for Science and Technology Studies” by Jane Calvert

Abstract

In my social scientific investigation of synthetic biology over the last 15 years I have spent time in various spaces including large anonymous conference rooms, classrooms in need of a coat of paint, esoteric studios for artistic research, glass-walled government meeting rooms, artisan coffee houses, and high-ceilinged libraries. In this talk I journey through these different rooms, exploring the possibilities and limitations of each, and the opportunities they provide for observation, intervention, and collaboration with scientists and engineers. I ask what, if anything, unites STS research in these different places, and if there is or should be a normative orientation underlying this work. I end by asking whether there is a place for STS, whether STS has to create new spaces, or whether it is fated to be forever itinerant.

Speaker Bio

Jane Calvert is a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research is on the social studies of the life sciences, particularly synthetic biology. She has a long-standing interest in interdisciplinary collaborations and works closely with scientists, engineers, policy makers, artists and designers. Her book A Place for Science and Technology Studies was published Open Access by MIT Press in 2024.

Discussant Bios

Radhika Gorur is Professor of Education at Deakin University. Her research spans education policy and reform; global aid and development in education; data infrastructures and data cultures; accountability and governance; large-scale comparisons; and the sociology of knowledge. She is interested in the social and political lives of data and in how policies get mobilised, stabilised, circulated and challenged. Radhika is a founding director of the Laboratory of International Assessment Studies, deputy convenor of the Deakin Science and Society Network, and a founding member of the international STudieS network.

Elin Sundström Sjödin is a Senior lecturer at the School of Education, Culture and Communication at Mälardalen University in Sweden. Her main research interests focus on literary didactics, critical literacy and the processes in which reading and literature becomes valued/valuated as beneficial for individuals as well as for society. In her current research project, ‘The Fiction of Numbers: How reading is made a public and didactic problem’, she makes use of STS theories to investigate the construction of reading as a public problem within the spheres of research, public discourse, policy, and educational practice.

Joining the event

The Livestream link is already available here. We will email it to you just before the event, too. Please note that you will need to login via a YouTube account to take part in the chat/ Q and A.