2024 SKAT Sessions

30408 -Politics of Artificial Intelligence  (Co-Sponsored with the Section on Political Sociology)

Sun, August 11, 10:00 to 11:30am, Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Floor: Level 5, 511D

In October 2022, the White House released what it described as a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. In its opening passage, the blueprint states “Among the great challenges posed to democracy today is the use of technology, data, and automated systems in ways that threaten the rights of the American public.” Meanwhile, social scientists have started to address the role of algorithms and AI in changing power relations in the U.S. and worldwide. Much focus in these analyses is the question of government regulation or lack of regulations, and political campaigning. The goal of this panel is to initiate some conversation among sociologists about the role of AI and politics today. Some of the topics that we aim to address include Artificial intelligence (AI) governmentality, the relation and tension between the state and capital in AI, AI, democracy, and authoritarianism, the future of government and AI, AI and human political subjectivities, political ethics of AI, parties, elections and AI, domination, resistance and AI, security and violence and AI, AI and the future of political sociology and science, knowledge, and technology studies. Any theoretical and empirical works on the above themes and on analyzing AI and shaping power relations are welcomed. Submissions on global politics of AI are highly encouraged.

Session Organizers: Atef S. Said, University of Illinois at Chicago; Paolo Parra Saiani, University of Genoa

Presider: Laurel Smith-Doerr, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Individual Presentations:

• Algorithmic Risk Scoring and Welfare State Contact Among US Children – Martin Eiermann, Duke University
• AI Policymaking: An Agenda for Sociological Research – Tina Law, UC Davis; Leslie McCall, The Graduate Center, CUNY
• Propaganda Bias and Large Language Models – Hannah Waight, University of Oregon; Eddie Yang; Yin Yuan, UC San Diego; Solomon Messing; Margsraet Roberts; Brandon Michael Stewart, Princeton University; Joshua Tucker
• Red AI? Inconsistent Responses from GPT Models on Political Issues in the US and China – Di Zhou, New York University; Yinxian Zhang, CUNY-Queens College

40210 – Knowledge to Action in Times of Polycrisis

Mon, August 12, 8:00 to 9:30am, Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Floor: Level 5, 511F

In the last two decades, the world has been facing several multifaceted and overlapping uncertainties and crises, such as global pandemics, environmental degradation, wars, social unrests, high inflation, and food insecurities. Recently, the term “polycrisis” has become increasingly popular to connote this situation that poses major intersecting challenges to both governance and everyday lived experiences in the present day. Under times of polycrisis in the 21st century, science and technology play crucial roles in both ameliorating crises and in perpetuating them. Of particular interest to this Open Panel are theoretical, analytical, and/or empirical attempts to consider how the intersection of technoscience and society are transformed in the context of polycrisis. We are interested in papers that answer, but are not limited to:
* How do we come to conceptualize the polycrisis?
* What kind of technoscientific worlds are emerging out of these circumstances?
* What are the social processes underlying the translation of knowledge about our social world to meaningful action in response to it?
* What are the consequences of polycrisis on social inequalities? How do technosciences reproduce or remediate these consequences?
* How do / should we act in times of polycrisis?

Session Organizers: Janna Zou Huang, UC Berkeley; Paola Parra Saiani, University of Genoa

Individual Presentations:

·       Climate Closure: Rethinking Barriers to Decarbonization and Adaptation – Ankit Bhardwaj, New York University ; Malcom Araos, University of Utah

·       Impediments to Resource Industrialization: Knowledge Enclosure, Scientific Capacity, and Material Barriers in Bolivia’s Lithium Sector

·       Siloed Interdisciplinarity?: A Multi-level Computational Text Analysis of Community Resilience Planning – Jonathan Tollefson, Brown University ; Scott Frickel, Brown University; Christina Gore, National Institute of Standards and Technology; Jenner Helgeson, National Institute of Standards and Technology

·       Stockholm Syndrome in the Iron Cage: Risk, Preparedness, and Personal Responsibility – Jonathan Nathanial Redman, UC Irvine

40819 – Technoscience Will Not Save Us

Mon, August 12, 2:00 to 3:30pm, Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Floor: Level 5, 513C

Technoscientific solutions are increasingly deployed–exported, imported, and imposed upon Global South and marginalized communities as panaceas for all socioeconomic, health, and political problems. These projects often work through interacting discourses of development, innovation, and security, which reinforce (post)colonial relations of power and exacerbate deep-seated forms of social inequity across spatial boundaries in the North and South. This phenomenon is not new. But in our current era of advanced technocapitalism and its inexorable stampede towards elusive horizons of progress and inclusion, exploring multiple sites of resistance and creation is an urgent task.  

We invite papers that engage in and advance SKAT conversations about the relationships between applications of technoscience, narratives of societal “progress,” and struggles for social justice/equity across diverse geographies of power. We are especially interested in papers that center post/de/anticolonial, Indigenous, Black, queer, feminist, environmental, and/or other critical epistemologies of thought to help illuminate, trace, and critique the discursive and material flows, dynamics, and politics of technoscience for the Global South and systemically marginalized communities of the Global North. We ask: How can pluri-geographical frameworks deepen our understanding of the normative ways that technoscientific developments and aims undermine, stall, or weaken efforts to fight global inequity and difference? Which groups, voices, and/or bodies get silenced, omitted, or bolstered through new (and old) practices of technoscience? What should we learn from the Global South’s engagements with sociotechnical landscapes that help engender new practices of resistance? Finally, if technoscience will not save us, what will (can)? How do critical methodologies of and experiments with technoscience from the perspective of marginalized populations complicate this STS axiom and help us engender new forms of resistance, community, and society that connect larger struggles?

Session Organizers/Presiders: Firzuh Shokooh-Valle, Franklin and Marshall College; Oliver E. Rollins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

·       Automated Border Inspections: The Dis/Enchantment of CBP One™ Across the Extended Mexico-US Borderlands – Lupe Alberto Flores, Rice University

·       Centering Deep Care: Immigrant Siblings of Color and Countering Hegemonic Frames of Doing Gender in Predominantly-White-Institutions – Megha Sanyal, University of Calgary; Pallavi Banerjee, University of Calgary; Pratim Sengupta, University of Calgary

·       Crip Technoscience and Data Justice: Datafying and Governing the Disabled Body in Urban India – Kim Fernandes, University of Toronto

·       Doctor’s Orders: biomedical technoscience, expert authority, and (post)colonial field politics in global health – Sutina Chou, UC San Francisco

·       “I wake up. I track it.”: Weight Management Technoscience as Gendered Pleasure and Digitized Rationality – Ni’Shele Jackson, University of Illinois-Chicago

41010 – Knowledge Construction and Practices in Science, Medicine, and Public Health

Mon, August 12, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Floor: Level 5, 511F

This session includes papers that examine knowledge construction and practices in science, medicine, and public health.

Presider: Catherine Lee, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Session Organizers: Catherine Lee, Rutgers University-New Brunswick; Jill A. Fisher, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

·       Convergence in the Conceptualization of a Research Problem: Traumatic Brain Injury – Monica J. Casper, San Diego State University; Daniel Ray Morrison, University of Alabama in Huntsville

·       ‘Our Biology is Listening’: Epigenetic Biomarkers and the Production of Positive Childhood Experiences – Martine Lappe, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo; Robin M. Jeffries Hein, UCLA; Fiona Fahey, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo

·       Types of Genetic Determinism in Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing for Health – Asia Friedman, University of Delaware; Tammy L. Anderson, University of Delaware

·       Leveraging public health expertise to reclaim biopolitical citizenship: the credibility struggles of formerly incarcerated activists – Molly Clark-Barol, University of Wisconsin-Madison

·       Chemical class struggles: The significance of defining PFAS for environmental regulations and public health – Jennifer Ohayon, Silent Spring Institute; Phil Brown, Northeastern University; Alissa Cordner, Whitman College; Arianna Castellanos, Whitman College; Lauren Ellis, Northeastern University

2023 SKAT Sessions

The Politics of Data and Quantification in the Public Sector

Fri, August 18, 10:00 to 11:30am

Marriott Philadelphia Downtown, Floor: Level 4, Franklin Hall 5

Governments around the world leverage data and statistics to legitimize themselves and shape public policy. In recent decades, new forms of data and quantification became possible and applied widely in the public sectors globally. Accompanying this change is the formation of new styles of governance, the acceleration of datafication and quantification in new social domains, the introduction of new technologies information and communication technologies, and the involvement of new stakeholders. How should sociologists understand these changes under the broader transformation of the state, market, and society relationship? This panel will welcome papers that unfold these new developments through diverse theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Session Organizer: Chuncheng Liu, UC San Diego

Presider: danah boyd, Microsoft Research

Individual Presentations:

• Migrating the State into Corporate Clouds – Dan M. Kotliar, University of Haifa; Alex Gekker, Tel-Aviv University
• Population Census, State Legibility, and the Politics of Data in China – Junchao Tang, University of Michigan
• The Asymmetric Impact of Pretrial Risk Assessment Algorithms  – Simone Zhang, New York University
• The Data Fix: Quantifying Structural Racism in COVID-19 and Beyond – Cal Lee Garrett, University of Illinois at Chicago; Claire Laurier Decoteau, University of Illinois-Chicago

The Politics of Data and Quantification in the Public Sector

Fri, August 18, 10:00 to 11:30am

Marriott Philadelphia Downtown, Floor: Level 4, Franklin Hall 5

Governments around the world leverage data and statistics to legitimize themselves and shape public policy. In recent decades, new forms of data and quantification became possible and applied widely in the public sectors globally. Accompanying this change is the formation of new styles of governance, the acceleration of datafication and quantification in new social domains, the introduction of new technologies information and communication technologies, and the involvement of new stakeholders. How should sociologists understand these changes under the broader transformation of the state, market, and society relationship? This panel will welcome papers that unfold these new developments through diverse theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Session Organizer: Chuncheng Liu, UC San Diego

Presider: danah boyd, Microsoft Research

Individual Presentations:

• Migrating the State into Corporate Clouds – Dan M. Kotliar, University of Haifa; Alex Gekker, Tel-Aviv University
• Population Census, State Legibility, and the Politics of Data in China – Junchao Tang, University of Michigan
• The Asymmetric Impact of Pretrial Risk Assessment Algorithms  – Simone Zhang, New York University
• The Data Fix: Quantifying Structural Racism in COVID-19 and Beyond – Cal Lee Garrett, University of Illinois at Chicago; Claire Laurier Decoteau, University of Illinois-Chicago

Global and Comparative SKAT

Sat, August 19, 10:00 to 11:30am

Marriott Philadelphia Downtown, Floor: Level 4, Franklin Hall 11

This co-sponsored session between Science, Knowledge and Technology (SKAT) and Global & Transnational Sociology (GATS) invites papers that investigate the transnational circulation of scientific knowledge, expertise, ideas, information, and categories. We also welcome research that examines knowledge production, medical practice, and technological development in comparative perspective. We are particularly interested in scholarship that advances the sociological study of science, knowledge, and technology across national borders and/or beyond the Global North.

Organizers/Presiders: Larry Au, The City College of New York; Ken Chih-Yan Sun, Villanova University

Individual Presentations:

·       Transnational Hospitals, Transnational Connections, Transnational Assemblages: Doing Outpatient Care for/with New Mainers in Maine – Susan E. Bell, Drexel University

·       Thick governmentality in Taiwan and South Korea: Lessons learnt from pandemic governance – Tzung-wen Chen, National Chengchi University

·       On the Fringe of Expert Field: Constructing Credibility of Professional Medical Image Annotators in China – Wanheng Hu, Cornell University

·       The Material of Biopolitics: Comparing Struggles for COVID Vaccine Access with the AIDS Treatment Movement – Jonathan David Shaffer, Johns Hopkins University

·       Measuring the foreign body: Biometric innovations at the border in a comparative perspective – Torsten H. Voigt, RWTH Aachen University

Technology and the Body

Sat, August 19, 12:00 to 1:30pm

Marriott Philadelphia Downtown, Floor: Level 4, Franklin Hall 11

Papers in this session consider the intersections of science, knowledge, technology, and the body, with an emphasis on novel scientific approaches and emergent technologies.

Session Organizers: Melanie Jeske, University of Chicago; Emily Vasquez, University of Illinois-Chicago

Presider: Emily Vasquez, University of Illinois-Chicago

Discussant: Melanie Jeske, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations:

·       Agents of Plasticity: The (Neuro)Politics of Psychedelic Transformation – Logan Neitzke-Spruill, University of Delaware

·       Data Values: Digital Surveillance and the New Epistemology of Psychiatry – Mira Vale, University of Michigan

·       Race, Gender, and Robotics: Embodying and Designing Difference – Mark Peterson, University of Pittsburgh

·       “The Biggest Struggle:” Trust and Expertise in Clinical Genomics – Kellie Owens, New York University Grossman School of Medicine

How Categories Travel

Mon, August 21, 10:00 to 11:30am

Pennsylvania Convention Center, Floor: 100 Level, 104B

This co-sponsored session between Global & Transnational Sociology and Science, Knowledge and Technology explores contestations over categories and systems of classification as they travel across borders. This session invites papers that consider various pathways and transformations that categorical infrastructure undergoes when considered from a transnational or comparative perspective. For example, categories, such as diagnoses or identities, are often imposed with epistemic violence by Western knowledge regimes and institutions, but they are just as often contested and domesticated in hybrid ways as they are taken up, used and challenged by non-Western actors – from states, to medical institutions, to social movements, to patients and activists. We are especially interested in papers that situate such considerations within the Global South or that consider South-South or South-North flows. We also particularly welcome papers that engage with research and theorizing by scholars based outside of North America and Western Europe.

Session Organizers: Claire Laurier Decoteau, University of Illinois-Chicago; Jaimie Morse, University of California-Santa Cruz

Presider: Jaimie Morse, University of California-Santa Cruz

Individual Presentations:

·       Tensions between Global and Local in Clinical Guidelines: A Postcolonial Feminist Analysis of Gender-Affirming Healthcare – Alyssa A. Lynne-Joseph, Wichita State University

·       The State’s Politics of “Fake Data” – Chuncheng Liu, University of California San Diego; danah boyd, Microsoft Research

·       Treating Risk, Deepening Inequality: Tracking Prediabetes Diagnosis Across Three Mexican Clinics – Emily Vasquez, University of Illinois-Chicago

·       Unanticipated Alliances Between Traditional Chinese Medicine and Precision Medicine – Larry Au, The City College of New York

2022 SKAT Sessions

1108 – Antiracist Science: Problems and Possibilities for Institutional Change

Sat, August 6, 8:00 to 9:30am, LACC, Floor: Level 1, 153A

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 min)

Description

Alongside the deadly COVID-19 outbreak, the biomedical sciences continue to struggle with the impacts of scientific racism. Major academic science and biomedical journals have recently responded to this challenge with a flurry of new commentaries requesting scientists to combat the latent harms of (systemic) racism. Yet what will this new confrontation with scientific racism look like and truly seek to accomplish? Requests for researchers to confront racism within science comes on the heels of social demands to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter. Stakeholders have pushed US universities to address their own institutional obligations that generate (racial) inequality, revamping diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and spurred some radical appeals to re-create the university space as an antiracist institution.

We invite papers to take the possibility of an “anti-racist science” as an empirical query and a political possibility—what should “anti-racist” science and medicine mean? What should it look like? The struggle for anti-racism connects to other struggles against systemic inequality. Thus, how can intersectional frameworks deepen STS and our understanding of the normative ways that scientific, biomedical, and technological practices may undermine, stall, or weaken efforts to fight systemic inequality? Who and what gets omitted or silenced within our existing conversations about a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive scientific or biomedical future? What kinds of roles can, and should, sociologists play in helping create a more social justice orientated science and medicine? What pitfalls or roadblocks prevent such ideas, and how might we overcome them? Recent discussion of the contributions of Wells, Du Bois, and Duster demonstrate the need for and interests in a social justice-oriented SKAT, here we ask for papers that show or teach us how to put that perspective to work to help capture ongoing debates, challenges, and possibilities for institutional change.

1909 – SKAT In and For Policy

Sat, August 6, 4:00 to 5:30pm, LACC, Floor: Level 1, 153B

Session Submission Type: Invited Session (90 minute)

Description

Many of the most pressing political issues of our time—from the climate crisis, to the Covid-19 pandemic, to political disinformation, to built-in systemic racism—are, at some level, questions of knowledge, science, and technology. This invited session is dedicated to exploring how engaged SKAT scholars mobilize the tools and insights from the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology and science studies to intervene in policy debates and shape policy. Reflecting on their personal experiences and research, panelists will address the role of SKAT in and for policy descriptively by examining how SKAT enables and constrains policy interventions, when and how insights from science studies are sought out by policymakers, and whether certain policy domains, issue areas, or political contexts are better suited for translating SKAT knowledge. The panel will also address normative questions related to whether and to what ends SKAT should serve as the basis for engaging policymakers and by reflecting on the emancipatory possibilities SKAT offers.

1704 – Technopolitics and Scientific Knowledge in a World in Crisis

Sat, August 6, 2:00 to 3:30pm, LACC, Floor: Level 1, 150C

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 min)

Description

The world is facing overlapping crises, in issues from racism and immigration to healthcare to the environment. The papers in this panel will address people’s responses to these multiple global crises, in actions and policies, but also in how the crises, actions and policies are socially constructed. Some of the questions we are seeking to explore in this panel are: What sustains a politics of life amid the pervasiveness of injustice and violence? What are the both vital and fraught relations between science, technology and a politics of life and care, themes that have become fundamentally intertwined during the global COVID-19 pandemic? What is the role of information technologies in everyday life, political activism and dissemination of ideas? How is scientific knowledge politicized and contested in its role as it is used to ameliorate the crises, such as in the case of COVID-19? In the US, we have witnessed tremendous polarization between right-wing anti-science and left-wing pro-science perspectives. But in what ways has the critique of mainstream science from historically marginalized communities–Black, Brown, Indigenous, LGBTQI+–collided with anti-science rhetoric? What forms of technopolitical agency are flourishing?

2108 – Who Do You Think I Am? The scientists’ idea of their public

Sun, August 7, 8:00 to 9:30am, LACC, Floor: Level 1, 153A

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 min)

Description

The pandemic era that began in 2020 has brought scientists to the stage so far in the shadows – virologists, epidemiologists, etc. – and thus also a (normal) debate between different positions which often remains only in the background. The many doubts that this has raised in the general population, with countries that have seen substantial percentages of people doubtful about vaccines, makes useful to deepen the vision that scientists have of their public: not only the – more obvious – of political decision makers, but also that of the general public, whose opinions often influence those of politicians. In general, scientists have internalized an idea of the public they are addressing and which is not made explicit. For example, some scientists may have a paternalistic idea of their public as an audience to guide and educate; others a more equal idea of the public as autonomous subjects with whom dialogue is possible, also freely expressing risks and limits linked to the results of the research.
In this panel priority will be given to empirical works that analyze scientists’ work and their communication styles. The panel wants to contribute to the discussion on the relationships between scientists and their publics, which depends not only on the trust people have in science, but also on the trust scientists have in people.

2021 SKAT Sessions

A New Canon for SKAT: Working in the Tradition of Du Bois, Wells, and Duster

Mon, August 9, 11:00am to 12:25pm EDT (11:00am to 12:25pm EDT), VAM, Room 14

Session Organizer: Alondra Nelson

Panelists: Ruha Benjamin, Michael Rodriguez-Muniz, Joan Fujimura, Kevin Moseby

Money for Nothing? Science Between Markets and Politics

Mon, August 9, 4:15 to 5:40pm EDT (4:15 to 5:40pm EDT), VAM, Room 14

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (85 min)

Description

Many factors influence a scientist’s choice of research problem: past interests and training, serendipitous yet consequential encounters with new collaborators, expertise, or information, institutional context or disciplinary culture; commercial opportunities, pressures, and commercially related policies can change the composition of scientific research and the choices that guide it. “Research agendas reflect what gets funded”, so it is no surprise that searching for external funding is having an impact on the research agendas of individual faculty members, as research is being pursued based on donors’ interests. This panel wants to contribute to the discussion on freedom in science, but also to its accountability. In times of ‘neo-liberal scientism’ or ‘academic capitalism’, what are the trends in science? Priority will be given to empirical works that analyze the development of scientists’ work (in the broad sense: biology, economics, political science, sociology, etc.), changes in publishers’ policies, and governmental influence.

Sociologies of Science, Knowledge, and Technology in “Revolting Times”

Mon, August 9, 12:45 to 2:10pm EDT (12:45 to 2:10pm EDT), VAM, Room 6

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (85 min)

Description

Drawing on scholar-activist Michelle Fine’s ongoing characterization of the present as “revolting times”—marked by incredible forms of inequality and movement-led uprisings that reflect a desire for profound social transformation—we propose a panel that showcases SKAT scholarship reflective of this moment and its implications for the future of the section. Even as some corners of the sociology of science, knowledge, technology (and medicine) have embraced an interest in the study of inequalities and injustice created through, with, and by technologies, biomedicine, and scientific knowledge production, less SKAT scholarship conceives of SKAT and STS as tools for justice-making or social transformation. Projects that seek to strike out centrifugally against the conventions of the field confront a canon of sociological/STS scholarship and norms that constrict what counts as “good” SKAT work. Reflecting the ASA theme of DuBoisian sociology, which challenges both the dominant origin stories of American sociology and the legacy of disinterested positivism that haunts the field, this panel will foreground scholarship that investigates alternative genealogies of SKAT/STS and scholars who do critical scholarship as justice work. We welcome papers that do not merely document injustice or efforts to ameliorate social and scientific problems, but those that view the sociological enterprise itself as a catalyst for community-building, restorative justice, and systemic change. We are especially interested in papers that speak to or are consonant with DuBois’s belief in the capacity of rigorous social science to address seemingly intractable social problems and which connect this work directly to the sociology of knowledge, science, and/or technology.

2020 SKAT Sessions

2421 – Cultures of “Tech”: Studying and Working in Silicon Valley+

Sun, August 9, 2:30 to 4:10pm PDT (5:30 to 7:10pm EDT), Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Floor: Ballroom Level, Continental 9

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

This session discusses how cultures of “tech” are studied, enacted, and worked on in places like Silicon Valley. The panel will include presentation of papers on topics such as contract work in tech, ethnographies in tech companies, and global centers of tech.

This panel focuses on the social, cultural, and historical aspects of the contemporary technology industry in Silicon Valley and beyond. Drawing on ethnographies, social histories, and interview studies, the panelists illuminate technology companies from the inside, revealing the ethos and mythos, challenges and discontents of this powerful industry in the modern world.

2221 – Open Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section Session

Sun, August 9, 10:30am to 12:10pm PDT (1:30 to 3:10pm EDT), Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Floor: Ballroom Level, Continental 9

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (100 min)

Description

All papers related to topics in science, technology, and knowledge are invited for submission to this open SKAT section paper session.

2019 SKAT SESSIONS

Science and the State
Organizer/Presider: Alondra Nelson
Discussant: Fred Block
Drawing from her recent book, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Audra Wolfe took up the history behind why so many American scientists insist that science is apolitical. Anne Pollock discussed pharmaceutical knowledge making in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, foregrounding the importance of both place and politics for drug discovery (see Synthesizing Hope Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery, The University of Chicago Press, 2019). Addressing the intersection of politics and epistemology, Paolo Parra Saiaani traced how randomized trials came to be considered the gold standard of evidence among policymakers.

Designing for Social Justice? The Politics of Technology
Presider: Julia B. Ticona
Langdon Winters’ now famous question, ‘do artifacts have politics’ brought forth a case of designing for injustice. Here, four presenters explored efforts to design in the opposite direction – to design for justice. Benjamin Snyder examined the use of militarized surveillance technology taken up by Baltimore citizens to monitor police action.  Alexandra Chase Gervis explored the promise and pitfalls that unfold as labor leaders and tech leaders become unexpected bedfellows, asking whether a mobile app make benefits like healthcare coverage possible for workers who are informally employed.  Arguing that data decisions in healthcare are too important to be left to data experts alone, Taylor Cruz examined the technopolitics tied up in a data analytics program deployed to reduce diabetes disparities.  And Arafaat A. Valiani (with co-author Patrick Jones) linked both hope and disappointment to the use of electronic voting machines in postcolonial India.

Genetics, Identity and Other Controversies
Presider: Aaron Panofsky
Focusing on Autism science, Claire Laurier Decoteau traced the way that controversies have been smoothed in this field over time as dominant perspectives have subtly absorbed or “subsume” the outliers.  Santiago Molina argued a surprisingly uncontroversial path led to the very controversial deployment of CRISPR to genetically modify two twins in China. Torsten Voight examined how neuroscientists domesticate controversies viewing their field as an “integration project”, while David Peterson explored the building crisis as “replication activists” re-make meta-science. Finally, Wendy Roth explored whether genetic ancestry test results have the power to disrupt users’ social networks.

2018 SKAT SESSIONS

Digital Inequality
Invited Session
Presider: Jenny Reardon, UC Santa Cruz

• No Platform! How White Supremacist Movements are Challenging Platform Companies’ Ethics
  Joan Donovan, Data & Society and Peter Martin Krafft, UC Berkeley
  
• Haunted Algorithms: On the Racializing Assemblages of Algorithmic Governance
  Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, University of Pennsylvania
• Logics of Social and System Identities
  A. Aneesh, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
• Exploring Racism in Virtual Reality
  Courtney D. Cogburn, Columbia University

Discussant: Jenny Reardon, UC Santa Cruz

Science and Politics from Obama to Trump
Invited Session
Presider: Alondra Nelson, Columbia University and SSRC

• Public Trust and the Politics of Knowledge in the “Post-Truth” Era
  Shobita Parthasarathy, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan 
• The Use and Misuse of Science in Decision Making
  Michael Halpern, Union of Concerned Scientists
• Scientists in the American Resistance
  Dana R. Fisher, University of Maryland
• Keeping Science, Policy, and the Public Connected in Troubling Times
  Kei Koizumi, Senior Advisor for Science Policy, AAAS

Discussant: Alondra Nelson, Columbia University and SSRC

Artificial Feelings: The Politics and Perceptions of AI

This panel will examine the sociological implications of artificial intelligence, including both culture and politics. How do AI agents impact the apprehension and performance of emotion? What social benefits might AI augur and what new norms or regulations may be needed to shape a beneficial future? What challenges does the expansion of AI pose to civil rights and social justice? Papers are invited that draw on insights, theories and frameworks from the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology to explore the impact of AI and related technologies in the US and abroad.

Energy Politics, Technology, and Just Transitions

This panel investigates how the problem of developing just transitions
for our energy systems require the ongoing expansion of theories of
science, technology, and knowledge to include the analysis of emotions,
structural inequalities, including the mobilization of low-income groups,
racial and ethnicity minority groups, and labor. We invite case studies of
political contestation over energy transitions to examine how prominent
theoretical frameworks for the analysis of expertise and technology
(e.g., actor-oriented approaches, the analysis of discourse and meanings, and the transitions of technological systems) are modified by researchers working in the context of energy justice and democracy.

Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtables

Organizer: Melanie Jeske

---

2017 SKAT SESSIONS

Open Session: “Encoding Inclusion, Decoding Inequality”

Organizer: Alondra Nelson (Columbia University)

This session highlights sociological approaches to algorithmic culture and big data. How do new technologies exacerbate or ameliorate forms of social exclusion? Can big data and machine learning eliminate racial bias and discrimination or will they intensify disparities? Paper topics might include hashtag activism, genomics and personalized medicine, the internet of things, facial recognition software, predictive policing, sousveillance and surveillance.

Open Session: “Race and Ethnicity in Global and Postcolonial Science”

Organizer: Anthony Hatch (Wesleyan University)

Race and ethnicity are global social structures that have unique configurations within national contexts and broad implications for science within and across national borders. This open session calls for papers that examine how race and ethnicity impact the postcolonial contexts and/or global flows of scientific institutions and cultures, scientific practices and expertise, and scientists and research subjects.

Open Session: “Scientific Careers: Key Dimensions of Social Inequality”

Co-organizers: Mary Frank Fox (Georgia Institute of Technology), Kjersten Bunker Whittington (Reed College)

Social inequality is a central feature of scientific careers. In this session, we identify and explain key dimensions of inequality: includingg those of gender, race, sexual identities, national origins, and institutional locations. In doing this, we propose ways and means that equity can be improved through practices and policies within organizations, as well as in national science policies, that shape the ways that scientific careers occur.

Open Session: “Technology, Politics, and Socio-Environmental Solutions” co-sponsored by E&T and SKAT

Co-Organizers: Scott Frickel (Brown University) and Tammy Lewis (Brooklyn College-CUNY)

This joint panel highlights how knowledge politics in science and technology condition societal efforts to address major environmental and ecological challenges. Broadly, we seek papers that critically engage scientific, social scientific, and technological efforts to understand and address (or “fix”) major socio-environmental challenges, from climate change to global toxics to widespread environmental inequalities and injustice. What role can environmental sociologists and sociologists of science and technology play in enhancing the social robustness of environmental solutions?

2016 SKAT SESSIONS

Open Session: “Topics in Sociology of Science, Knowledge and Technology”

Description: This session invites papers on any topic related to the sociology of science, knowledge and technology

Session Organizer: Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, mrodriguezm@uchicago.edu

Invited Session: “Politics and Practices of Digital Knowledge Production”

Description: How do digital systems and practices intersect with, produce, and reproduce particular ways of knowing? This panel addresses contemporary intersections between digital studies and the study of science, knowledge and technology. We ask, whose ways of knowing are built into these systems, with what privilege and scope, and which ways are left out? How do the practices of digital knowledge production encode or enact systematic distinctions, categorizations, hierarchies and inequalities? Examining computational systems and artifacts from databases to algorithms, from labor politics to expertise, we return to the core questions of the field to discuss what it means for our research, our theories, and our methods when the sociology of science, knowledge and technology goes digital.

Session Organizer: Janet Vertesi, jvertesi@princeton.edu

Open Session: “Science at the Margins”

Description: Margins take many meanings in contemporary society, but most of these signify relationships of inequality between centers and edges or peripheries. Such relationships help describe geographical, social, and intellectual spaces as well as account for the social and symbolic power of those things, people, and processes that occupy marginal positions. We invite submissions that reflect on the theoretical and empirical significance of “the margins” and marginality in the practice and organization of science and technology.

Session Organizer: Logan Williams, will2734@msu.edu

Open Session: “What Would Bourdieu Do? New Approaches to Field Studies in Science, Knowledge and Technology”

Description: Fields and field theory are gaining renewed attention in various areas of sociology, including STS. This panel highlights recent applications of field theory to science studies and theoretical work on the dynamics of scientific and technological fields, broadly construed. All methodological approaches are welcome, including quantitative studies of networks, public opinion surveys, bibliometrics, and organizational analysis.

Session Organizer: Gordon Gauchat, gauchat@uwm.edu

Open Session: “Bodies and Sexualities in Science and Technology Studies” (co-sponsored with the Section on Bodies and Embodiment)

Description: We invite submissions that examine how science and technology are central to the everyday expressions of embodied practices. How has scientific research shaped social understandings of embodied experiences? How have technologies (medical, communication, surveillance, “camouflaged”) been used to organize, facilitate, enhance, track, or prevent bodily practices? Overall, what does the study of science and technology bring to the study of bodies?

Session Co-Organizer (SKAT): Katie Hasson, khasson@usc.edu

Invited Thematic Session: “Science, Movements and Social Inequality”

Description: In contemporary society political conflict increasingly centers on claims of scientific fact or uncertainty and these “knowledge politics” often have visible, broad and contradictory consequences for social inequality and social change more generally. This thematic session will consider the ways in which politicizations of scientific knowledge inside and outside the academy specifically shape efforts by social movements to confront and reduce social inequality. Invited panelists will consider power relations within and across the science/society divide as they influence the organization of social protest and resistance and alter distributions of social advantage and disadvantage in four socially consequential domains: environmental justice, gender and sexualities, biology and race, and genetics and disease. To date, scholars have paid insufficient attention to theorizing and studying the relationship between science, movements, and social inequality. Presentations on this panel will move those interconnections into the foreground.

Organizer: Scott Frickel, scott_frickel@brown.edu
Moderator: Steven Epstein
Panelists: Ruha Benjamin, Catherine Bliss, Phil Brown, Tom Waidzunas

Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology Refereed Roundtables (one-hour)

Organizer: Alondra Nelson, Columbia University

2015 SKAT SESSIONS

Open Session One: “Topics in Science, Knowledge, and Technology Studies”

Description: All submissions that advance sociological approaches to the study of science, knowledge, and/or technology are welcome, regardless of empirical focus.

Session Organizer and Presider: Jill Fisher

Presenters:

Risky Science?: Assessing and Negotiating Risks in University Bioscience – Dilshani Sarathchandra, University of Idaho

Psychiatry’s Little Other: DSM-5 and Debates over Psychiatric Science – Claire Laurier Decoteau & Paige Lenore Sweet, University of Illinois, Chicago

New Ways to Die in the Age of Biomedicalization: Changes in Cause of Death Classification Rules – Bryce J. Bartlett, Duke University

Too much of a good thing?: American midwives and the positive side of strategic ignorance – Kellie Owens, Northwestern University

Citizens, Experts, Politics, and Policy: Exploring Goals and Motivations of Volunteer Water Quality Monitors – Jaime McCauley, Northern Kentucky University

Open Session Two: “Bodies & Sexualities in Science & Technology Studies (co-sponsored by the Section on Sociology of the Body and Embodiment)”

Description: We invite submissions that examine how science and technology are central to the everyday expression of sexuality as embodied practice. How has scientific research shaped social understandings and embodied experiences of sexualities? How have technologies (medical, communication, surveillance, “camouflaged”) been used to organize, facilitate, enhance, track, or prevent sexual practices? Overall, what does the study of science and technology bring to the study of bodies and sexualities?

Session Organizers: Katie Hasson (khasson@usc.edu) and Elise Paradis (elise.paradis@utoronto.ca)
Presider: Elise Paradis

Presenters:

White, Shelley K., “Regulatory Scripting: Embodied, Scientific, and Medical Knowledges on Vaginal Mesh”

Sigurdson, Krista Mary Smith, “Safety and Scarcity in the Production and Distribution of Banked Donor Milk”

Lappe, Martine Danielle, “The Maternal Body as Environment in Autism Science

Ahlm, Jody, Respectable Promiscuity and Cybercarnality; Or, “Never show your face on pictures with your naughty bits””

Huang, Yu-Ling, “The Making of Bio-political Knowledge: Fertility Studies in Early Cold War Taiwan”

Invited Session: “The Politics of Knowledge: Technoscientific Dimensions of Political Life”

Description: Knowledge, expertise, and technologies are built into the inner workings of modern political processes, including practices of governance and modes of activist resistance. At the same time, scientific and technological developments are often the source and object of heated political controversies. Presentations by invited panelists in this session treat the “politics of knowledge” as a key component of everyday political life.

Organizer: Steven Epstein, Northwestern University, s-epstein@northwestern.edu
Presider: Janet Shim, University of California, San Francisco, Janet.shim@ucsf.edu

Presenters:

Patrick Carroll, “Water, Technoscience, and Regimes of Governance in California” University of California, Davis

Alondra Nelson, “Janus DNA: Race and Reconciliation after the Genome” Columbia University

Kelly Moore, “‘Wellness’ and the Embodied Normalization of Neoliberalism” Loyola University Chicago

Judy Wajcman, “Pressed for Time: How Technological Acceleration Came to Signify the Zeitgeist” London School of Economics

Discussant: Scott Frickel, Brown University, scott_frickel@brown.edu

Refereed Roundtables

Session Organizer: Catherine Bliss

2014 SKAT SESSIONS

Open Session: The Sociology of Big Data: Knowledge, Technology, Security and Privacy
Mon., August 18, 2:30-4:10 pm

Description: Big Data has emerged as a key engine of commerce and state power in the 21st century, even as it has created new vulnerabilities that threaten existing political and social orders. These developments have led to charged public debates over security and privacy and have introduced new ways of knowing social worlds that challenge the social sciences. We invite contributions that examine the science and technology of Big Data or assess its implications for knowledge production and social order.

Session Organizer: Benjamin H. Sims, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Presider: Benjamin H. Sims, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Presenters:

Rock Stars of Big Data? The Standardization of Expertise and Implications for Diversity in Analytics – Margaret Willis, Boston College

Big Data Policing in the Homeland Security Era: ILP and Intelligence Fusion in History and Practice – Brendan Innis McQuade, State University of New York-Binghamton

Constructing the Suspicious: Data Fusion and the Future of Security – Torin Monahan, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

The Archival to The Database State: India’s Unique Identification Number Project: Inclusive Surveillance and Privacy – Parul Baxi, University of California-Davis

Discussant: James A. Evans, University of Chicago

Open Session: Topics in Science, Knowledge, and Technology Studies
Tue, August 19, 8:30 to 10:10 am

Description: All submissions that advance sociological approaches to the study of science, knowledge, and technology are welcome, regardless of empirical focus.

Session Organizer: James A. Evans, University of Chicago
Presider: Jacob Gates Foster, University of California-Los Angeles

Presenters:

Entrepreneurial Formulas. Business Plans and the Formation of New Ventures – Martin Giraudeau, London School of Economics and Political Science; Liliana Doganova, Mines ParisTech

Looping Genomes: Diagnostic Expansion and the Genetic Makeup of the Autism Population – Daniel Navon, Harvard University; Gil Eyal, Columbia University

Managing Sharing/Secrecy Tensions around Scientific Knowledge Disclosure – Andrew Nelson, University of Oregon

The Impact of Bone Marrow Donor Infrastructure on Sibling Relationships – Lianna Hartmour, University of California-Los Angeles

The Organization of Expert Activism: Shadow Mobilization in Two Social Movements – Scott Frickel, Washington State University; Rebekah Torcasso, Washington State University; Annika Yvette Anderson, Washington State University

Refereed Roundtables
Tue, August 19, 10:30 to 11:30 am

Session Organizer: Scott Frickel, Washington State University

Invited Session. Science and Morality
Tue, August 19, 12:30 to 2:10 pm

Description: Moral and scientific practices are always entwined, and the sociology of science has been at the forefront of analyzing those intersections. This panel engages research that has pushed the field forward by examining: how research sponsors, religious groups, and governments weave moral and scientific issues together; institutional arenas in which these issues are worked out; and the kind of “work” that concepts such as justice, ethics, and morality do for scientists and the sociology of science.

Session Organizers: Sydney A. Halpern, University of Illinois-Chicago; Kelly Moore, Loyola University-Chicago
Presider: Sydney A. Halpern, University of Illinois-Chicago

Presenters:

Experimental Patriots: The Ethics of Drug Testing in American Prisons – Anthony Ryan

Hatch, Georgia State University

Bio-Ethics and Bio-Justice: HPV and the Expanding Field of Cancer Prevention – Laura Mamo, San Francisco State University

A Critique of the Use of New Genomic Data to Reconstitute Biological Race Categories – Joan H. Fujimura, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ramya Rajagopalan, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Beyond Incommensurability in Sexual Rights Conflict: Scientific, Religious, and Moral Truths of Homosexuality Woven across the United States and Uganda – Tom J. Waidzunas, Temple University

Discussant: Kelly A. Joyce, Drexel University

Invited Session. Valuation Devices: STS Approaches to the Sociology of Worth
Tue, August 19, 2:30 to 4:10 pm

Description: In such politically fraught and technically mediated arenas as health, the environment, education, and finance, we find intensive struggles over the worth of things. Tools such as environmental impact assessment, performance review, and cost-benefit analysis seek to objectively measure values but often become objects of controversy. This panel will explore emerging directions in the social analysis of valuation processes, with an emphasis on the place of knowledge, expertise, and technologies.

Session Organizer: Andrew Lakoff, University of Southern California
Presider: Andrew Lakoff, University of Southern California

Presenters:

Stop it. Why Resisting Rankings has Failed and Why Evaluation Measures can be Hard to Tame – Wendy Nelson Espeland, Northwestern University

The Type and the Grade: Wine Classifications and the Institutional Scaffolding of the Judgment of Taste – Marion Fourcade, University of California-Berkeley; Rebecca Elliott, University of California-Berkeley

Capturing Worlds of Worth: Fiction Reviewing, Management Consulting and Scholarly Evaluation Compared – Michele Lamont, Harvard University; Phillipa K Chong, Harvard University

My Top Ten List of Valuation Devices – David Stark, Columbia University