Workshop: Engaging the Global Flux of Technoscientific Developments and Regulatory Responses

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides funding for the 8th annual meeting of the Society for the Studies of New and Emerging Technologies (S.NET), which is to be held in October 2017, in Tempe, Arizona. The goal of S.NET is to foster interdisciplinary and transnational scholarship on the societal dimensions of emerging technologies. The workshop will promote broad ranging intellectual inquiry and contribute to the continued development of diverse literatures on the mutual impacts between societies and emerging technologies. The bulk of the funds will be directed to graduate students, postdocs, scholars from underrepresented groups and junior scholars from the US that are accepted to present at the conference and who have little, or no other, travel support. Supported recipients will participate in two workshops focused specifically on early career professional development of the next generation of STS scholars. The 2017 conference theme is "Engaging the Flux," which alludes to the ongoing flux of technological developments, scientific knowledge productions, and societal alterations. The proposed workshops will embody the conference theme, embracing it in two ways of significance to junior scholars in the social studies of science, STS, science-informed art practices, and STEM disciplines. The conference will gather a projected 150-200 S.NET members (based on past attendance records), the vast bulk of whom will present on research that directly engages flux. The requested funds will enable scholarly work with applied benefits for the responsible development of new scientific knowledge and technologies, product innovation and commercialization, sustainable economic development, and (consequently) the long-term material and physical betterment of humankind. The funds will also fuel the professional development of the recipients at a crucial stage in their careers during a historic moment of intensified sociotechnical, political and professional uncertainty.