Dear STS Community, The STS Program will be holding three Special Seminars in the next two weeks.
You are cordially invited to attend the Special Seminars listed below. We look forward to your attendance and hope you enjoy these talks. Jose Ragas, Cornell U Monday, December 7 4pm – E51-095 From Citizens to Algorithms: ID Cards and Global Biometrics in the Age of Surveillance Over the last century and a half, experts from different fields have attempted to design a mechanism capable of establishing particular identities for each individual in a given territory. Biometrics is the latest attempt to fulfill this utopian vision of universal identification by using technology as an effective identifier of people’s bodies. This talk revisits the origins and limits of these efforts by examining the genealogy of ID cards from the Global South. By reversing the conventional approach of technologies of information disseminating from the North to the South, I offer a different perspective in order to introduce a more complex and nuanced analysis of how users in different settings interacted with artifacts originally intended to monitor their movements and categorize them according to certain scientific parameters. Marissa Mika, U of San Francisco Monday, December 14 4pm – E51-095 Cobalt Blues: The Half Life of Technology Transfer What happens when oncology's technologies travel? Focusing on the history of cancer care in Uganda for the past 50 years, I show how the historically situated techno-politics of a one-time radiotherapy donation continue to shape the ethical and practical realities of cancer care today in one corner of the Global South. This is a meditation on the "half life" of machines, technocratic imaginaries, and the limits of repair in a unequal world. Dwai Banerjee, Dartmouth College Wednesday, December 16 4pm – E51-095 “Markets and molecules: biopharmaceutical rights in the global south” The Indian pharmaceutical industry has historically manufactured low-cost drugs for the global poor. In this talk, I show how as new drug access controversies in India focus on biopharmaceutical therapies, they reveal new flows of international capital, emergent genetic technologies, and increasingly coercive trade regimes that together favor multi-national corporate oligopolies. In turn, the rise of such oligopolies imperils the future availability of essential life-saving drugs for the work of global public health. My aim here is to demonstrate how the future of the right to drug access rests uneasily, and potentially calamitously, in a shifting balance of power between global south interests and Euro-American pharmaceutical capital. Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have. Thank you, Gus _____________________________________________ Gus Zahariadis Assistant to the Director Program in Science, Technology, and Society T: (617) 253-3452 F: (617) 258-8118
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