Sent on behalf of Deborah Fitzgerald, MIT STS department head: Dear STS Community, MIT’s STS Program is pleased to announce it has awarded the 2021-22 Benjamin Siegel Writing Prize<https://sts-program.mit.edu/benjamin-siegel-writing-prize/> to Hampton Smith, for the essay “Making Quantification in the Age and Wake of Slavery.” Hampton is a second-year doctoral student in the department of architecture. Each year MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society offers the Benjamin Siegel Writing Prize to the MIT student submitting the best written work (under 50 pages) on issues in science, technology, and society. The Prize was established in 1990 by family and friends to honor the memory of Benjamin Siegel, S.B. 1938, Ph.D. The $2500 Prize is open to undergraduate and graduate students at MIT from any department or school. This year’s selection committee is composed of Chakanetsa Mavhunga and Sherry Turkle. The goal of Hampton’s essay is to look at the experience of blackness through a new lens, one that does not satisfy itself with narration, but looks at materials that can be made to reveal previously unread quantification, for example, basketry. The essay shares its personal roots: “I grew up going to Charleston, South Carolina on vacation . . . I would always make it a point to watch local basket makers. I suppose those experiences are what lead me to this project.” The essay’s argument begins with the violent archival materials related to the history of slave trading—ledgers, bills of landing, and other accounting instruments with which traders monitored and measured their investments. Then, it repositions black people (women in this case) as co-producers of quantification, [and] going beyond the ship ledgers or accountant manuals “to develop a historical counter-archive, … to read for black knowledges of quantification in an altogether different archive of slavery.” It is then that the essay turns to basketry as an example of such an archive, along with W. E. B. Dubois’s graphic visualizations, the one typically unrecognizable as a form of quantification, the other a banal one (i.e. data visualizations). The virtues of this work are many: It opens a new research direction on studies of quantification, the transatlantic trade in Africans as slaves, and the plantation experience, by centralizing the quantified as quantifiers in their own right. Second, rather than relying on the slave master and seller’s written archive, Hampton classifies as text that STS scholarships traditionally reads as artifacts rather than writing. Third, it joins the literature that troubles definitions of the scientific and the technological in new global conversations. -Chakanetsa Mavhunga and Sherry Turkle Congratulations to Hampton Smith for his prize-winning essay, and my thanks to Chakanetsa Mavhunga and Sherry Turkle for serving as the faculty representatives on this year's STS Committee on Prizes and Awards.
Deborah Fitzgerald Leverett Howell and William King Cutten Professor of the History of Technology Program in Science, Technology, and Society MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Bldg. E51-296A Cambridge, MA 02139 dkf...@mit.edu<mailto:dkf...@mit.edu> _______________________________________ _______________________________________ Gus Zahariadis (he, him, his) Assistant to the Director; Sr. Admin III Program in Science, Technology, and Society Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences 77 Massachusetts Ave, E51-163B Cambridge, MA 02139 T: 617.253.3452 g...@mit.edu<mailto:g...@mit.edu> https://sts-program.mit.edu
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