Notices

Hello, I am writing to extend an invitation for expressions of interest for an edited collection I am working on with Bristol University Press titled, Science and Technology Studies  and Health Praxis: Genetic Science and New Digital Technologies. The details are listed below. Do let me know if you are interested and able to contribute, or if you have any questions (tina.sikka@newcastle.ac.uk). A call for abstracts will come shortly. I am really excited about the collection and would love to have a contribution that reflects some of the interesting work being done by scholars on the list.

Timeline

January 2021 – finalise chapters
September 2021 – chapter draft submission
December 2021 – return edited drafts for revision
March 2022 – final submissions of chapters
April 2022 – Introduction, final revisions
Completion: May/June 2022

This edited collection invites chapters from a variety of fields aimed at the interdisciplinary study of the latest health (digital and genetic) technologies using a variety of forward-looking STS methods (the socio-technical, radical democratisation, feminist technoscience, new materialism, laboratory studies, radical/auto ethnography, case studies etc.). What makes these health technologies unique, and therefore demands study, is that they constitute an embodied and mediated health ecosystem based on neoliberal logics that promise bio-molecular transformations of who we are in particular ways. The book will be primarily aimed at scholarly and student readers in critical STS, race, gender, socio-economic status, sexuality and health studies.

Each chapter will apply some form of STS based method, approach, or theoretical frame (e.g. case studies, ANT, controversies, feminist technoscience/STS, Indigenous and Postcolonial STS, co-production and co-constitution, socio-material analysis, ethnographies) within the following framework:

1. STS, Health Knowledge, and the Body

• How new health technologies (digital and genetic) are changing how we relate to our material, embodied selves;
• The representation, communication, and internalization of health knowledge (mediated and unmediated);
• The economic and cultural inequalities that result from these technologies, practices/performances, and changing definitions of 'good health';
• How health norms, practices, and technologies are taken up and experienced by raced and gendered individuals and groups in embodied ways;
• How fatness intersects with science, technology, normativity, and equality.

2. STS, Health and Subjectivity/Identity

• How health technologies have transformed and produced new subjectivities, relations to the body, and relations to the natural world;
• The study of the way in which ways in which health is tied to and reflects overlapping identities vis-á-vis health disparities;
• How the social construction of race, sexuality, class, dis/ability and gender are expressed by and through digital and genetic technologies in novel ways;
• The study of forms of sociality that these technologies might encourage/discourage;

3. New Frontiers in Health STS

• The nature of scientific knowledge (production and distribution) as it relates to genetically and epigenetically based knowledge about health;
• The novel and changing nature and character of new health technologies;
• The impact of genetically-based knowledge regimes on our understanding of who we are (in particular around race, indigeneity, sexuality);
• How these technologies are wound up and deeply implicated in (surveillance) capitalism;
• How these technologies are co-produced and the ways in which gender, race, class, sexuality, and dis/ability might be reflected in and through future health technologies.
• The ways in which power and inequality are reflected and reproduced by these technologies, discourses, and practices.

Tina Sikka, PhD
Head of Postgraduate Research
Lecturer
Media, Culture and Heritage
School of Arts and Cultures
Newcastle University

Spontaneous Generations, a scholarly journal published by the graduate students of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, invites contributions to its 11 th volume.

Experts occupy an increasingly contested space in our society. Politicians challenge the expertise of public health officials amidst the COVID-19 pandemic; climate change deniers that of climatologists; creationists that of evolutionary biologists and geologists. Even the rotundity of the Earth has not escaped renewed public scrutiny. While many regard this growing tide of resistance to experts with anxiety or alarm, even their most stalwart defenders acknowledge the risks inherent in excessive deference to experts. After all, experts are only human. They can make mistakes of fact or ethical judgment. They can fall prey to the temptations of conformity. They can be corrupted by corporate or state patronage. A technologically sophisticated society can hardly function without experts, but neither can a democratic one exempt them from scrutiny.

Scholars involved in the study of science, technology, medicine, and mathematics are wellpositioned to explore the pressing issues surrounding expertise. As experts who study other experts, they have a unique vantage point. The editors of Spontaneous Generations welcome contributions which explore these themes from an anthropological, historical, philosophical, sociological, or interdisciplinary point of view. Questions which contributors might take up include, but are not limited to:

• What epistemological challenges arise from the practice and communication of expertise? How can non-experts evaluate expert testimony in a principled, reasonable way?

• What epistemological challenges arise from the practice and communication of expertise? How can non-experts evaluate expert testimony in a principled, reasonable way?

• What epistemological challenges arise from the practice and communication of expertise? How can non-experts evaluate expert testimony in a principled, reasonable way?

• What epistemological challenges arise from the practice and communication of expertise? How can non-experts evaluate expert testimony in a principled, reasonable way?

In short, we invite second-order reflections on the challenges, opportunities, and socialsituatedness of expertise, whether your own or that of the experts you study. We especially welcome contributions in the form of focus essays: 2–3,000 words in length. Research articles and book reviews which speak to the theme of expertise, more or less directly, are also welcome. We aim to publish both established and early career scholars. Contributions should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition; be formatted in MS Word; and be received no later than December 20th, 2020. We will also be happy to review abstracts before that time, if you have an idea for a submission and are considering whether or not to go forward. Please send abstracts, inquiries, and contributions (along with your institutional and departmental affiliation) to Daniel Halverson at daniel.halverson@mail.utoronto.ca.