This summer the New Books Network interviewed CSTMS’ Charis Thompson about her book Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013). In this book, Charis Thompson investigates the evolution of the controversy over human pluripotent stem cell research in the United States and proposes a new ethical approach for “good science.” She traces political,… Read more

On the occasion of his 70th birthday, Professor Thomas Laqueur, Co-Director of the Program for the Medical Humanities, was honored for his decades of contributions to a wide range of academic communities in an event at the Social Science Matrix. Professor Laqueur is a historian of immense range and creativity who has set intellectual landmarks across a… Read more

This fall the Center’s Special Project area “The Cloud and the Crowd” convenes a new reading group. Following on from Cori Hayden’s course by the same name offered last year we will expand the exploration of relevant texts in literary, social and political theory and data science. Among those texts will be the newly published A Prehistory of… Read more

Gretchen Gano joins the Center this fall as the new Associate Director of Research and the Interim Director for the Ph.D. Designated Emphasis in STS. She is a scholar of Science, Technology and Society with research and practitioner experience in participatory technology assessment of emerging technologies. Her research explores the practices, dynamics, and structures of sociotechnical innovation systems. She is interested… Read more

On November, 6, 2015, UC Berkeley’s Humanities and Social Sciences Association (HSSA) will hold a symposium, Crowdsourcing and the academy: Exploring promises and problems of collective intelligence methods in humanities and social science research on the UC Berkeley campus.  The purpose of this event is to explore the premises, promises, and risks of crowdsourcing in the social sciences and humanities. … Read more

In April 2015, CSTMS hosted a two-day interdisciplinary conference on “Faking It:” Counterfeits, Copies, and Uncertain Truths in Science, Technology, and Medicine. Over the past several decades, science studies scholars have explored the ways in which scientific knowledge and practice is socially constructed, debated, contested, and deemed credible by the public.  Others have turned their… Read more

CSTMS is thrilled to announce three of our graduating STS Designated Emphasis students have accepted new positions! Rachel Carmen Ceasar, PhD in Medical Anthropology, is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her work examines the intersection of forensic archaeology, the dead body, and hierarchies of heritage and knowledge… Read more