Science, Knowledge and Technology Sessions, 2010 ASA Meetings

Please go to the ASA website for paper submission procedures.

1) Session Title: The Field of Science: Capital, Habitus and the Struggle for Power

Open Session

Session description: Pierre Bourdieu is considered by scholars in many domains to be one of the most influential French intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work has been influential in many areas ranging from the sociology of education to language, economics, health, culture, literature, and politics. Surprisingly, scholars in science and technology studies have shown limited interest in Bourdieu, leaving out of their conceptual repertoire a whole range of tools for understanding technoscience. The papers selected for this session will draw on Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus and capital and examine how social forces---both internal and external to the scientific field---can shape knowledge production.

Session Organizer and Presider: Mathieu Albert, University of Toronto.
mathieu.albert@utoronto.ca



2) Session Title: Knowledge about the Economy: Creating It and Using It

Open Session

Session Description: The ongoing financial crisis has made clear the limits of our knowledge about the economy. Recently, several promising lines of sociological research have begun to explore the creation and application of such knowledge. These include work on the performativity of economics, work examining economists as professionals, and work looking at how economic knowledge is used in politics. While groundbreaking research has been done in each of these areas, a conversation across these approaches has just started to develop. This session aims to bring together scholars studying economic knowledge from these or other perspectives to highlight common ground and clarify differences.

Session Organizer and Presider: Elizabeth Popp Berman, SUNY--Albany
epberman@albany.edu

3) Session Title: Science, Technology, and the Struggle for Human Rights

Open Session

Session Description: This session will feature papers from scholars forging importing links between issues related to science and technology and human rights. Topics of interest may include (but are not limited to) the social implications of nanotechnology; health care, medicine, and human rights; reproductive politics and population control; labor rights; indigenous peoples and sovereignty; food security and food justice; climate change and climate justice; environmental inequalities and environmental justice movements; intersections among science, technology, and human rights and the politics of race, class, gender, citizenship, and sexuality. Emphasis will be placed on bridging the study of science and technology with research on human rights.

Organizer and Presider: David N. Pellow, University of Minnesota
dpellow@umn.edu

4) Session Title: Science, Medicine, Race, and (In)Justice

Open Session

Session Description: Social studies of science and medicine have not been agnostic about the implications of scientific and medical epistemologies and practices, but this session is intended as an opportunity to reflect explicitly on the consequences such scholarship has for social justice. We are particularly interested here in the constellation of identities and issues surrounding 'race.' However, given that much attention has been given to discrete racialized, gendered, or sexualized analyses with regard to science, medicine, and social justice, we hope that this session will also offer new possibilities to dialogue towards "intersectional" knowledge production in these areas, including and moving beyond singular analyses of race.

Organizers: Janet K. Shim and Shari L. Dworkin, University of California, San Francisco

Janet.Shim@ucsf.edu
shari.dworkin@ucsf.edu

5) Roundtable Organizer: Catherine Bliss, Brown University, Catherine_Bliss@brown.edu

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