The Elections Committee is pleased to present the candidates for the 2023 election. You will receive a link in your inbox to cast your virtual ballot (using SurveyMonkey). Please check your junk email or spam folder and if you have any trouble, please contact info@4sonline.org. Voting will close on Monday, June 19th, at 11:59 PM (Pacific time).
Candidate for Treasurer
Amit Prasad
Amit Prasad is an Associate Professor in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is also an affiliate faculty of Atlanta Global Studies Center and Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Previously, he taught in the Department of Sociology at University of Missouri-Columbia and was the Director of the South Asia Studies Program. He has also served as a Council Member of the Science, Knowledge, and Technology (SKAT) section of the American Sociological Association. His research focuses on post/de-colonial, transnational, and global aspects of science, technology, and medicine. An important concern for him is how coloniality – expressed through values, norms, linguistic tropes, ideologies, etc. – continue to animate the present, including our own field. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, American Institute of Indian Studies, among others and he has published in a number of journals, including Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology & Human Values, Theory, Culture, and Society, Technology & Culture, Cultural Geographies. He is the author of Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT) and Science Studies Meets Colonialism (Polity). Presently, he is writing a book on his decade long study of a stem cell therapy clinic in India that is tentatively titled Globalization in a Laboratory. He is also an editor of the journal Science, Technology & Society (Sage).
Candidates for Council
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Monamie Bhadra Haines
Monamie Bhadra Haines will join Virginia Tech’s Department of Science, Technology and Society as an assistant professor in August 2023, after spending 5 years in the faculty of Nanyang Technological University and Technical University of Denmark. She has three reasons for running for council member. First, she harbours an enduring commitment to 4S as evidenced by her participation in 4S meetings since 2009 and her service to the institution when asked (as a judge for the Mullins Prize, program committee member, 6S mentor). Second, she sees herself as a good colleague who tries to put in the work to achieve the smooth functioning of institutions like 4S that she values. Third, she is committed to navigating cross-cultural and perspectival difference, which is an important part of a transnational organisation. Living and working in different countries has compelled her to constantly decenter and reposition herself intersubjectively to navigate varied research environments, pedagogical philosophies, and institutional cultures and expectations. In her scholarship, this has been translated into critically examining how democracy is practiced around science and technology in different contexts. Monamie’s work is organized around understanding the multiplicities of democratic governance through an attention to the politics of power and knowledge in Global South and comparative perspectives. Under this umbrella, she has worked on the surveillance of migrant workers in Singapore, comparative engineering education in Europe, and Indian activism. She has published work on Indian anti-nuclear activism in Social Studies of Science, Science as Culture, Journal of Responsible Innovation, and is developing her monograph on the credibility politics of Indian anti-nuclear activists. She has co-authored articles in East Asian Science, Technology and Society (pandemic surveillance and citizen science), Energy Research and Social Science (practices of energy democracy in Morocco and Tanzania), Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (secular protests in India, and STS pedagogy in Singapore (forthcoming)). She has recently begun, and hopes to continue, practicing collaborative, engaged scholarship with colleagues and activists.
Melissa Creary
Melissa S. Creary is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, School of Public Health. She is core faculty of the Science, Technology, and Society Program in the College of Literature, Science, and Arts and Faculty Affiliate for the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the Ford School of Public Policy. She is also the Associate Director of Anti-Racism for Michigan Social Health Interventions to Eliminate Disparities (MSHIELD) for the Michigan School of Medicine and associated hospitals. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (focusing on Health, History, and Culture) at the Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA) and a master’s in public health at Emory University. Her primary research interests include how science, culture, and policy intersect, particularly around ethical, legal, and social concerns (ELSI). Through a health equity lens and using historical and ethnographic methods, she uses sickle cell disease as a case to investigate simultaneous constructions of race and science via the development of policy. Her anti-racist research also theorizes how embodied outcomes of accumulated injustice and exclusion inhibit the receipt of justice even via well-meaning programs, policies, and technologies designed to build equity. Her work for 4S would amplify these topics for the organization, seeking to further encourage and connect STS orientations with concerns of power and race. Her writings have appeared in a range of journals crossing several disciplines, including the BioSocieties, Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, Social Science & Medicine, The American Journal of Bioethics, and JAMA Open Network.
Cathy Herbrand
Cathy Herbrand is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Medical Sociology and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Reproduction Research at De Montfort University (UK). She is also a member of the Belgian Advisory Committee on Bioethics (2014-2023), chairing its sub-committee on surrogacy regulation. Her research interests lie in the sociological and anthropological study of medicine, genetics, biotechnologies, reproduction and gender. She has produced pioneering work and published empirical and theoretical papers on the social implications of reproductive and genetic healthcare technologies, with a focus on two main areas: 1) the interactions between scientific progress, policies and patients’ lives, including in the context of mitochondrial disorders and egg donation; 2) the transformations of family norms and regulations arising from the development of lesbian and gay parenting. Her new collaborative and interdisciplinary research project (funded by an ESRC Research Grant) focuses on the implications of new preconception reproductive genomic testing in the UK. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Sociology of Health and Illness, BioSocieties, Anthropology and Medicine, Bioethics, and Journal of Medical Law and Ethics. Cathy is also a member of the editorial board of Sociology, the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association and has convened the Human Reproduction Study Group of the British Sociological Association since 2016.
Jaya Keaney
Jaya Keaney is Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research in feminist science studies explores how reproductive kinship is entangled with scientific knowledge practices and regimes of race, gender, sexuality, and coloniality. Her first book, Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling (forthcoming with Duke University Press, Nov 2023) considers how race and kinship are reformulated in the global assisted reproductive industry. Tracing diverse queer family making journeys, the book argues that reproductive technoscience and queer innovations in kinship reshape racialized intimacy. Jaya’s current research extends her interest in racialized inheritance and reprogenetics to the field of postgenomic science. This project explores the growing uptake of postgenomic models of embodiment and memory in anti-racism discourse across diverse communities of practice, and considers the potential of these models to enact racial and gendered justice. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, Jaya held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University, and was a visiting scholar at the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) at the University of Cambridge. Jaya’s writing appears in journals such as Science, Technology, & Human Values; Body & Society; and Trends in Biotechnology, as well as several edited collections. She was the co-editor (with Sonja van Wichelen) of a 2022 special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values titled Reproduction in the Postgenomic Age, which explores how postgenomic bioscience is reshaping understandings and practices of reproduction. Alongside her research, Jaya is committed to fostering regional STS infrastructures in Australasia, and has been an active participant in AusSTS and the Deakin Science and Society Network. She is also passionate about sharing the tools and insights of STS with a new generation of scholars and thinkers through her teaching, and this year developed an undergraduate subject on queer feminist STS at the University of Melbourne. Her work with 4S would be driven by her belief in the power of STS for addressing obdurate social inequities, and her commitment to nurturing diverse STS research and learning communities.
Jaimie Morse
I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University. Broadly speaking, my work examines the politics of knowledge in biomedicine and global health, with a focus on the interplay between law, health, and human rights advocacy in processes of policy change. I was deeply honored to receive the 2022 David Edge Prize for my article in Osiris entitled The Geopolitics of ‘Rape Kit’ Protocols: Historical Problems in Translation as Humanitarian Medicine Meets International Law. I would like to give back to the organization by serving on 4S Council. 4S is one of my cherished intellectual homes, and members of this community have helped me to develop my work at many conferences and workshops over the years. If elected, I would like to organize professionalization workshops for graduate students and junior scholars that provide opportunities for dialogue and collaboration across regional and transnational STS scholarly networks. For example, I co-organized a two-part series on Global STS in collaboration with The STS Futures Initiative in 2021. The STS Futures Initiative was convened by graduate students to facilitate professionalization in the field (@STSfutures). The Global STS workshops featured scholars who are creating new regional STS networks outside of North America and Western Europe and facilitating research and theorizing in emerging subfields. My hope is that future professionalization workshops would be co-designed and co-led with graduate students to offer support and mentorship opportunities to junior scholars. At UC Santa Cruz, I am affiliated with the Science and Justice Research Center, the Legal Studies program, and the Global and Community Health Initiative.
Rohit Negi
Rohit Negi is an Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Community Knowledge (CCK) at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). Trained in Urban Planning and Geography, Rohit’s interests are at the interface of urbanization, environmental change, and STS. Rohit has researched subterranean, built, and atmospheric urban processes in Southern Africa and India. His recent work is on the technosciences, politics, and representations of air pollution in the Delhi region. Apart from academic publications, including the co-authored ‘Atmosphere of Collaboration’ (Routledge), this work has led to meaningful engagement with the regional scientific community as well as with a local artists’ collective. Rohit has led the design of new programs in Urban Studies at AUD, from undergraduate to doctoral studies, that are fairly unique in the Indian academic space both in terms of their content and pedagogical approach, bringing together elements from design and humanities education. At CCK, Rohit leads work on the ‘People’s Geography of Delhi’ that documents and disseminates stories of the city’s settling, inhabitation, and everyday lives through its diverse neighborhoods. This project has taken the form of in-situ pop-up museums and exhibitions, popular illustrated and bilingual publications, and the creation of short films that are in the public domain. Rohit has served on the 4S Carson Prize Committee (2019) and was a faculty mentor to the 6S Sketch Group Program (2022). He hopes to contribute, in particular, to pedagogical initiatives and conversations related to community engagement at 4S.
Paolo Parra Saiani
Paolo Parra Saiani is Associate Professor at the University of Genoa (IT). His work bridges sociology and social research methodology and addresses various overlapping elds of inquiry. The rst examines social and political factors that shape the global flows of knowledge, as well as the social and political ramifications of the globalization of science; the second focuses on research agendas and on the necessary infrastructures. He served as a chair in Cholula 4S meeting and he is member of the Executive Board of RN24, Science and Technology of the European Sociological Association; he is also member of the International Sociological Association, the Red Latinoamericana de Metodología de las Ciencias Sociales. He has organized panels for the 2021 and 2022 ASA Meetings (for the Science, Knowledge and Technology Section) and served in the Robert K. Merton Book Award Committee (2021-22) and in the Star-Nelkin Paper Award Committee (2022-23) of the ASA. His most important recent publications are Doing Sociology in the Age of ‘Evidence-Based Research’: Scientific Epistemology versus Political Dominance, American Sociologist, 2018; Towards a new canon? Rewriting the history (and the future) of sociology, Quaderni di Sociologia, 2020; Triangulación metodológica y big data, with J.I. Piovani, PRACS, 2021. If elected, he will work closely with other board members to support the strategic plans of our Society: enhancing the diversity and breadth of our association, increasing our visibility, and strengthening relationships with other associations.
Candidates for 6S Representative
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Zhaopeng Li
I am Zhaopeng Li, a PhD student from Fudan University majoring in public policy. I’m running for the position of 6S Student Representative. My research interests focus on research assessment and technology transfer in emerging economies.
I wish to serve on the Society for Social Studies of Science Student Section (6S) in order to promote and enforce a strong, healthy academic community for students and junior scholars of science studies. As a young member of Chinese Association for Science of Science and Sci-tech Policy, I have participated in several academic conferences in the field of sci-tech policy and public administration. As a result, I have met a group of excellent Chinese scholars of relevant field and I wish to better promote the collaboration and communication between Chinese and global scholars in 6S’s future activities. Furthermore, I have almost finished my PhD courses, so I am able to spare 10-20 hours per week to complete 6S’s task.
In addition to being a PhD student in a Chinese top university in Shanghai, I also had a 6-week international exchange experience in Duke University in 2019 summer. Besides, I have been accepted as a visiting scholar supervised by Professor John Walsh in Georgia Technology Institute in 2024. I’m skilled in communicating with scholars from all over the world. If the position requires anything that I am not familiar with, I am also willing to learn them.I cherish it as an invaluable experience for both research and service joining 6S as a student representative. As a second-year doctoral student, I have both strong will and enough time to participate in 6S activities and take on related tasks.
Lissette Lorenz
I am a PhD candidate in science and technology studies (STS) at Cornell University with a background in environmental studies and dance. I draw from the strong tradition of activist scholarship that has served as a foundation for the field of STS to conduct qualitative community-based research on mental and environmental health initiatives in historically underserved areas of Virginia, USA. Building on critical social theories across the humanities and social sciences, I utilize interdisciplinary and experimental qualitative methods involving somatic techniques to address environ-mental health challenges. As a social scientist from intersecting historically marginalized communities, I can attest to the ongoing structural challenges that minoritized students face in and around the academy. Despite ongoing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at the institutions that I have been a part of, I still encounter barriers to my education and training; they serve as daily reminders that as a first-generation, neurodivergent graduate student and woman of color, the academy was not originally built for everyone to thrive. Yet I am determined to work intersectionally and in community to remove these barriers and help usher in equitable and just scholarship practices and networks. Serving as a 6S representative will provide me the opportunity to do this crucial work in solidarity with the 4S and 6S communities. Participating in the 2022 6S Sketch Group Program, along with engaging with others at previous 4S annual meetings, have helped me establish relationships with these communities. As a 6S representative, I will continue to commit to building up these relationships, further strengthening the bonds between students and early-career scholars in these spaces as we collectively transform academic institutions world-wide into diverse, equitable, and just spaces of scholarship and praxis.
Leslie Salgado
My name is Leslie Salgado, and I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Calgary (UofC). I am excited to submit my nomination for the position of Student Representative for the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).
I have extensive experience in knowledge mobilization and community building, which will be valuable assets in this role. I have served on organizing committees for the UofC CMF Department Graduate Student Conference, as a Graduate Student Representative for the Faculty of Arts EDI Committee, and as a Sustainability Ambassador at the UofC. I also volunteer for the Women in AI community in Canada. These experiences have given me a deep understanding of building strong communities and fostering collaboration between diverse groups using intercultural communication skills.
If elected as Student Representative, I plan to bring these experiences to 6S to continue the community growth, especially connecting students from the Global South with opportunities for professional development and networking. I would also like to pay special attention to students in caregiver roles and how 4S can provide specific opportunities for them. Furthermore, I want to keep the 6S community growing and attract new graduate students to our channels and events, like the 6S Sketches Program, where I will serve as a 6S liaison. Issues like academic integrity in times of generative AI, interdisciplinary research, and research impact beyond academia are topics I would like to raise in the community.
Thank you for considering my nomination.
Prerna Srigyan
I am Prerna Srigyan, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine. My research and advocacy are geared towards understanding and leveraging pedagogical cultures of science for critical and radical activation. With UCI’s EcoGovLab, I help build pedagogical tools to recognise, characterise, and address environmental and social injustices for universities, schools, community advocates, and environmental professionals. Read more about my work here.
Being a part of 4S for the last five years has undoubtedly influenced my orientations and commitments as a scholar. At my first 4S in 2018, I noticed how graduate students and early career scholars played a highly active and visible role in the Society's governance, proposing new programs to advance transnational researchers' participation and collaboration in the field. Five conferences and many friendships later, I am a beneficiary of those kinds of programs that invite researchers from different orientations and backgrounds to enrich and expand the field. I would like to reciprocate by contributing to the organisational and intellectual work that makes this possible. My academic service experience includes organising the annual graduate student conference at UCI Anthropology and serving as a contributing editor for the online blog of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.
If elected, I would continue the pedagogical programs meticulously planned and executed by 6S Reps, such as the 6S Sketch Groups and the forthcoming Para-conference. I would like to recover and initiate programs illustrating many pedagogical genealogies and geographies that have formed the field as an intellectual and practitioner-oriented knowledge domain. Findings and reports from such conversations would be invaluable for newcomers and habituals alike to build refreshing research and training programs. 6S Reps steward the field into new directions, and I remain excited and committed towards that endeavour.