Linguists first used the term backchannel to refer to the spontaneous responses and signals that provide interactivity to what is only apparently a one-way communication. Social media users have adopted the term to refer to the unofficial, multi-directional online conversation that parallels formal academic exchange at a lecture or conference. The Backchannels blog is intended to have a similar relationship to scholarly discourse in STS. It provides an outlet for alternative-format scholarly communications, publishing shorter, timelier, media-rich communiques of interest to the global STS community. The editors welcome proposed contributions.
Jul 22 2024
In a three-day conference at Colby College, faculty across the small liberal arts college shared their research, teaching, and partnerships in critical medical and health humanities. Their goal was to collectively define the field by connecting their work to critical keywords.
Jul 17 2024
This blog post illustrates the processes by which the Pacific Oyster is transformed into a capitalist commodity to meet the demands of market consumption and resistance against underwater precarity.
Jun 24 2024
In this post, Annika Hirmke explores the tensions between the abstract techno-visions of environmental design projects in Montana within the contexts of settler colonialism and structural challenges of climate change.
Jul 1 2024
In this reflection based on her fieldwork in Ghana, Joyce Koranteng-Acquah shows how farmers engage with scientific institutions to produce knowledge and technologies, addressing the complex dynamics between scientific research, community engagement and policy development.
Jun 11 2024
Organisers report back from a recent workshop that invited scholars to explore the conceptual exchanges between STS and sociology.
Jun 3 2024
In this text, Giuliana Faccioli critically revisits the supposed return of feudal relations in platform capitalism through a reading of “North by South” applied to political economy. Rather than venturing into the genealogy of the term, she argues we should look into its more recent historical origins and outcomes.
May 27 2024
In this reflection on the development of interdisciplinary environmental justice units for California high schoolers, authors Prerna Srigyan, Margaret Tebbe, and Nadine Tanio reflexively analyze the politics of knowledge in translational research involving STS scholars and STEM educators.
May 13 2024
Natalie’s current book project is a critical history of the “invasive” European starling in the US. In this piece, she describes how one twentieth-century ornithologist characterizes the bird as communist, and how this narrative bolstered ornithology and later invasion biology.
May 6 2024
In the second of a two-part Backchannels post, Amanda Domingues and Rogelio Scott-Insua interview Professor Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. They continue the conversation on narratives within the history of science that apply categories originally conceptualized in Europe and North America to understand events that transpired across the globe.
Apr 28 2024
Michaela Clark explores the UCT DoS Collection of clinical photographs, produced at South Africa’s first medical school. She submits that its photographic contents testify to connections between historical actors and institutions. Following the collection outside the settler-colonial medical archive offers insight into how clinical photography crossed scientific and lay terrains, and continues to bridge local and global space and time.