Notes from St. John in Irmamaria's Wake: Rethinking Critical, Applied STS

• In Event: Spitballing STS: Millenial Tactics

Abstract

I discuss my time as a "consulting anthropologist" with an MIT scientific lab, describing how I both worked WITH scientists to help them interpret qualitative surveys on attitudes towards genetic engineering in St. John, USVI - and worked ON them to understand their own interpretations of "responsive science." In the process, I grapple with the fraught balance between critique and collaboration: how can we work to deploy an applied approach to STS that might deconstruct the institutional and exclusionary borders of scientific knowledge production, and in turn make science and technology accountable to critique? Such a project points to the roles STS scholars might take in collaborating with/critiquing scientists and technologists in generating more just and responsive relations between academia, science, and society. Ultimately, then, I argue for a more nuanced focus on “critically applied” STS, one that can simultaneously empower students to question the means and ends of STS scholarship as well as grapple with emergent changes in scientific moves towards responsiveness and reflexivity.

Author

• Gabrielle Robbins, MIT HASTS