Michael Brown

"Without getting lost in speculative futures, which nonetheless require serious attention, I would like to see STS researchers critically engage with the looming eugenicism resulting from the informationalization of life, and I would like to see this connected to issues of erasure and the necropolitical powers materialized in the technologies of state power/control/neglect."

Kelly Underman

"I'm very interested in exploring the role of affect/emotion as a form of biocapital, primarily through my work on empathy and the medical profession. The scholarship on care in science is exciting, and I'd like to see more work that engages in theory-building around that question."

Kelly Joyce

"As the use of machine learning, algorithms, and big data continue to grow and impact a range of domains including city planning, child protective agencies, policing, education, and more, it will be important for STS scholars to participate in and shape these domains. There is exciting STS work in this area, and I am contributing to it, but there is so much more to do. Given the large investment in computer science, data science, and engineering research, and the deep reach automated systems will have in a variety of social arenas, addressing the social, ethical, and political dimensions of algorithms and machine learning is particularly important."

Vincent Duclos

"At a personal level, I am currently starting a research project devoted to the contested, yet severe condition of Internet addiction. This study will investigate the causes, experience, and therapeutic management of Internet addiction in India and North America. It will examine the relationship between Internet use, and broader forms of subjectivity and sociality. More broadly speaking, I am interested in debates around the effects of digital technologies on the human brain, and especially on attention. Secondly, I would like to investigate the use of algorithms and of artificial intelligence for disease surveillance. This is a topic which I have started exploring, and I hope my research will gradually expand in that direction. As far as STS scholarship is concerned, I would certainly like to see the field become less Western-centric, and take more seriously science & technology practices in/from the global South. There is some movement in that direction, but it remains very marginal."

Chloe Silverman

"We should continue to think in nuanced and challenging ways about how we can collaborate with members of the technoscientific/biomedical cultures that we study while retaining our legacy of critical engagement with the products of science/medicine/technology. I think that there are lots of ways to do this well and no obvious solution—we do not want to simply be accessories to research projects in the sciences and technology because STS research is an important form of knowledge production in its own right, but part of establishing our continued relevance and necessity means working with different partners and for different audiences (and generating different kinds of products)."

Mimi Sheller

"I think it is crucial to continue to include African, Caribbean, Latin American, Indigenous and Black critical theoretical perspectives in the field of STS, as well as feminist, queer, and critical gender perspectives. STS scholarship (and my own field of critical mobilities research) must play a central part in expanding the social science of the Anthropocene to address how humans can change our relation to the Earth. For me some of the most exciting work in this area comes out of these alternative ontologies, ‘otherwise’ knowledges, and the questions they pose of epistemic justice."