"Foucault has long been an intellectual inspiration for me, and remains one today. In fact, his lectures on biopolitics, which I first read in an undergrad philosophy course, were my introduction to some of the themes I would later come across while studying STS--a field in which many scholars are today still grappling with Foucault's ideas and seeking to articulate how the forms of knowledge and power that he so cogently describes continue to operate in shaping our social environments. And his work continues to resonate with me--both those lectures I read years ago, and the other texts that I have delved into since then. They have come to not only shape my approach to the work that I do, but my own personal philosophy as well."
"My two favorite books were Margaret Lock’s The Alzheimer Conundrum and Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome. Murphy’s concept of the “domain of imperceptibility” continues to inform my work."
"Yes – it is impossible to narrow it down to a single scholar or text. Key scholars that continue to resonate with me today Include (in no particular order) David Noble, Khiara Bridges, Joel Tarr, Langdon Winner, Lennard Davis, John Bellamy Foster, Donna Haraway, Judy Wajcman, Bruno Latour, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Donna Riley, Thomas Kuhn, Lewis Mumford, Ulrich Beck, Charles Perrow, Michel Foucault, and of course Karl Marx!"
"I remember really liking Stephen Shapin’s Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology. This piece comes to my mind because I remember having a lot of discussions with a classmate of mine (Jason Ludwig, accelerated history/STS student - 2017) about the importance of history in STS. Personally, I would always disagree with Jason about how important it was, and here it turns out one of my favorite STS pieces is all about history!"
"Drexel’s STS program is where I was first exposed to Clarke et al.’s (2003) biomedicalization theory as well as an in depth reading of the work of Michel Foucault. Both continue to resonate with me because of their analytical utility. I find these works to be generative in a wide variety of situations and so I turn to them often as a starting point to begin thinking through new research problems or data interpretations."
"My undergraduate STS experience started out very firmly in the realm of philosophy of science, which I think is valuable but not where my interests center. As a result, I think, I became particularly enamored of the first more sociological STS I encountered. Unfortunately, that was Bruno Latour’s Science in Action. While I still struggle with his style of prose, that book was the first thing that really helped physics-major-college-student me articulate the questions I was asking and the doubts I was harboring about scientific practice.
When I got to Drexel, I had the wonderful experience of rapidly opening up my understanding of more social-scientific STS. I latched on to a lot of things—Gieryn’s cultural cartographies, Galison’s work on big science, Fortun and Hilgarnter’s studies of genomic research—but, honestly, the works that have stuck with me most are some of the things that haven’t played any direct role in my research so far. In particular, Dorothy Roberts’ books Killing the Black Body and Fatal Invention are texts that I return to over and over as models of the rigorous, eloquent, relevant scholarship I want to do.
One other idea that’s stuck with me throughout my graduate career has been Adele Clarke’s situational analysis. While I certainly haven’t kept up the methodology as she laid it out, her practice for processing data has helped keep the complex relationality at the fore of my work."
"Thanks to the broad-based program I encountered a wide range of thinkers, from Latour to Haraway, Foucault to Kuhn and Veblen to Peirce. I regularly refer to all of them (though not all equally favorably) and am still reading new work based on what I learned from them."
"When I was in the program, my favorite scholar was Donna Haraway. I loved that she incorporated so much of the world, from digital landscapes to dogs, into heavy theory. Now, I'm finding Ruha Benjamin's work incredibly relevant to my current projects. I frequently return to a quote from People's Science when I think about the potential impacts of research on policy-making: "What may bring healing and longevity for some may threaten the rights and dignity of others, in part because of the historically mediated relationship different groups have with scientific experimentation and biomedicine. If we ignore this history, we are fashioning a future with in-built inequities" (p. 24). This has taught me to do research with care."
"To this day, the text that sticks out as the most influential for me personally is Paul Rabinow’s “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality”. Reading it in my Drexel Intro STS class for the first time, it blew the doors wide open for me intellectually speaking. The most influential group of scholars for me have been feminist historians/philosophers of science who have made critical contributions to the deconstructing scientific authority and objectivity at a fundamental level. Studying the work of scholars like Sandra Harding, Lorraine Daston, Helen Longino, and Sally Haslanger signalled a thought-paradigm shift for me as a young researcher asking questions about “how can science work better for all?” More recently, I have been more deeply exploring the work of Ulrich Beck and his theoretical constructs surrounding the “risk society” concept, as well as delving into work done by scholars like Scott Frickel, Daniel Kleinmann, Jenny Reardon, and David Hess which study the commercialization of science, and the intersections/entanglements between science and the regulatory state."
"I did have a favorite class. (Forgive me Dr. Kenner, but it was Tiago's class on Transnationalism). Actually, if I had continued and completed a thesis, that was the route I had planned on going down. I found it fascinating to understand how collective systems or even commodities affect societies around the globe, and the feedback loops that are in play. I believe Dr. Tiago's one project was on Oranges. I cant say that I am able to directly utilize this theory in my professional life, but I appreciate seeing and understanding our world a little differently now."