STS Futures Lab

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This gallery exhibit showcases methods and artifacts being produced in the STS Futures Lab in the School of Integrated Sciences at James Madison University. The STS Futures Lab is a space in which faculty and a small cohort of interdisciplinary undergraduate STEM students collaborate on pedagogy and research at the intersection of science, technology, and society. Here, innovations in STS pedagogy have begun to inform a reconceptualization of STS theories and methods, and methods initially designed for the undergraduate classroom have developed into methods for conducting STS research.

Specifically, this exhibit highlights the integration of scenario analysis, design fiction, and ethical reasoning, and demonstrates how this integrated trio of approaches for engaging students in critically interrogating socio-technical futures morphed into an STS research and public engagement project on interactional expertise, anticipatory governance, and the cultivation of moral imagination. In this research project, the STS Futures Lab is engaging experts from various disciplines in collaborative scenario analysis and design fiction as a form of critical participation--and using media production, including 360 video--to document these interactions for inclusion on a YouTube channel (in development) of ‘weird detours into the future’. Meanwhile, the mode of interaction is being analyzed to examine the possibilities and constraints of play, pedagogy, and collaborative making in the development of interactional expertise, tools for anticipatory governance of emerging technologies, and multidisciplinary collaborations that produce new knowledge at the intersection of a research subject’s area of expertise, anticipatory ethics, and STS pedagogy and research.

STS Futures Lab

STS Futures Lab

Visualizing and Engaging With STS Concepts

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Philosophy of Science Diagram

This diagram illustrates the relationship between some basic concepts in the (traditional) philosophy of science.

Governance of Science and Technology Diagram

This diagram illustrates the relationship between some basic concepts in the governance of science and technology.

Philosophy of Science Card: Fleck

This is one in a series of Philosophy of Science cards that I have used in discussion activities in class to help students engage with some philosophers of science and related concepts.

Philosophy of Science Card: Kuhn

This is one in a series of Philosophy of Science cards that I have used in discussion activities in class to help students engage with some philosophers of science and related concepts.
Co-Imagining Futures: Engaging Experts Across Disciplines
STS as Critical Pedagogy
The STS Futures Lab: The Student Dimension

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Students Abroad For a Conference

This photo shows two undergraduate student members of the STS Futures Lab--Samuel Kodua and Nolan Harrington--on a ferry in Helsinki, where they co-presented with Lab co-PIs Emily York and Shannon N. Conley at the SEESHOP (Studies of Expertise and Experience) 2019 meeting.
Exposing undergraduate STEM students to STS research and to international collaboration and scholarship is one way that the STS Futures Lab helps STEM students to appreciate different forms of knowledge production and expertise. It also gives them a chance to develop research skills in the social sciences, and to develop the professional skills of conference presentation. While the expense of such trips makes it a challenge, we are striving to find more funding to enable such opportunities.

Co-Presenting With Students

Shannon N. Conley and undergraduate student Nolan Harrington co-present research-in-progress, "Negotiating Expertise, Trust, and Identity in a European Union, Catholic, Island Nation" at the SEESHOP (Studies of Expertise and Experience) 2019 meeting in Helsinki.
Inviting undergraduate (mostly STEM) students to conduct research and co-present with us is an amazing learning opportunity for our students. Here, our two undergraduate students were the only student participants at this small international workshop.

STS Futures Lab in the Classroom

In addition to undergraduate student members, the STS Futures Lab has created an ethical reasoning module for one of the required undergraduate social contexts classes in the Integrated Science and Technology B.S. program at James Madison University.
In small groups, students conduct research on a technology area. They conduct scenario analysis, and then create a design fiction based on one of the scenarios that emerged in their scenario analysis. They are asked to select a scenario and to create a design fiction that is neither utopian or dystopian. Their design fiction juxtaposes 2D and 3D elements across scales, and is supposed to help start a conversation with their peers about the social and ethical dimensions of their plausible future scenario.

Collaborative Design Fiction

Three undergraduate student members of the STS Futures Lab collaborate on a design fiction as part of the Co-Imagining Futures research project--imagining a plausible future related to the topic of information technology education and gender parity. Here, they work on a quick design fiction prototype at the end of a half-day workshop conducted with an invited expert on information technology education.
Collaborating on quick design fictions facilitates critical thinking about plausible sociotechnical futures, including discussion about what makes a particular future plausible or not, and what kinds of factors might shape it in different directions. The design fiction becomes a useful artifact to negotiate different ideas and visions of a plausible future, and to then have further conversation about it.
Here, students are participating in the Co-Imagining Futures research project. Their participation in this research is a learning experience for them, but is also critical to the research itself: they are excellent mediators between the various experts in the workshop.

Close Advising and Mentorship

The STS Futures Lab offers an opportunity for a small cohort of undergraduate students to meet regularly with faculty members / Lab co-PIs Emily York and Shannon N. Conley for advising and mentorship. Students can pursue their own interests, developing STS-inflected research projects as part of the Lab and/or in conjunction with their capstone research projects. Students who are undergraduate majors in Integrated Science and Technology (ISAT), an ABET-accredited applied science major at James Madison University, are required to complete a capstone research project.

Design Fiction Music

Who said music couldn't be part of design fiction? Two undergraduate student members of the STS Futures Lab write a song from the perspective of a student living in a plausible future in which higher education is no longer valued.

Forging an STS Student Community Within STEM

By opening the STS Futures Lab to a small cohort of undergraduate students, we seek to forge an STS student community that learns as a cohort how to engage with each other and support each other around STS-inflected projects. While students from any discipline are welcome, the STS Futures Lab is located within the College of Integrated Science and Engineering, and the majority of participants are majors in the ABET-accredited applied science major called "Integrated Science and Technology." Developing an STS community within STEM spaces is an act of critical participation that seeks to make STS ways of thinking and doing a readily accessible and self-evidently important part of doing science and engineering well.

Collaborative Scenario Analysis

Undergraduate student members of the STS Futures Lab collaborate on scenario analysis related to implementation precision medicine as part of their participation in the Co-Imagining Future research project.
Working through various social, political, economic, technological, and environmental drivers, they iterate through a number of scenario crosses that force them to think through what conditions could lead to various scenarios in the next 20-30 years.
The critical thinking that this entails is particularly developed in a small group context where different participant's assumptions and values often surface through discussion of plausible socio-technical trajectories.

Participating in Research and Interacting With Invited Experts

Undergraduate student members of the Lab who are participating in the Co-Imagining Futures research project directly interact with invited experts during the half-day workshop. Here, several students are engaging with Dr. Anne Henriksen, an expert in epigenetics and sex hormones, as they collaborate on a scenario analysis related to implementation precision medicine.

Experimenting With Virtual Reality

The STS Futures Lab is beginning to experiment with virtual and augmented reality to assess whether, to what extent, and with what implications VR and AR might be leveraged to create design fiction for undergraduate education, research purposes, and public engagement initiatives. Here, an undergraduate student member of the Lab experiments with VR.
The STS Futures Lab at the Intersection of Research and Pedagogy

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