Cite as:
Woodruff, Maggie, and James Adams. 2018. "UCI Anthro Faculty and Alumni on STS and the Department." In UCI Anthro Faculty, edited by Maggie Woodruff, James Adams, and Nandita Badami. In STS in UCI Anthro STS, edited by James Adams and Maggie Woodruff. In STS Across Borders Digital Exhibit, edited by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August. http://stsinfrastructures.org/content/uci-anthro-faculty-sts-and-department
Through individual interviews, several UCI Anthro faculty and alumni shared with Maggie Woodruff and James Adams their thoughts on STS and the UCI Anthropology department.
This PECE essay helps to answer the STS Across Borders analytic question: “What topics have been prominent in this STS formation in different periods?”
This essay is part of a broader exhibit on UCI Anthro STS.
STS Across Borders is a special exhibit organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to showcase how the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has developed in different times, places...Read more
"To put together a training program, a masters program in STS, is collaborative … those of who are interested in science and technology often find ourselves working together, even beyond the STS frame, like Kris [Peterson] and I in how we approach our methods course. We pull from the methodological knowledge and processes of anthropologists interested in STS like Kim [Fortun] and Joe Dumit … because of the ways in which STS approaches problems of trying to think about scale, for example, and thinking about the way things move and shift locally and globally. We do this in anthropology at large, but science and technology studies has had to think about the emplacement of science, the movements of technology, and think carefully about how to develop methods to engage that particularly because we’re oftentimes dealing with elite communities who have access kinds of equipment and kinds of communication and power and scales of economy that distinguish them from other groups."
Olson, Valerie. Interview by Maggie Woodruff. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, June 12, 2018.
For more about Valerie, click here.
"I really do want to bring a water-focused publicly engaged STS practice into the department, and I’m doing more and more in that area just through this kind of locally emplaced work … I’m hoping to do that, make it something that students can get trained in in the future."
Olson, Valerie. Interview by Maggie Woodruff. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, June 12, 2018.
For more about Valerie, click here.
“Anthropology has always been characterized by a wide range of topics studied, influenced in part by the diversity of fieldsites in which anthropologists have conducted research.” STS “feels like another iteration of anthropology being very omniverous,” with field sites, topics of study, and concepts offering fresh ways to shed new light on current projects.
Boellstorff, Tom. Interview by author. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, June 12, 2018.
For more about Tom, click here.
Genealogies highlight a key STS concept: networks. But networks are not always about the institutions you came from but the networks of affinities you cultivate. “We produce confident, trained anthropologists … this includes but is not, importantly, limited to producing tenure track professors. I think STS offers a unique toolkit that helps to really strengthen the kinds of methods and skills that our graduates offer in the world. I think that we have a diverse set of students who get a diverse set of jobs, and this is a testimony to our rich collection of skills and interests in our department.”
Olson, Valerie. Interview by Maggie Woodruff. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, June 12, 2018.
For more about Valerie, click here.
In the department, there is “innovative thinking that [is] deeply embedded in these innovative projects… and I think that’s reflected in our graduate student training as well. I think this department is also actually very very grounded, and has a very deep respect for anthropological concerns … that allows us to have a longer and more expansive view of the field.”
Zhan, Mei. Interview by author. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, May 30, 2018.
For more about Mei, click here.
"STS at UCI has been a collaborative project based on the application of STS ideas, concepts, and methods to projects that are clearly ethnographic anthropological projects located in the normative subdisciplines of anthropology, so in other words I think we use STS as a resource, and we produce STS-minded and trained people but I’m not sure that we have a distinctively STS-defined program. So with Kim [Fortun] coming on board as one of the foremost, pivotal scholars in STS and anthropology, I’m excited to see where we might go with our application of STS as a theoretical and methodological framework, and as an orientation toward asking questions about science and technology but also for producing work with an intent to impact and bring some social justice to the production and use of science and technology."
Olson, Valerie. Interview by Maggie Woodruff. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, June 12, 2018.
For more about Valerie, click here.
Asked about the growing STS thread in UCI’s Anthropology department, Tom Boellstorff suggests that maybe why STS has been so strong here is because it’s possible for so many people to have it as a “subsidiary” research focus. The department allows faculty to follow their research interests; because of this freedom, Boellstorff believes faculty “were inspired by a broader interest in the discipline around engaging with questions of science and technology that was linked to thinking about modernity more broadly.”
Boellstorff, Tom. Interview by author. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, June 12, 2018.
For more about Tom, click here.
The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice could be “a useful book that could … call for very interesting conversations across anthropological subdisciplines and across interests. It’s about the relationship between the production of bodies and the production of space and I think that’s something that our department naturally does a really interesting job of working on, such as Damien Sojoyner, Mei Zhan, Tom Boellstorff, Kris Peterson. I think the co-production of embodiment and space is something that our department stands out in.”
Olson, Valerie. Interview by Maggie Woodruff. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, June 12, 2018.
For more about Valerie, click here.