In June 2021, more than 180 early-career Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars and participants congregated at this year’s Australasian STS Graduate Network Conference (henceforth AusSTS2021) to reflect on the theme of “situated practice.” The third event since the network was founded in 2017, this year’s multi-sited gathering comprised local nodes in the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne, and Darwin, …
Category Archives: Lectures
Digital Psychedelia: Hidden Experience and the Challenge of Paranoia
This article is part of the series: Tracking Digital Psy
Introduction
Over the past 15 years, several groups of researchers have sought to use clinical trials to reintroduce psychedelics to mainstream society, reporting impressive efficacy from trials at university sites such as Johns Hopkins, New York University and Imperial College London, in the treatment of clinical targets such as unipolar depression and anxiety, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) …
Mapping Algorithmic Assumptions: Reflections from a Society for Psychological Anthropology roundtable
This article is part of the series: Tracking Digital Psy
Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch als Industriepalast, 1926. Detail. Image in public domainIntroduction: surveil, classify and predict
by Alexa Hagerty and Livia Garofalo
The works distilled by the authors and the discussion offered by Professor Emily Martin presented here were originally part of a roundtable at the Society for Psychological Anthropology 2021 biannual meeting. They seek to map the algorithmic …
Surviving COVID-19
This article is part of the series: The Age of COVID-19
Survival. Perhaps the word carries more weight today than ever. We are all engaged in this exercise of collective survival. Many of us have found ourselves forced to become accustomed to the unwelcome novelty of the burden of extreme uncertainty. And it is only now that we can understand what it means to live in vulnerability. We now found ourselves …
Conference Report: Social Medicine from the South
(On behalf of the Wellcome Trust Global Social Medicine Network)
Introduction
Social Medicine from the South was a virtual two-day mini-conference consisting of two panels that took place on Friday 26 March and Monday 29 March 2021. The event was organised by the Global Social Medicine Network, a Wellcome Trust funded network of scholars from around the world …
“The Truth Is Not Known”: COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy as a Failure of Biomedicine’s Moral Legitimacy in Zambia
This article is part of the series: Contested Truths
Over the course of the last several months, a series of chilling videos have been shared across Zambian social media, purporting to link COVID-19 vaccines with a global plot to reduce the world’s population through the mass murder of Africans. Such videos are easily framed within the Western folk category of the “conspiracy theory,” and in a literal sense the …