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<b>Please join us at MIT on Monday, April 6th:<br><br>
<div align="center"><u>STS Colloquium<br><br>
</u><font size=4 color="#0000FF">Future Imperfect: Sociotechnical
Imaginaries and Cultures of Public Policy<br>
</b> <br>
</font><font size=4><b>Sheila Jasanoff<br>
</font>John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University<br><br>
4:00 pm, MIT, E51-095*<br>
</b><font size=4 color="#0000FF"> <br>
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<u>Abstract<br>
</u>For more than half a century, governments have channeled a fraction
of their public spending toward the development of science and technology
for peaceful purposes. Underlying those expenditures is a faith in
innovation and its capacity to advance national interests. The
discrepant cross-national uptake and trajectories of “the same”
technologies suggests, however, that the links between technology’s
potential and conceptions of the public good differ among political
cultures. In this talk, I will develop the idea of national
sociotechnical imaginaries and show how they operate to create different
logics of possibility for national investments. Using examples from
the US, Europe, and beyond, I will show how imaginations are conditioned
by different founding notions of state-society relations, the publics to
be served, and the futures that are considered desirable. I will
reflect on US imaginaries as played out in President Obama’s early policy
pronouncements. <br><br>
<u>Bio</u> <br>
Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology
Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. She has held academic positions at
Cornell, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, and Kyoto. At Cornell, she founded and
chaired the Department of Science and Technology Studies. She has been
Karl Deutsch Guest Professor at the Science Center Berlin and Fellow at
the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. She has authored more than
100 publications on the role of science and technology in the law,
politics, and public policy of modern democracies, with particular focus
on the regulation of biotechnology and the environment in the US, Europe,
and India. Her books include <i>Controlling Chemicals </i>(1985), <i>The
Fifth Branch</i> (1990), <i>Science at the Bar</i> (1995), and <i>Designs
on Nature</i> (2005). Jasanoff has served on the Board of Directors of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as President
of the Society for Social Studies of Science. She holds AB, JD, and
PhD degrees from Harvard, an honorary doctorate from the University of
Twente, and an <i>Ehrenkreuz</i> from the Government of Austria.<br><br>
<br>
*To view this building's location on the MIT campus:
<a href="http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?zoom=level2&centerx=712138&centery=496004&oldzoom=level3&map.x=320&map.y=192" eudora="autourl">
http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?zoom=level2&centerx=712138&centery=496004&oldzoom=level3&map.x=320&map.y=192<br>
</a><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
Debbie Meinbresse<br>
STS Program, MIT<br>
617-452-2390<br>
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