[Sci-tech-public] REMINDER: STS Circle, September 17 - Steven Epstein (Please RSVP)

[STS]

STS Circle at Harvard
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Steven Epstein
Northwestern, Sociology

on
Sexual Health as Buzzword: Competing Stakes and Proliferating Agendas
Monday, September 17
12:15-2:00 p.m.
Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu> by 5pm Thursday, September 13.

Abstract: Sexual health is one of the great buzzwords of the early twenty-first century. The recent, exponential growth of discourses, practices, techniques, and industries that reference or profess the goal of sexual health marks a new moment in the history of engagement by health institutions with the domain of sexuality. At the same time, the convergence around the specific term masks a remarkable diversity of scientific, political, economic, and practical agendas which sometimes coexist and at other times directly compete. I seek to understand the contexts in which the term has arisen, the consequences of attempts to lay claim to it, the kinds of bodies and embodied subjectivity that are linked to its uses, and its implications for what we imagine sexuality to be.

Biography: Steven Epstein is Professor of Sociology and John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, where he has also directed the Science in Human Culture Program, and where he is a co-convener of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern. Epstein studies the “politics of knowledge”—more specifically, the contested production of expert and especially biomedical knowledge, with an emphasis on the interplay of social movements, experts, and health institutions, and with a focus on the politics of sexuality, gender, and race. His books include Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (1996), Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (2007), and the coedited volume Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine’s Simple Solutions (2010). He has also published in such journals as Social Studies of Science, Sociological Theory, Body and Society, and Sexualities. He is spending the 2012-13 academic year at Harvard with support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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