From wihadley at mit.edu Tue Oct 7 09:53:03 2025 From: wihadley at mit.edu (Willamina Hadley) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2025 13:53:03 +0000 Subject: [Sci-tech-public] Invitation to the Arthur Miller Lecture in Science and Ethics - "Landfill, Platform, Diagnosis: How People in Crisis Use Science and Technology to Build New Ethical Worlds" (Monday October 27) Message-ID: Dear MIT Community, The Program in Science, Technology, and Society invites you to the annual Arthur Miller Lecture in Science and Ethics on Monday, October 27th at 4:00 pm in the MIT Welcome Center, featuring Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Anthropologist and Associate Professor at Bard University, as she speaks about technological advances and the ingenuity of humankind in times of turmoil or distress. Landfill, Platform, Diagnosis: How People in Crisis Use Science and Technology to Build New Ethical Worlds Duress, or the use of force or threats to make someone do something against their will, can come in many forms. Whether it be ecocide, economic collapse, or disability, when people are under duress, their options to respond become limited. The need to survive intensifies, and people's choices seem to narrow down to solidarity or violence. Stamatopoulou-Robbin's first book on waste and its infrastructures in Palestine, as well as her current book on platform-mediated home-sharing in Greece, challenge these narratives of declining countries in crisis. They show how people respond inventively to the needs of the community and the material affordances of technology and science. They respond in ways that may not make duress go away, but can remake how it works in their lives. Science and technology are not in and of themselves solutions to the political problems that generate duress. Yet when people tinker with them, they reshape the ethical contours of their worlds in unexpected ways. This talk tells stories of old technologies (a landfill in Palestine), a newly dominant platform (Airbnb in Athens), and efforts to establish a future diagnosis in the U.S. (an autism profile called "pathological demand avoidance") to consider the unpredictable place and light of science and technology in dark times. About Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is a New York-based anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College with interests in infrastructure, waste, the environment, platform capitalism, the home, and neurodivergence. She is the author of Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). Her current book, De/tachment: Airbnb in Athens, is under contract with Duke University Press. She is beginning fieldwork on her next project on the rise of "demand avoidance" as a diagnosis and lived experience for autistic people. She has served on the editorial teams of MERIP, Cultural Anthropology, and Critical AI. More on her scholarship and films can be found here: https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com To Attend the Event Please fill out this RSVP form if you plan to attend in person. To access the lecture virtually, please use this Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91893762893 This talk is free to the MIT community and open to the public. See the attached flyer for more details. We hope to see you there! Thank you, Program in Science, Technology, and Society ******************************************************************************************** Mina Hadley | MIT (she/her) Events and Communications Assistant Program in Science, Technology, & Society 508-808-4282 MIT_STS - Facebook - Instagram - LinkedIn - X On campus: Tue Thu Remote: Mon Wed Fri -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Landfill, Platform, Diagnosis - How People in Crisis Use Science and Technology to Build New Ethical Worlds.png Type: image/png Size: 2973725 bytes Desc: Landfill, Platform, Diagnosis - How People in Crisis Use Science and Technology to Build New Ethical Worlds.png URL: