On March 13-14, 2025, we are hosting a 25th Anniversary Conference featuring presentations from graduate student alumni and former and current UM STS faculty members. We envision this as an academic family reunion—a chance to share a meal with old friends, meet new colleagues, reflect on past accomplishments, and discover what’s new in the ever-expanding world of U-M STS.
Thursday, March 13, Rackham Assembly Hall
5:30 pm: Keynote, Gabrielle Hecht, Stanford University: “Inside-Out Earth”
New energy systems accumulate on top of old ones. So do their wastes. Today, massive increases in discarded matter remain invisible in scenarios outlining how "renewable” sources will “replace" fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the world currently consumes more fossil fuels—and generates more waste products—than ever before. Wood alone supplies more energy than nuclear power plants or than the combination of hydroelectric dams, and solar and wind power.
How do communities live and breathe at the front lines of these dynamics in times of transition? What could it mean—what should it mean—to respond to our planetary crisis in ways that respect and incorporate local environmental justice priorities? This talk explores such questions, and the ongoing accumulation of wastes from energy, in three parts of the world: Abidjan, the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire; Mpumalanga province, South Africa; and Chile’s Atacama Desert.
Followed by catered dinner for guests who RSVP
Friday, March 14, 1014 Tisch, 8:15-6 pm
8:15-8:35 am: Light Breakfast
8:35-8:45 am: Welcome
8:45-10:30 am: Orders of Extraction
We use the concept of "orders of extraction" to signal both the epistemological claims and material practices that enable different regimes of extraction to operate across time and space. Drawing on a variety of methodological approaches, including the creative arts, our papers center on questions of ecology, subjectivity, post-colonial political economies, and extra-human natures. We are interested in the unexpected convivialities—between environmental protection and mining in Senegal (d’Avignon), lead poisoning and divination in Morocco (Williford), debt and El Nino oscillations in Kenya (Park), and commodity-producing extractive labor and meaningful life in Madagascar (Klein)—composing historic and contemporary orders of extraction. How, we ask, do these histories and processes deepen our understanding of the uneven efflorescence of ecological crisis in the present?
Robyn d'Avignon, New York University: "The Offset, A History: Mining as Conservation in West Africa"
Daniel Williford, University of Wisconsin, Madison: "Protection, Exposure, Divination: ‘Making’ Lead Manifest in Morocco"
Emma Park, New School for Social Research: “Of Rinderpest, Famine, Smallpox, and Debt: The Railroad and the Structure of the Conjuncture in 19th Century Eastern Africa”
Brian Klein, UMich: "Enskilment Underground: Artisanal Mining, Meaningful Work, and Frontier Capitalism in Madagascar"
Chair: Yousif Hassan, UMich
10:45-12:00 pm: Centering the Marginalized in Medical STS
This panel explores how particular bodies are made legible, controllable, and classifiable, drawing together cases from ancient Rome to modern medical labs to incarceration camps. The authors investigate the production of the boundary dividing the normal from the pathological and center the experiences and labor of non-elite subjects. The panel reflects on the challenges and potential of centering the marginalized in STS scholarship.
Alex Stern, University of California, Los Angeles: “STS Research and Reparations for Eugenic Harms: Stories from the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab (SSJL)”
Megh Marathe, Michigan State University: “Expedient Classification: Making Seizure at Home and in the EEG Lab”
Anna Bonnell Freidin, UMich: “Foodwork and Reproductive Control in the Roman Empire”
Chair: Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, UMich
12:00-1:15 pm: Lunch
1:15-2:30 pm: Engaged STS and Environmental Crisis
In this session, we explore the multiple and situated meanings of being an engaged STS scholar. Using diverse research topics (wildlife-livestock interactions in African protected areas, urban public health and social justice activism, mining capitalism, and the history of acid rain and climate litigation) scholars will discuss how their work intersects with policy and the intricacies associated with advocating for policy outcomes that affect vulnerable people and communities.
Nick Caverly, University of Massachusetts, Amherst: “Some Technopolitics of Whiteness as Property in Renewable Energy Transitions”
Rachel Rothschild, UMich: “A Historian of Environmental Science Goes to Court”
Bilal Butt, UMich: “When Animals Don’t Cooperate with Scientists: Dissecting People-Environment-Policy Relationships in Dryland East Africa”
Chair: Stuart Kirsch, UMich
2:45-4:30 pm: The Ambivalent Politics of Ambiguous Data
Data-making is a key means through which experts build their credibility, stake policy claims, and construct and contest political and social worlds. Examining data projects from sociogenomics, international conflict, and climate change, this panel reveals that the ways that experts produce, interact with, and dispute data create new political arrangements—for better and for worse.
Paul Edwards, Stanford University: “Is Climate Change an Existential Risk?”
Dan Hirschman, Cornell: “The Costs of Climate Change”
Emily Merchant, University of California, Davis: “Reinscribing Race in the Human Genome
Joy Rohde, UMich: “The Promise and Limits of Experiential Political Data”
Chair: Elizabeth Popp Berman, UMich
4:45-6:00: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of U-M STS: Concluding Roundtable
This event is made possible by the generous support of the School of Information, the English Language and Literature Department, the History Department, the Communications Department, the Digital Studies Institute, the Anthropology Department, the Sociology Department, the Eisenberg Institute, the Anthro-History Department, the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing, the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program, the African Studies Center, the LSA Research Office, the LSA Humanities Institute, and the RCI Block Grants for Arts and Humanities.
