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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260413T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260413T173000
DTSTAMP:20260404T064221
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SUMMARY:2025-26 Morison Prize and Lecture with Catherine Coleman Flowers
DESCRIPTION:Join us on Monday\, April 13\, 2026\, at 4 pm in the Nexus\, Hayden Library\, for a talk led by Catherine Coleman Flowers\, an environmental and climate justice activist bringing attention to the largely invisible problem of inadequate waste and water sanitation infrastructure in rural communities in the United States. \nScience and Technology: A Collaboration for Justice\nThis lecture will explore how partnering science and technology with community engagement can mitigate environmental harms. Using storytelling and citing the space program as an example\, one will be challenged to expand the definition of profit to also include community wellbeing. \nAbout Catherine Coleman Flowers\nAs the founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice(formerly the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise)\, Flowers builds partnerships–from close neighbors\, to local elected officials and regional nonprofits\, to federal lawmakers and global organizations–in order to identify and implement solutions to the intersecting challenges of water and sanitation infrastructure\, public health\, and economic development. \nFlowers spearheaded a collaboration with tropical disease researchers focused on intestinal parasitic infections spread by way of insufficient water treatment and waste sanitation. The researchers found that hookworm–long thought to have been eliminated from the South–is in fact prevalent among the residents of Lowndes County\, prompting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to undertake a similar\, larger study across the rural American South. Flowers’s testimony to the U.S. Congress led to the introduction of legislation in 2019 to address neglected diseases of poverty in the United States. \nFlowers is broadening the scope of environmental justice to include issues specific to disenfranchised rural communities and galvanizing policy and research to redress failing infrastructure that perpetuates socioeconomic disparities in rural areas across the United States. \nIn addition to leading the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice\, Flowers sits on the Board of Directors for the Climate Reality Project\, the Natural Resources Defense Council\, the Center for Constitutional Rights\, and the American Geophysical Union\, as well as serving as a Practitioner in Residence position at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. In 2021\, her leadership and fervor in fighting for solutions to these issues led her to one of her most notable appointments yet — Vice Chair of the Biden Administration’s inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Previously\, Flowers has worked as a high school teacher in Detroit\, Michigan\, and Washington\, D.C. She has published articles in Anglican Theological Review\, Columbia Human Rights Law Review\, and American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene\, among others\, and her first book\, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret\, came out in November 2020. Flowers was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship–commonly referred to as the “Genius Grant” –in 2020. \n\nTo Attend the Lecture: \nPlease fill out this RSVP form if you plan to attend in-person\, as space is limited. To access the lecture virtually\, please use this zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94664936448 \nThis 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!
URL:https://sts-program.mit.edu/event/2025-26-morison-prize-and-lecture-with-catherine-coleman-flowers/
LOCATION:The Nexus at Hayden Library (14S-130)\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02142\, United States
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260415T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260415T180000
DTSTAMP:20260404T064221
CREATED:20260312T142339Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260401T135755Z
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SUMMARY:Deep Forensics: A Conversation on Disappearance\, Technology\, and Layered Violence in Mexico
DESCRIPTION:Join us on Wednesday\, April 15th\, from 4-6 pm in E51-095 for a special lecture with Professors Lindsay Smith and Vivette García-Deister titled “Deep Forensics: A Conversation on Disappearance\, Technology and Layered Violence in Mexico.”  \nSpeakers: \nLindsay A. Smith (Arizona State University\, ASU)\nVivette García-Deister (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México\, UNAM)\nModerated by: Eden Medina (Massachusetts Institute of Technology\, MIT) \nDeep Forensics: A Conversation on Disappearance\, Technology and Layered Violence in Mexico. \nIn Mexico\, where more than 130\,000 people are missing\, and over 72\,000 bodies remain unidentified\, extraordinary violence has become embedded in the fabric of ordinary life. In this conversation\, we bring complementary perspectives to bear on this crisis: one focused on the grassroots forensic practices of buscadora collectives —groups of family members\, predominantly women and allied scientists\, searching for their disappeared loved ones— and the other on the work of state experts\, institutions\, and practitioners deploying forensic technologies in novel and sometimes unexpected ways. \nTogether\, we explore emergent forensic practices and technologies in Mexico and how these become entangled with —and sometimes transformative of— institutional responses to ongoing violence. A key point of convergence is the question of layered\, sedimented harm and its attendant temporalities: what role can technology play in revealing forms of violence that accumulate slowly\, across time and terrain? How might emergent socio-forensic assemblages provide alternative registers to address systemic entrenched harms and project long-term just futures? \nAbout Lindsay Smith \nLindsay Smith is an Associate Professor of Science\, Technology & Innovation in the Borderlands at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society. Her work explores the power—and the limits—of scientific technologies in confronting impunity and violence during democratic transitions. Through long-term collaborations with human rights movements in Latin America\, Smith examines how communities have reimagined emergent technologies like genetics\, biometrics\, and GIS—not just as forensic instruments but as ways to craft new forms of justice that challenge conventional ideas of citizen science and state authority. She leads the STSborderlands working group\, an interdisciplinary network of scholars rethinking the entanglements of science\, technology\, colonialism\, and place across the Mexican Borderlands.  Her work has been published in Social Studies of Science\, Science\, Technology & Human Values\, and American Anthropologist\, among other journals in Anthropology\, Latin American studies\, and STS. Smith is currently completing a National Science Foundation CAREER project that investigates hybrid technologies of migration—technologies that operate at the nexus of surveillance and human rights in the U.S.-Mexico border region. \nAbout Vivette García-Deister \nVivette García Deister is a Professor in the Faculty of Science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She uses ethnographic methods\, transnational history\, and the philosophy of science-in-practice to study the relationships between science\, technology\, and society. Vivette has analyzed the developments of biomedical and forensic genetics and their impact on health\, racism\, and justice in Mexico. Currently\, she studies the treatment of ancient and contemporary human remains in forensic and historical research.  Vivette is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Tapuya: Latin American Science\, Technology and Society. She has published two books\, dozens of research and outreach articles and chapters\, and has written for Slate\, Este País\, Animal Político\, Cronopio\, and Letras Libres. \nTo Attend In-Person \nPlease fill out this RSVP form if you plan to attend\, as this event is in-person only. \nThis event is co-sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.
URL:https://sts-program.mit.edu/event/deep-forensics-a-conversation-on-disappearance-technology-and-layered-violence-in-mexico/
LOCATION:E51-095
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260423T163000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260423T180000
DTSTAMP:20260404T064221
CREATED:20260305T194922Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260305T194952Z
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SUMMARY:KSJ + STS Spring Lecture - Confronting Race in Science\, Medicine\, and Journalism
DESCRIPTION:Join the Knight Science Journalism program and the program in Science\, Technology\, and Society on Thursday\, April 23rd at 4:30 pm in the Nexus at Hayden Library (14S-130) for a thoughtful discussion on the history of race in the fields of science\, medicine\, and journalism\, and its implications for the future. \nFeaturing \nOliver Rollins\, Professor\, MIT STS \nDavid S. Jones\, Professor of the Culture of Medicine at Harvard University \nUsha Lee McFarling\, Director of KSJ \nTime \nLecture: 4:30 – 5:45 pm \nReception to Follow \nTo Attend In-Person \nPlease fill out this RSVP form if you plan to attend \nThis event is in-person only
URL:https://sts-program.mit.edu/event/ksj-sts-spring-lecture-confronting-race-in-science-medicine-and-journalism/
LOCATION:The Nexus at Hayden Library (14S-130)\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02142\, United States
CATEGORIES:Special Event
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260504T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260504T173000
DTSTAMP:20260404T064221
CREATED:20260112T163547Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260112T163547Z
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SUMMARY:Presentation - Hunting microbes: Histories of Mining Bio-Remediation in the Phenol Swamps of Estonia
DESCRIPTION:A massive fire in the Estonia Mine in 1988 kicked off a series of events that are hard to track nearly fifty years later. A team of microbiologists\, historians\, and geographers came together to figure out how Soviet Estonian scientists treated the toxic spill of phenol from the mine with human-engineered microbes. This is the only known release of GMO bacteria in a natural environment in the world. Few people in Estonia are willing to talk about the event. Archives are limited\, and most are inaccessible. Microbes\, however\, helped us piece together the story. \n\nDate: Monday\, May 4th\, 2026\nTime: 4 pm\nLocation: TBD\nPresenters: Kate Brown (MIT)\, Yonatan Chemla (MIT)\, Victoria Chen (MIT)\, Danhue Kim (MIT)\, Aro Velmet (UCLA)\, Linda Kaljundi (Tallinn Arts Academy)\, Anu Printsman (University of Tallinn)\, and Anna Helena Liiv (University of Tallinn)
URL:https://sts-program.mit.edu/event/presentation-hunting-microbes-histories-of-mining-bio-remediation-in-the-phenol-swamps-of-estonia/
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