Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life

On Friday, May 8, from 11:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in MCB 102, STPL will host a half-day workshop, marking the culmination of the first year of work for the collaborative research project The City on Life Support: Los Angeles as a Laboratory for Planetary Health. “Thinking in the Aftermath,” like the project itself, will bring scientists, technicians, artists, and activists into dialogue scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Oriented to themes of residue and remediation, particularly in the wake of the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires, presenters will discuss current projects and future directions for scholarship and practice. Along with a panel consisting of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, keynote speakers include Joanne Nucho, Associate Professor of Anthropology at USC; Sunny Mills, an Altadena-based visual artist; and Nicole Maccalla of Eaton Fire Residents United. Lunch will be served.

If you are interested, please RSVP by e-mail to James Bradley, Postdoctoral Researcher with STPL, at jamesb20@usc.edu.

An interdisciplinary group convened by STPL around themes of simulation and futurity recently conducted visits to USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies in Playa Vista and RAND in Santa Monica. On February 27 at ICT, the group met with a series of researchers developing new methods for the study of human psychology, artificial intelligence, terrain visualization, and their application to military contexts. One April 10 at RAND, they participated in a seminar-style conversation with researchers advancing work on Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty and Systems Transitions, drawing in researchers from RAND’s offices in Boston, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., as well as Santa Monica.

This ongoing project joins humanists and social scientists, whose work reflects critically on how simulations generate provisional knowledge about the future, with a set of practitioners of simulation. Participants represent fields including communication, sociology, anthropology, history, architecture, urban planning, and cinema, Next year, the group plans to develop research in and on sites where simulation techniques are being developed — in climate futures, biotechnology, world-building, and other domains. If you are interested in getting involved, please write to Peter Ekman, STPL’s Coordinator of Programs, at pekman@usc.edu for more information.

STPL is thrilled to announce the recipients of this year’s Graduate Research Stipends. These grants support summer research by current Ph.D. students working on topics related to science and technology studies — especially, but not only, those currently enrolled in the Graduate Certificate Program in STS. All funded students will present on their research in STPL’s annual graduate symposium, held early in the fall term. Watch this space for details on the event.

The students are:

Elaina Foley (History)
Bena Habtamu (Anthropology)
Alfonso Hegde (Communication)
Muyao Jiang (Communication)
Andrea Kim (Cinema and Media Studies)
Stella Lin (Communication)
Christina Marsh (American Studies and Ethnicity)
Bouchra Tafrata (Anthropology)
Denise Toor (Communication)
Sui Wang (Communication)
Ruohan Zhou (History)

Congratulations to all! We wish you a productive and fascinating summer of work.

The following courses, offered in Fall 2026, will satisfy requirements for students enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Science and Technology Studies. Please contact instructors for further information.

AMST 567: Body, Power, and Politics (Prof. Nayan Shah). This graduate seminar investigates theories, histories, knowledge, and representation of the body as imbricated in the nexus of power and political resistance. The course examines historical and conceptual scholarship on the relationship of bodies, techniques of power, representation, and transformation that emerged in the 18th–20th centuries though epistemologies of medical and biological sciences, anthropology and criminology, and institutions of clinics, exhibitions, prisons, concentration camps. To explore these questions, we will examine touchstone theoretical approaches to the body and power as well as scholarship on health and medicine, carceral and political struggles, queer and transgender studies, and critical race, indigenous, and colonial studies.

ANTH 608: Feminist Science and Technology Studies (Prof. Andrea Ballestero). Offers an overview of the field of Feminist Science and Technology Studies combining historical and transnational approaches with future directions.

COMM 573: Networked Publics: Theories and Encounters (Prof. Mike Ananny). Examines models of a democratic public sphere, with special focus on design and use of networked information infrastructures supporting free speech.

COMM 620: Studies in Communication Theory: Studying Infrastructure with STS (Prof. Christina Dunbar-Hester). Current problems in communication theory and research: advanced, specialized interest areas of individual faculty on the frontiers of knowledge.

COMM 658: Science Fiction as Media Theory (Prof. Hector Amaya). This class explores the ways that science fiction, sometimes known as speculative fiction, has historically functioned as a form of vernacular theory about media technologies, practices, and institutions, and as a wellspring of our sociotechnical imaginaries. As recent writings about “design fictions” illustrate, science fiction does not work in a social vacuum, independent from the sociotechnical imaginaries it explores. Science fiction has also inspired the developers and of new technologies as well as those who create content for such platforms, helping to frame our expectations about the nature of media change. And, increasingly, media theorists, raised in a culture where science fiction has been a pervasive influence, are drawing on its metaphors as they speculate about virtual worlds, cyborg feminism, posthumanism, and Afrofuturism, among a range of other topics.

STPL Director Andrew Lakoff’s most recent book, Planning for the Wrong Pandemic: Covid-19 and the Limits of Expert Knowledge, was recently released in the U.S. by Polity Press.

Peter Ekman, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture and STPL’s Coordinator of Programs, has just published his first book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America’s Postwar Urbanism, with Cornell University Press.

Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies, recently published an article in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East titled “Precarious Petroleum: Volatile Reservoirs, Varied Natural Gas Compositions, and Development in 1960s Iran.”