Welcome to the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. STPL serves as a platform for collaborative research, graduate training, and public engagement on problems at the intersection of science, technology, environment, and society.
STPL’s collaborative research projects bring together USC faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows to investigate how authorized knowledge is produced in contested settings. Its recent project, “Precarious Ecologies,” funded by the Mellon Foundation, focused on how activists and scientists collaborate to generate knowledge about environmental hazards. STPL’s current project, “The City on Life Support,” considers Los Angeles as a laboratory for the production of knowledge about planetary health.
The Center also takes an active role in training graduate students across USC’s schools. Its Graduate Certificate Program in Science and Technology Studies enables Ph.D. students to forge connections between their home departments and the interdisciplinary field of STS. Through summer research stipends and an annual graduate-student symposium, the Center provides students with a venue for conducting and sharing original research.
Finally, through its public-engagement activities, STPL seeks to foster intellectual exchange both within and beyond USC. The Center hosts public lectures, small seminars, workshops, and thematic working groups with the aim of generating insight into historical and contemporary formations of expert knowledge.
We welcome inquiries from students and potential collaborators.
Remembering Andrew Lakoff
We are heartbroken to share that Andrew Lakoff, Director of the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, passed away on July 7 after a brief illness.
Andy founded STPL in 2020 and was in every sense the central figure defining its identity, role, and agenda as a platform for interdisciplinary inquiry. His remarkable intellect and fundamental decency were apparent to everyone who came into contact with him as a colleague, student, or friend. The Departments of Anthropology and Sociology, where Andy held joint faculty appointments, join us in mourning his loss, as does USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, for which he previously served as Divisional Dean for Social Sciences.
An event in his memory will take place on campus at USC during the next academic year.
The Advisory Committee of STPL will endeavor to ensure that the Center’s work continues, guided by Andy’s expansive vision of intellectual community and animated by his searching curiosity about the world. For now, we remember a life well lived.
Mike Ananny, Juan De Lara, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Peter Ekman, Jennifer Petersen, and Peter Redfield
Recent News
Levan Book Chat with Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani, Friday, October 2
The new book by Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani, a faculty affiliate of STPL and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies, will be the topic of the next Levan Book Chat, hosted online on Friday, October 2, at 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time. Please register here.
Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran was published in April 2026 with Stanford University Press. Following the movement of natural gas from underground deposits, through infrastructures of refining and distribution, and into everyday life, Movahedi-Lankarani explores the roles of development planners, oil firms, industrialists, engineers, and consumers — as well as the mountain ranges, sedimentary rock, and natural gas itself — to show how natural gas emerged as a crucial enabler of industrialization and a strong impetus for resource nationalism. Tracing the transformation of gas from a waste product into a vital resource, this book offers a history of anticolonial developmentalism in Iran — revealing a key driver toward intensified energy use that suggests why and how societies in the Global South became voracious consumers of fossil-fuel energy.
The author will be joined in conversation by Arang Keshavarzian (NYU) and Victor Seow (Harvard). Joanne Nucho, Associate Professor of Anthropology at USC, will moderate.
James Bradley’s Dissertation Recognized by the Urban History Association
The Urban History Association has given its Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History to James Bradley, current research associate and recent postdoctoral fellow of STPL (working chiefly on “The City on Life Support” project). He completed the dissertation, “Garbage Politics: Los Angeles and the Problem of Solid-Waste Management in the Late Twentieth Century,” in the University of Chicago’s Department of History in 2025. As the UHA awards committee writes in its citation, “From the creation of public landfills in the 1950s, through the ‘garbage crisis’ of the 1980s and the current ‘thriving market’ for trash, this thesis shows how local political actors have exacerbated inter-community disputes over who has a ‘right to dispose’ and who bears the burden of unrestrained consumption. In wonderful detail and consistently nuanced analysis, Bradley unpacks the competing interests and visions among politicians, businesses, and residents of greater Los Angeles, offering powerful new inlets for thinking about ‘the urban’ at multiple scales.” Congratulations, James, on this impressive work.
Celebrating the Life and Work of Andrew Lakoff
STPL asks that you save the date for an on-campus memorial event honoring Andrew Lakoff, STPL’s founding director and Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, who passed away on July 7.
Date: Monday, October 5, 2026
Time: 2:30 PM – 4:30 PM (Light refreshments to follow)
Location: Mudd Hall of Philosophy, Room 203
Please RSVP here at your earliest convenience.
STS Graduate Research Symposium
Thanks to everyone who took part in the annual STS Graduate Research Symposium, an important pillar of STPL’s intellectual community, on Friday, September 11. The three panels — “Technologies, Cultural Production, and Labor,” and “Science, Technology, and Territory,” and “Expertise and Nation-Building” — sparked lively, critical, and collegial conversation across disciplinary lines.
We are again grateful to Dornsife College and to the Annenberg School for their support of STS summer research stipends for Ph.D. students, and we look forward to reading the remarkable dissertations that are taking shape in our midst.
Fall 2026 Courses for the STS Graduate Certificate
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.
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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.
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Offers an overview of the field of Feminist Science and Technology Studies combining historical and transnational approaches with future directions.
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Examines models of a democratic public sphere, with special focus on design and use of networked information infrastructures supporting free speech.
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Current problems in communication theory and research: advanced, specialized interest areas of individual faculty on the frontiers of knowledge.
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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.
Recent Publications from STPL Affiliates
Planning for the Wrong Pandemic: Covid-19 and the Limits of Expert Knowledge
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.
Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America’s Postwar Urbanism
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.
Precarious Petroleum: Volatile Reservoirs, Varied Natural Gas Compositions, and Development in 1960s Iran
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.”
