STS Graduate Research Symposium

Date: Friday, September 11

Location: ANN 106

Time: 10:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Ph.D. students who received summer grant funding from STPL will share the results of their research. The daylong event will comprise four panels, each with a different USC faculty member serving as respondent. Students represent numerous disciplines and constituent schools of USC. We are grateful to Dornsife College and to the Annenberg School for their support of STS summer research stipends for Ph.D. students.

Please RSVP at this link.

The schedule is as follows:

(10:00–10:15) Opening Remarks

(10:15–11:45) Technologies, Cultural Production, and Labor — Juan De Lara

Muyao Jiang (Communication), “Precarious Circulations: Individual Resellers and the Translation of Mobile Technology in Shenzhen”

Sui Wang (Communication), “Engineering Empathy: How Socioemotional AI Reorganizes Care, Labor, and Emotional Life”

Bena Habtamu (Anthropology), “Preparing for the Future in an African Metropolis”

Alfonso Hegde (Communication), “The Auteur–Owner Figure: How Film Directors Have Been Constructed as Geniuses through Ownership over Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI)”

(11:45–12:45) Lunch

(12:45–1:50) Science, Technology, and Territory — Peter Ekman

Christina Marsh (American Studies and Ethnicity), “‘With Mind, Hand, and Hammer’: Reevaluating Legacies of Geological Extraction in the Clarence King Papers”

Andrea Kim (Cinema), “A Study on the Creative Provenance of Skid Row Artists: Designing Reciprocal Data Exchange”

Elaina Foley (History), “The Chemistry of Herbaria: Collecting and Conserving Plants in the 19th Century”

(2:00–3:30) Expertise and Nation-Building — Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani

Denise Toor (Communication), “Chokepoints in Canada’s ‘Sovereign AI’ Project”

Bouchra Tafrata (Anthropology), “Arid Modernities: Agro-Industrial Infrastructure and Hydraulic Futures in Southern Morocco”

Ruohan Zhou (History), “The 1963 Japanese Industrial Exhibition and the Origin of China’s Manufacturing Rise”

Stella Lin (Communication), “Family as Prototype and the Children of Computers”