Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life

Andrea Ballestero, Professor of Anthropology, recently received a Collaborative Research grant from the National Science Foundation (co-funded by its STS and Cultural Anthropology programs) for a project titled “Retooling at the Hydro-Frontier: Devices for Resource Extraction in the 21st Century.”

In April 2024, Nayan Shah, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History, received the Phi Kappa Phi USC Faculty Recognition Award for his book Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes (University of California Press, 2022). He was also elected to the Society of American Historians. In 2024–25, he is Huntington Library Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow while at work on a new project that concerns Asian American artistic perspectives on environment and embodiment. He appears in a creative documentary, DIS-EASE (2024, dir. Mariam Ghani), a provocation to rethink how we define both the “public” and “health” in public health, which premiered at the Tate Modern in August.

We are very pleased to announce that STPL has been awarded a Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences (HHSS) Initiative Award from USC’s Office of Research and Innovation. During the 2025–26 academic year, the Center will host a series of workshops and other events developing the concept of planetary health and exploring the ways in which the urban environments of greater of Los Angeles disclose new dimensions of the problem.

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.”