Health and STS Reading Group
Time/date:
- 10-11am, last Tues of each month (as scheduling allows)
- 27th January, 24th February, 31st March, 28th April, 26th May, 30th June, 28th July
Location:
- Seminar Room 56, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG
- Teams meeting also
Research about health in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) concerns the political, social, legal, and ethical dimensions of developments in health knowledge, technology, and policy. Examples include: how states know what pandemic response should involve, why health gets framed as a problem for markets and who benefits or loses in the process, what structures shape and are shaped by the conduct of experimental research, and, broadly, when ideas about life and its entitlements change. STS pays close attention to the cultural resources involved in the production of scientific and political authority, thereby challenging a simple “progress narrative” to illuminate how people and institutions understand, create, and intervene in the world and imagine potential alternatives.
This year, a new “Health and STS” reading group will convene out of the Schwarzman Centre as part of the Uehiro/Medical Humanities program. The group will meet once a month and hopes to bring together students and faculty across disciplines to address topics concerning the representations, ethics, and governance of health research, technologies, and interventions.
If you would like to attend, please email: utsa.bose@some.ox.ac.uk or hannah.shrader@linacre.ox.ac.uk
All chapters are available in advance here. Also see below the upcoming programme.
Programme:
Outbreaks, Planning and Preparedness
- Engelmann, L. (2018). Mapping AIDS: Visual histories of an enduring epidemic. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 3 – author will present
- Chigudu, S. (2020). The political life of an epidemic: cholera, crisis and citizenship in Zimbabwe. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1 – author will present
- Lakoff, A. (2024). Planning for the wrong pandemic: Covid-19 and the limits of expert knowledge. John Wiley & Sons. Chapter 5
Animal and Environmental Health
- Tousignant, N. (2018). Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal. Duke University Press. Chapter 5
- Lynteris, C. (2025). How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic. Hopkins Press. Chapter 6 – author will present
- Kim Fortun (2001) Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, disaster, new global orders. University of Chicago Press. Chapter 7
- Michelle Murphy (2006) Sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty: Environmental politics, technoscience, and women workers. Duke University Press. Chapter 2