The STS Program was founded at MIT in 1976 to address this unprecedented and momentous integration of science, technology, and society. degrees.
The primary activity of the STS program is research, which takes many forms: individual faculty members pursuing intellectual inquiry, teaching in our graduate program, organizing and hosting conferences, colloquia, and other types of publications. Faculty and students in the Program address two basic, interrelated questions: how did science and technology evolve as human activities, and what role
05/05/2026
Congratulations to Professor Dwai Banerjee on his new book!
The tech revolution that wasn’t MIT Assistant Professor Dwai Banerjee’s new book, “Computing in the Age of Decolonization,” looks at the historical trajectory of the computing industry in India.
05/05/2025
http://disq.us/t/4u23onp
Professor David Kaiser has published an article in Physics Today in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Quantum Mechanics.
Hippies, Bell tests, and a career studying quantum entanglement Investigating a group of maverick physicists who studied the foundations of quantum mechanics in the 1970s led one physicist-historian to help create a new test of entanglement.
05/05/2025
https://dana.org/article/how-neuroscience-is-shaping-justice/
What happens when brain science enters the courtroom? And how do we make sense of new technologies that claim to detect, or even predict, criminal intent or mental state? In a recent conversation for NeuroSociety Stories, sociologist and MIT professor Oliver Rollins sheds light on how scientific discoveries are not only reshaping legal thinking, but also challenging how we define concepts like culpability, responsibility, and rehabilitation.
How Neuroscience is Shaping Justice Sociologist and MIT professor Oliver Rollins sheds light on how scientific discoveries are reshaping legal thinking.
04/16/2025
Professor Robin Scheffler is featured in MIT News! MIT historian Robin Scheffler’s research shows how local regulations helped create certainty and safety principles that enabled an industry’s massive growth.
Beneath the biotech boom MIT historian Robin Scheffler’s research shows how local regulations helped create certainty and safety principles that enabled the biotech industry’s massive growth.
01/29/2024
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra to discuss Market/Making at 2/5 at 4pm in Nexus, 14-130. To Market, to market!
11/30/2023
Dec. 5, 2023 A panel to discuss Paradigm Shift in Infectious Diseases. Held in Building 14S-130, Nexus Room. Registration is recommended! See QR code below.
11/30/2023
02/08/2023
Reminder! Please join us for the very first speaker series with Alyssa Parades. This coming Monday at 4 pm.
02/02/2023
Announcing the 2023 Spring Speaker Series!! STS is excited to have
our first speaker, Alyssa Paredes join us On Monday, February 13th. Save the date.
05/19/2022
Jennifer L. Mnookin, MIT HASTS '99, new chancellor of University of Wisconsin, Madison
Dr. Jennifer L. Mnookin named new chancellor of UW-Madison MADISON, Wis.—Dr. Jennifer L. Mnookin, Dean of the School of Law and Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been named the [...]
05/10/2022
“Making Quantification in the Age and Wake of Slavery”, by Hampton Smith, Architecture
MIT’s STS Program is pleased to announce it has awarded the 2021-22 Benjamin Siegel Writing Prize to Hampton Smith, for the essay “Making Quantification in the Age and Wake of Slavery.” Hampton is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Architecture. This year’s selection committee is composed of Chakanetsa Mavhunga and Sherry Turkle.
The goal of Hampton’s essay is to look at the experience of blackness through a new lens, one that does not satisfy itself with narration, but looks at materials that can be made to reveal previously unread quantification, for example, basketry. The essay shares its personal roots: “I grew up going to Charleston, South Carolina on vacation . . . I would always make it a point to watch local basket makers. I suppose those experiences are what lead me to this project.”
The essay’s argument begins with the violent archival materials related to the history of slave trading—ledgers, bills of landing, and other accounting instruments with which traders monitored and measured their investments. Then, it repositions black people (women in this case) as co-producers of quantification, [and] going beyond the ship ledgers or accountant manuals “to develop a historical counter-archive, … to read for black knowledges of quantification in an altogether different archive of slavery.” It is then that the essay turns to basketry as an example of such an archive, along with W. E. B. Dubois’s graphic visualizations, the one typically unrecognizable as a form of quantification, the other a banal one (i.e. data visualizations).
The virtues of this work are many: It opens a new research direction on studies of quantification, the transatlantic trade in Africans as slaves, and the plantation experience, by centralizing the quantified as quantifiers in their own right. Second, rather than relying on the slave master and seller’s written archive, Hampton classifies as text that STS scholarships traditionally reads as artifacts rather than writing. Third, it joins the literature that troubles definitions of the scientific and the technological in new global conversations.
-Chakanetsa Mavhunga and Sherry Turkle
Benjamin Siegel Writing Prize - MIT STS Each year MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society offers the Benjamin Siegel Writing Prize to the MIT student submitting the best written work (under 50 pages) on issues in science,…