“Matter is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance….the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities” — Karen Barad 

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Run by the Biopolitics of Science Research Network, LABTALK is an interdisciplinary reading group of scholars, activists, scientists, and creatives, dedicated to critical engagements with technoscientific knowledge. During our two-hour long sessions, we will examine a range of key texts in STS scholarship – tracing out notable developments in expertise, classification, scientific methods, and institutional norms. Crucially, we will also incorporate texts that ostensibly have ‘nothing to do with’ STS but whose themes might potentially be productive or are politically urgent when it comes to the field. Through doing this, we hope to understand how social worlds are constructed through uncanny acts of transmission and mediation with the sciences, countering the fantasy of laboratory neatly separated from society as we know it. 

 

We will seek to reflect upon a range of concerns, including how science informs and influences what we deem as normative, comprehendible, even possible; how institutions and technoscientific organisations move within, and shift, the forces of the global economy; how a language of morality, theology, humanitarianism, and altruism within scientific thought makes allowances for the abuse of human and non-human bodies, as well as the continued exploitation of labour; and, finally, how we can best utilise the social sciences for the improvement of 'doing science' itself. 

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Invitation to Join: Open to all scholars and members of the public —  we particularly encourage undergraduate and HDR students to attend. During 2018, we’ll be meeting on the last Monday of each month. If you are interested in joining the mailing list, please leave us a quick email! Necessary reading material (as a PDF document) can be downloaded on the LABTALK website. 

 

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Contact: ziha2281@uni.sydney.edu.au