MIT | Program in Science, Technology, and Society

05/05/2026

Congratulations to Professor Dwai Banerjee on his new book!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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,…