Understanding the future of technoscience and society is bound up with understanding our technoscientific pasts. It is important to learn from the history of science, technology, and innovation to find ways to develop more inclusive and sustainable technologies. This Thematic Cluster will focus on connecting technoscientific histories with their hopeful futures.
Thematic Cluster Lead: Professor Anna Agathangelou
Dr. Anna Agathangelou teaches in the areas of international relations and women and politics. Some of her areas of expertise are time and temporality in global politics, the body, time and ecology, international feminist political economy and feminist/postcolonial and decolonial thought. She is the co-director of Global Change Institute, Cyprus and was a visiting fellow in the Program of Science, Technology and Society at John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard (2014-2015). She is currently involved on two multinational SSHRC partnership research projects focusing on sexual violence and human security, global governance, and biotechnology. She has researched ethnic conflict in Cyprus, as well as reconstruction in post-conflict societies with a focus on sexual violence, displaced peoples and the missing.
Members:
Associate Member
Ori Freiman is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at McMaster University’s Digital Society Lab, where he explores the intersection of technologies, democracy, and social change. He deals with the societal aspects of implementing emerging technologies, focusing on AI policy and ethics, trust in technology, and the potential consequences of Central Bank Digital Currencies.
Ernst Hamm's work in the history of science considers several areas, including the history of the geosciences, Enlightenment and Romantic science, the interactions of the natural and human sciences.
Dr. Alison Harvey is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Communications Program at Glendon College, York University. Her research and teaching focuses on issues of inclusivity and accessibility in digital culture, with an emphasis on gender and labour in digital games. She is the author of Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context (2015, Routledge) and Feminist Media Studies (2019, Polity).
Associate Member
Dr. Hassan is Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. His research examines the relationship between race, digital technology, and technoscientific capitalism. Dr. Hassan’s work is at the intersection of social and racial justice, and technology policy focusing on the social, economic, and political implications of emerging technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and data. Dr. Hassan was a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. His most recent project investigates the sociotechnical knowledge production practices of the state, scientists, and the tech industry focusing on the development of AI and its innovation ecosystem across multiple African countries.
Graduate Member
Dayna is a PhD Candidate in the Science and Technology Studies program at York University. Her work focuses on technoscientific future narratives and their impact on our presents.
Dr. Eric Kennedy is an Associate Professor of Disaster & Emergency Management at York University, where he teaches on and researches issues related to emergency planning, preparedness, and response. He also serves as Associate Director of York University’s newly-launched Emergency Mitigation, Engagement, Response, and Governance Institute (Y-EMERGE). Dr. Kennedy’s work focuses on decision-making, science advice, policy/governance, and knowledge production in disaster and emergency contexts. He holds a PhD in the Human & Social Dimensions of Science & Technology from Arizona State University, where his dissertation examined the use of science, evidence, and data in the context of wildfire management in Canada. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Kennedy was principal investigator on a longitudinal project monitoring Canadian attitudes, experiences and adaptations, as well as led an international working group on survey research methodologies in the pandemic context. His ongoing research explores issues related to expert judgement and knowledge synthesis in the context of emergency response.
Dr. Kenton Kroker is an Associate Professor in the Health & Society Program in the Department of Social Science at York University. His research examines how professional, technological, and sociopolitical developments have transformed biomedical knowledge over the past two centuries. His current research topics include the history of epidemic encephalitis, the interactions of sleep medicine and health care policy in late twentieth-century Canadian society, the history of sleep as a scientific object, and the role of visual rhetoric in the emergence of North American public health in the 19th century.
Dr. Ganaele M. Langlois is an Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies. Ganaele's areas of research include digital technocultures, philosophy of technology, critical theory, and digital methods.
Dr. Elisha Lim (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of the Technological Humanities at York University and researches the intersection of social media platforms, theology and critical race theory. Lim is currently working on a book called Pious about how corporate algorithms drive vigilant conduct.
Dr. Bernard Lightman is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities Department at York University, and Past President of the History of Science Society. Lightman’s research focuses on the cultural history of Victorian science and transnational history of science involving Britain and China.
Graduate Member
Anthony K Nairn is a PhD student in Humanities, working at the intersection of media, science communication, and religion. He is interested in affects, aesthetics, ethics, and narrativity in science popularization. He is Executive Assistant of the International Society for Science and Religion.
Dr. sava saheli singh (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Digital Futures with the Faculty of Education, York University. As an interdisciplinary scholar and filmmaker working at the nexus of education, technology, surveillance, speculative futures, and intersectional marginality, sava has a strong commitment to community-based public scholarship and critical digital literacy. She co-produced the award-winning Screening Surveillance series of four short films, a public education and knowledge translation project that calls attention to the potential human consequences of big data surveillance.
Dr. Joan Steigerwald's scholarship, graduate supervision, and teaching explores the relationships between science and technology studies, the history of the life sciences, the history of philosophy, Romantic studies, and contemporary theory. Her work is interdisciplinary, regarding different modes of inquiry as offering critical reflection on its others, exposing their boundaries and incompletions and yet also opening each to what is unthought within it.
Dr. Kate Tilleczek is a Professor who holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Youth, Education & Global Good in the Faculty of Education at York University. She is an educator, founder (in 2009), and Director of the Young Lives Research Laboratory which employs global, intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches to collaborative research with and for young people and their communities. Professor Tilleczek’s research garners new understanding about the wellbeing of young people and how we might re-design quality education and whole-of-society supports with/by them.
Dr. Alexandra Widmer is an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department. She has held a research scholar position at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her research interests are Colonial and postcolonial science and medicine/Indigeneity and well-being/ Reproductive justice and critical studies of demography and population control/ Digital health/Precision medicine/Critical Microbiome studies/ Science in Food Cultures.