News & Events

The Institute for Technoscience & Society will be co-hosting a book talk with the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies. See details below.

IRDL Speaker Series: Book Talk with Professor Fenwick McKelvey 

September 28, 2:30-4:00 

Co-hosted with the Institute for Technoscience and Society 

On Zoom: Register here.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. 

For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers, Professor Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet.

Drawing on novel archival and historical research, McKelvey recounts the history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections, voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes. 

Contact itscoord@yorku.ca if you have any questions.

The Institute for Technoscience & Society will be hosting its first event in collaboration with Ganale Langlois one of our Fellows  on October 5, 2026 at 519 Kaneff Tower from 2:30pm - 5:30pm. See details below and save the date.

Maya Hey will be talking about her new book Singing with Invisible Worlds.
Within us and around us, microbes are everywhere, constantly reshaping what it means to be human as we interact with them — least of which through foods made and consumed. Singing with Invisible Worlds theorizes human–microbe relationships through a rare ethnographic account of the fermentation process at the 350-year-old Terada Honke, one of only two natural sake breweries in Japan. Painting a vivid picture of how sake brewers collaborate with bacteria, molds, and yeasts, Dr. Maya Hey reveals that ambient microbes are not controlled but courted, cultivated, and deliberately choreographed. In documenting these remarkable practices, the book offers an intimate, situated understanding of how we can come to know and live with microbial life, with implications for feminist theory, science and technology studies, and multispecies ethnography. Unsettling simplistic notions of “good” or “bad” microbes, it presents a compelling vision for planetary coexistence—one that starts not with grand solutions but with small, rhythmic acts of microscopic attunement.

Maya Hey is a postdoctoral researcher at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory based in Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology and a core member of the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes in Helsinki. She holds degrees in nutrition, food studies, and communication studies.

Contact itscoord@yorku.ca if you have any questions.