FASoS/MUSTS Colloquium: ‘It Could Be Otherwise’

FASoS/MUSTS Colloquium: ‘It Could Be Otherwise: Jimmy Savile and the situated dynamics of concealment and revelation’

Speaker: Prof. Steve Woolgar, Linköping University/Oxford University

Date: Wednesday 10 December
Time and place: 14.00 – 15.30, Room 0.16, GG76 (C-building)

Abstract
One element of the success of STS is its capacity to apply analytic scepticism to a wide range of areas beyond science (which we used to think of as the hardest possible case) and technology. Yet STS’ radical potential has been continually compromised by successive failures of nerve and by its routinisation, appropriation and domestication. In this paper I outline some key features of provocation in STS as provided by the slogan “It Could Be Otherwise”. I consider the operation, limits, ethics and fate of radical STS arguments. And I focus in particular on the dynamics of concealment and revelation, with reference to the case of the exposure of Jimmy Savile.

Bio
Steve Woolgar is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Linköping University, and Professor of Marketing and Director of Science and Technology Studies at Oxford University. His most recent research includes an extended investigation of the ways in which ordinary objects and everyday technologies are increasingly regulating our lives (with Daniel Neyland, Mundane Governance: ontology and accountability, OUP 2013); an examination of the myriad social and organizational practices involved in scientific representation (with Mike Lynch, Catelijne Coopmans and Janet Vertesi, Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, MIT, 2014); a collection on practices of visualization in the digital age (with Annamaria Carusi, Aud Hoel and Tim Webmoor, Visualisation in the Age of Computerisation, Routledge, 2014); and a close look at the large variety of the ordinary objects and practices that make up ‘globalization’ (with Nigel Thrift and Adam Tickell, Globalization in Practice, OUP, 2014). He is currently working on the impact of the neurosciences on social sciences and the humanities, looking in particular at the rise of ‘neuromarketing’; and preparing a book length exploration of the nature and limits of provocation.
Before joining Saïd Business School in 2000, Steve was Professor of Sociology at Brunel University and the Director of the University’s Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture and Technology (CRICT). Steve is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and a Fulbright Senior Scholar award. He was awarded the JD Bernal Prize for Research Distinction in 2008, and was elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2010.

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