#actor network theory
Bruno Latour’s fashion can be likened to a black box. Each component of this, and every outfit, depends on a complex network of associations and factors in order to be experienced fully as the thing that it is. As it happens, this one associates to stylishness.
The scarf, dynamic in motion in this photo, is dynamic in matching bursts of colour. The red matches the spectacles, without which Latour would not be able to see his outfit in all its majesty, or the people who would acknowledge it. The gold matches his jacket’s trim. Every piece is connected, an actor, whether subject or object, in the fundamentally important networks of fashion and style that pervade everyday life.
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Below are the slides, audio, and transcripts for my talk “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture” given at the
2019 Conference for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, in early September
.
(Cite as: Williams, Damien P. “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture,” talk given at the 2019 Conference for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, September 2019)
[audio mp3=“http://www.afutureworththinkingabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/DPW4S2019-2.mp3”][/audio]
[Damien Patrick Williams]
Thank you, everybody, for being here. I’m going to stand a bit far back from this mic and project, I’m also probably going to pace a little bit. So if you can’t hear me, just let me know. This mic has ridiculouslygood pickup, so I don’t think that’ll be a problem.
So the conversation that we’re going to be having today is titled as “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture.”
I’m using the term “SFF” to stand for “science fiction and fantasy,” but we’re going to be looking at pop culture more broadly, because ultimately, though science fiction and fantasy have some of the most obvious entrees into discussions of STS and how making doing culture, society can influence technology and the history of fictional worlds can help students understand the worlds that they’re currently living in, pop Culture more generally, is going to tie into the things that students are going to care about in a way that I think is going to be kind of pertinent to what we’re going to be talking about today.
So why we are doing this: Why are we teaching it with science fiction and fantasy? Why does this matter? I’ve been teaching off and on for 13 years, I’ve been teaching philosophy, I’ve been teaching religious studies, I’ve been teaching Science, Technology and Society. And I’ve been coming to understand as I’ve gone through my teaching process that not only do I like pop culture, my students do? Because they’re people and they’re embedded in culture. So that’s kind of shocking, I guess.
But what I’ve found is that one of the things that makes students care the absolute most about the things that you’re teaching them, especially when something can be as dry as logic, or can be as perhaps nebulous or unclear at first, I say engineering cultures, is that if you give them something to latch on to something that they are already from with, they will be more interested in it. If you can show to them at the outset, “hey, you’ve already been doing this, you’ve already been thinking about this, you’ve already encountered this, they will feel less reticent to engage with it.”
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Read the rest of Audio, Transcript, and Slides from “SFF and STS: Teaching Science, Technology, and Society via Pop Culture”atA Future Worth Thinking About
