Author: Robert Browder

Please join us in Athenaeum Classroom for the next STS Seminar Series talk:

Friday, February 2
1:30-3:00
Professor Jacob Lahne
Department of Food Science and Technology (VT),
“Taste Objects: Making Sensory Knowledge in Food Science.”

Snacks and conversation to begin at 1:00. Josh Earle will handle your WebEx requests.

Abstract
“Taste Objects: Making Sensory Knowledge in Food Science,” Jacob Lahne

The sensory experience of our daily sustenance, in much of the post-Enlightenment scholarly community, has not often been considered particularly important for close study. While food and drink have been the object of study of different disciplines for many reasons – their cultural significance, their nutritional capacities, their basic availability, and so on – their sensory
properties have largely been neglected, considered either irrelevant or inaccessible. It is in this void that a few strains of industrial research have developed to accomplish this task – but only for a specific purpose and audience. Sensory science and flavor chemistry, areas of food-science research, purport to document, through a variety of techniques, the intrinsic sensory properties of foods for the development and marketing of new products by the food industry. The ontological and epistemological concerns having to do with sensory experience of other disciplines have failed to impinge on these researchers; “if there is no accounting for tastes, that’s news to the accountants” (Shapin 2012:179). In the absence of interest in sensory experience from other areas, these industrial researchers have come to define how we know about alimentary sensory experience. In this talk, I examine the ways in which food-science has developed tools for rendering subjective experiences of taste as objective, portable knowledge; how these methods are contingent on the industry from which they develop and to which they largely respond; and how these tools might be reimagined as more “maximally objective” scientific methods, to adopt Sandra Harding’s terminology. As other disciplines begin to recognize the critical roles that sensory experience of food and drink play in our lives, the uncritical adoption of these sensory sciences without a deeper investigation of their disciplinary history and assumptions may have real and concerning consequences.

Athenaeum will once again host the STS Seminar Series this semester. Please join us!

Jennifer Lawrence
The Global Forum on Urban & Regional Resilience (VT)
Friday, January 26

1:30-3:00p

Abstract

Deepwater drilling, hydrofracking, and strip mining of tar sands have become routine forms of extraction. Such extreme energy development requires intensified methods, complex technologies, and precarious terrains as easily extractable carbon has become increasingly scarce (Tompt, 2013). The normalization of extreme energy processes, and their ruinous consequences, signal the age of “Tough Oil” (Klare, 2007), a term that specifies this regime of extraction. Alongside the development of these hard-to-reach fossil fuel resources, acute environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe and the Dilbit disaster have also become commonplace. The dangers of extreme energy development have recently materialized in the form of: oil train explosions and spills, pipeline leaks, earthquakes tied to fracking, and water sources contaminated with extractive waste material. But, the danger of extreme energy is not confined to explosions or leaks; there are many cascading effects for human and ecosystem health. Examining the simultaneous production of vulnerability and rhetoric of security, this talk offers insight into the contradictory logic governing extreme energy. I argue that the era of extreme energy has created new vulnerabilities that necessitate resilient subjects on a number of registers, from individual to societal. The Canadian tar sands in Alberta, as a major oil producing region, provides insight into the biopolitical realities that attend the end of easy oil, e.g. catalyzing climate change and the manifestation of tentacular socio-environmental consequences like displacement, adverse health effects, and loss of biodiversity. This presents a situation whereby the effects of extreme energy production appear predetermined and uncontestable, and requires citizens, communities, and ecosystems to be resilient.

Thursday, January 25
3:00-5:00pm
Athenaeum Classroom (Newman 124)

Remarks begin at 3:30. Speakers:

Tyler Walters, PhD
Dean, University Libraries and Professor

Sylvester A. Johnson, PhD
Assistant Vice Provost for the Humanities
Professor of Religion and Culture

Tom Ewing, PhD
Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences
Professor, Department of History

Refreshments served.

Please join us for the next STS Seminar:

Friday, December 8
1:30-3:30 p.m.
Athenaeum (Newman Library 124)

Dr. Bianca Prietl and Martin Winter
Department of Sociology
Technical University of Darmstadt

Title
“Gendered Construction of Artifacts: The Cases of Food and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).”

Abstract
This talk will deal with feminist perspectives on the social construction of artifacts – especially, food and ICT. An analytical view on how gender is inscribed into different artifacts is combined with a methodological suggestion for how to alter design in a feminist way. The bases for this presentation are in-progress projects.

Presenter Bios
Bianca Prietl has a PhD in sociology and is currently working as a post-doc at the Department of Sociology at TU Darmstadt. Her research interests are gender studies, science and technology studies, engineering studies, sociology of work and social inequality, and qualitative empirical research. In her PhD-thesis she has investigated the gendered construction of engineering in renewable energies.

Martin Winter is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology at TU Darmstadt and currently working in a research project on gender, food, and culinary culture. His interests are gender studies, science and technology studies, food studies, and sound studies.

Please contact Josh Earle (jearle@vt.edu) regarding live streaming of the presentation.

Snacks and conversation will begin at 1:00.