Meeting & Making the Built World

I am a philosopher by training, though not a philosopher of science. I came to STSS following a seminar on the social structures of science in 2022 with Professor Carole Lee. In this seminar, I found myself wondering about the public's relationship with science. We were still relatively early in the COVID pandemic, and calls to #TrustScience were ubiquitous. I came to wonder how we can reconcile such calls with the recognition that science is a distinctly human endeavor. As such, it is fallible, and is more vulnerable to social and political influences than we might think (or hope).

In the STSS microseminar, I came to think more carefully about the contingency of the built world, and of the digital infrastructures upon which the world is premised. The papers completed for my STSS coursework reflect a broadening of my conceptions of technology and of the built world. For instance, though a physical data center or even a physical device might be crucial elements of generative AI and social media, users typically interact with the product (a chatbot, a social media platform) in less tangible ways. Moreover, my work has shown how technologies have become immutable parts of our affective scaffolds. Who we are, fundamentally, as affective beings can no longer be separated it seems from the technologies through which we come to know and mediate ourselves and others. 

My interest in STSS does not end at questions about trust, though. I am also interested  in (what I see as) the underbelly of trust: alienation. As explained below, I understand alienation as the byproduct of trust misplaced, or trust gone awry. It seems especially relevant when we’re talking about interpersonal conflicts, but I think alienation can be accomplished by impersonal ‘actors’ too. This is not a kind of economic alienation like that which Marx describes, but it is more akin to what Iris Marion Young describes as marginalization.