The STS Graduate Program at UBC draws on a rich set of resources at UBC, in Vancouver, and at our sister universities, Simon Fraser University and the University of Washington.
STS Colloquium Schedule (2026/27)
STS Colloquia will be held in Buchanan Tower 1112, 5:00-6:30 PM unless otherwise indicated
TERM 1 (September – December, 2025)
Thursday, September 24, 5:00 – 6:30 PM
Stephanie Dick, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
“Criminalizing Machinery”
Followed by an STS Welcome Reception at Koerner’s Pub
The New York State Identification and Intelligence System (NYSIIS), established in the mid-1960s, was the first
centralized, standardized law enforcement databank in the United States. An explicit application of Cold War-era
“systems thinking” in the context of intensifying mass incarceration, NYSIIS was meant to establish coherent
relationships between policing, prisons, and courts by standardizing and centralizing their information
gathering practices. NYSIIS developers were also early investors in several ‘artificial intelligence’ tools.
In this talk Dick will explore how, through the development and architecture of NYSIIS, “criminality” was
technologically constructed and “criminal justice” was reimagined as an information processing and
management system.
Stephanie Dick is an historian of science and technology who focuses on how mathematics, computing, and artificial
intelligence shape knowledge, labour, and power in the twentieth century. In her first book, Making Up Minds: Computing and Proof
in the Postwar United States, she explores attempts to automate mathematical intelligence in the twentieth century and the
theories of mind that informed these efforts. She also studies history of police uses of technology, especially the establishment
of the first centralized law enforcement databanks in the 1960s.
October 21: Rima Wilkes, Department of Sociology, UBC
“The Problem with Racial Comparisons: Someone Has to Be the Problem”Drawing on two recent papers, this talk examines a largely overlooked problem in how racial disparities are interpreted. Comparisons between racial groups do more than describe differences: explanatory frameworks assign meaning to the groups on either side of those differences. Cultural explanations have historically problematized groups with poorer outcomes by treating them as “deficient” or in need of improvement, while structural explanations reverse the evaluative direction, problematizing groups with better outcomes in terms of “advantage”, privilege, or domination. The difficulty and inherent problematization becomes especially apparent when comparisons expand beyond two groups. Different empirical configurations can shift which populations occupy the “deficient” or “disadvantaged” side and the “meritorious” or “advantaged” sides of a comparison, but they cannot eliminate the underlying evaluative contrast. In this sense, comparison is not simply a neutral method for observing racial disparities; it helps constitute the positions that subsequently become objects of explanation. Comparative analysis therefore confronts an inherent problem: some group(s) must occupy the position that the explanatory framework renders problematic. Much of the debate across different theories of race and ethnicity is ultimately about who that should be.Rima Wilkes is aquantitative scholar by training, her recent work examines how racial categories, comparisons, and measures shape the possible narratives about race as well as what becomes visibleor not in the empirical results. Wilkes’ research and writing span sociology and the broader scientific community, with publications in AmericanSociologicalReview, Demography, SocialProblems, PNAS, and Science.
November 19: Borna Noureddin, School of Computing and Academic Studies, BCIT
(details to Follow)
TERM 2
January 21, 2027: Gail Murphy, President and CEO of Science World, Vancouver
Professor of Computer Science and former VPRI, UBC
“The Unknowable Software Product: Essences, Accidents, and Propria of Software with AI-in-the-Loop”
Date TBD: Alexey Golubev, Associate Professor of History, University of Houston
Tentative title: “Knowledge Propaganda: Cold War Socialism as an Epistemic Project
To be co-sponsored with the Department of History
An alumnus of the UBC PhD program in History (2016), Alexey s a scholar of Russian history with a focus on social and cultural history of the twentieth century and expertise in STS, transnational history, and digital history. He was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto (2016-2017), and was a Joy Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2020-2021) where he worked on a project on science communication in socialist and post-socialist societies. His publications include Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (2020), The Barents Region: A Transnational History of Subartctic Northern Europe (co-editor, 2015), as well as “No Natural Colonization: The Early Soviet School of Historical Anticolonialism” (2023), Digitizing Archives in Russia: Epistemic Sovereignty and Its Challengegs in the Digital Age” (2021). https://www.uh.edu/class/history/faculty-and-staff/golubev_a/index.php
2026-2027 Stephen Straker Memorial Lecture
The annual STS Lecture honours Stephen Straker who was an historian of science at UBC and played a central role in founding the UBC Science and Technology Program.
February 11, 5:00-6:30: Kyle Whyte, George Willis Pack Professor, School for Environment and Sustainability; University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor; Professor of Philosophy
University of Michigan https://seas.umich.edu/research/faculty/kyle-whyte
Title TBA
Green College, Coach House, reception to follow
Lightning Talks by STS Graduate Students
April date TBA: An invitation to present will be circulated early in Term 2
