What did you like best about the program and why?
What I really liked with the Summer School is the possibility of meeting people coming from all around the world and who are also passionate about STS. It has helped me to understand who I really was in that big STS family by learning other ways of doing STS in different countries through specific concepts, methodologies or topics.
Antoine, 2022 Participant
Instructors and faculty really cared about interacting with students. Many senior scholars were present throughout the entire week and took students’ ideas and thoughts very seriously. Everyone was easy to approach and status differences were leveled to an extent I had not imagined to be possible before coming here.
2022 Participant
I really appreciated the effort to make the summer school as interactive as possible – both during the scheduled events and through the slack platform. I also appreciated the diversity in the summer school portfolio: lectures, discussions, roundtables and enough opportunities to interact with the staff.
Dafne, 2021 Participant
The variety of speakers and topics kept things continually interesting! I liked how the various sessions explicitly linked things back to STS concepts and made it easy to understand.
Jonathan, 2019 Participant
I enjoyed most the breadth of topics, approaches and political sensibilities explored during the case-study and invited lecturers’ panel sessions – I benefitted most from the certificate program skill-development sessions, particularly the abstract writing session.
Melina, 2021 Participant
I appreciate the debates, diversity in themes presenting the applicability of STS theories and concepts. However I believe that the best part was to see how much love has gone into the organization of this week. The care in the selection of topics, to the detailed information before the week and during.
Salah, 2022 Participant
What is the most important thing you learned about expertise, trust and democracy?
I have learned that my research topic was much closer than I had thought to the expertise-democracy relationship, and I would be able to contribute to making policy and society more democratic. I am actually reframing my research based on what I learned throughout the case studies as well as theoretical discussions.
Jongheon, 2021 Participant
We have to ask better questions in order to understand the current regimes of truth: but not in binary terms of true-false, expert-lay, scientists-citizens…I think we have to focus in the birth of new varieties of experts, new ways of assessing facts, new ways of defining risks.
Mariana, 2019 Participant
I don’t just want to think about who are the experts, how did they become to be experts, and why should we be trusting them. While important questions, I want to be thinking more critically, using themes from the STS lexicon, to be able to comment on how particular relationships of trust and expertise come to be realized.
Paul, 2022 Participant
[I learned that] expertise, trust and democracy are interlinked much more deeply than I tend to treat them in my own work. It was important for me to deepen my analytical and critical understanding of the complex relationships between them.
Lucy, 2019 Participant
STS can be crucial in understanding modern democracies.
Tadeusz, 2022 Participant
I learned from other participants’ and speakers’ work about the multiple uses of the STS theory to explore diverse historical and contemporary issues. By listening to experts from different fields and backgrounds, I found an enormous potential of STS as a lens to examine future research questions.
Margarita Maria, 2022 Participant
Funding
The STS Summer School is jointly hosted by the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School and the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard Kennedy School, with the generous support of the Hewlett Foundation.
Contact
STS Summer School @ Harvard
Program on Science, Technology and Society
79 John F. Kennedy Street
Cambridge MA, 02138
sts.harvardsummer@gmail.com
1-617-496-0807
