Save the date for January 28, 2027, which will be a public lecture at Seattle’s Town Hall by Cristina Visperas, the Mary Ann and John D. Mangels Endowed Lecturer and guest of the University of Washington Graduate School. Hosted by Society + Technology at UW, the Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STSS) Graduate Certificate Program, and the Department of Communication, this cross-campus event is presented in partnership with American Ethnic Studies, Geography, STS at UW Bothell, and Legal Studies at UW Tacoma.
Additional details, including her lecture title and campus visit details, will be announced this fall.
Every year, the UW Office of Public Lectures accepts nominations for the series. In January, Visperas was nominated by Society + Technology at UW faculty leader and STSS Director Leah Ceccarelli (Communication, UW Seattle) and Director of Strategy & Operations Monika Sengul-Jones, with endorsements from Erin McElroy (Geography, UW Seattle), Linh Thuy Nguyễn (American Ethnic Studies, UW Seattle), and Ilā Ravichandran (Legal Studies, UW Tacoma), and she was selected by the Office of Public Lectures for a 2027 visit.
Visperas is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Visperas researches the cultural politics of science and medicine, with a focus on race and state/state-sanctioned violence. Drawing on her science background, she examines how the work of experts can reproduce social hierarchies and, conversely, how they can be mobilized for the ends of justice and social good. Her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU Press), is an abolitionist study of postwar medical science experiments conducted in U.S. prisons and the emergence of modern American bioethics. Her next project analyzes the complicated relationship between emotion and scientific knowledge in the context of accelerating climate and public health catastrophes. She currently serves on the editorial board of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience and is affiliated with the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life.
S+T at UW prioritizes programming that advances our mission of fostering cross-campus cross-disciplinary collaborations on the social, societial, and justice aspects of technology; nominating Visperas to visit our campus for a public lecture was suggested independently by several S+T at UW affiliates and thus helps us advance this mission.
This isn’t the first time that S+T at UW has supported an external visitor. Previously, faculty leader Ryan Calo (Law and Information, UW Seattle) and co-director of the Tech Policy Lab, along with Sengul-Jones, endorsed the nomination and supported the visit of Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown, who was hosted by Jennifer Mankoff (Computer Science, UW Seattle) and CREATE. Brown’s visit also provided the opportunity for a feminist technoscience meet-up with S+T at UW Campus Partner UW Press.
Other scholars that S+T at UW affiliates suggested nominating include cultural theorist and author Catherine Liu (suggested by Agnieszka Jeżyk, Slavic Studies, UW Seattle); Jenny Reardon, the Science and Justice Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz (suggested by Sebastian Rubiano-Galvis); Beth Coleman, Information, University of Toronto (suggested by Temi Odumosu, Information, UW Seattle); Neda Atanasoski, Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland (suggested by Erin McElroy, Geography, UW Seattle, and Nassim Parvin, Information, UW Seattle); and danah boyd, Communication, Cornell University (suggested by Ryan Calo, Law and Information, UW Seattle).