Save the Date! STSS Graduate Presentations and Reception May 14, 2026 at 5:00 PM

Thursday, May 14, 2026 | 5:00–7:00 PM
Location TBD

Join us for the annual Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STSS) Graduate Presentations and Reception, celebrating the work of this year’s graduating certificate students: Dan Tibbles, Cameron Musard, Rin Huang, Rachael Diamond, and Erica Bigelow.

The STSS Graduate Certificate Program at the UW introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society through coursework, mentorship, and independent research. Through their studies, they develop specialized portfolios that reflect their intellectual interests and contributions, this capstone experience is an opportunity to hear from students about their research and to engage with our STSS faculty and affiliates community, and celebrate the culmination of their work and our year together. A reception will follow the presentations.

Student Presenters

Dan Tibbles
Bioethics and Humanities

Advisor: Sara Goering (Philosophy)
Presentation: Zooming Out

Dan Tibbles is a graduate student in Bioethics & Humanities, Genetic Epidemiology, and Education, Equity, & Society at the University of Washington. His work sits at the intersection of bioethics, public health genetics, and science and technology studies, focusing on how institutional incentives, interpretive practices, and data infrastructures shape what biotechnologies become clinically available, how they are communicated, and whom they serve. Prior to academia, he spent two decades in the tabletop game industry as a designer, manager, and business owner, a background that informs his systems-oriented approach to ethics, infrastructure, and human choice.

Rachael Diamond
Communication

Advisor: Carole Lee (Philosophy)
Presentation: Science/Society Communication in a Warming World

Rachael Diamond is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Communication whose master’s thesis research examines climate science communication and the rhetoric of environmental activists. After earning her MA, she will start her PhD in philosophy at Northwestern University in the fall. Before coming to UW, she was a political organizer advocating for pro-climate policies and candidates, and studied philosophy at Scripps College.

Erica Bigelow
Philosophy

Advisor: Amanda Friz (Communication)
Presentation: Meeting and Making the Tech-Built World

Erica Bigelow is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy whose dissertation studies the nature and extent of our moral obligations toward others’ emotions. She is a scholar of critical disability studies and is particularly interested in how online discourse shapes and interprets such obligations, and in rethinking feminist moral theories to meet the present moment.

Cameron Musard
Urban Design and Planning

Advisor: Daniela Rosner (Human Centered Design & Engineering)
Presentation: New-Wave Old-School Urban Planning (Retro-Planning): A Master Builder Imaginary

Cameron Musard is a second-year Master of Urban Planning student within the College of Built Environments, whose STSS portfolio explores the role of craft and making in the production and authorization of knowledge within built environment schools. He is a scholar of pragmatist/linguistic philosophy. His research interests include classical sociological topics such as analytical comparison between “traditional” and “modern” societies; and in philosophy of science, analytical comparison between naturalism and positivist epistemic venues.

Rin Huang
Cinema and Media Studies

Advisor: David Ribes (Human Centered Design & Engineering)
Presentation: Media, Modernization, Mobility

Rin Huang is a graduate student in Cinema and Media Studies, focusing on transportation and its media representations. They wonder how technologies, especially those related with aviation and aeromobility, create a dispersed imagination of globalization and modernization since 1920s.

Advisors

Sara Goering
Philosophy (UW Seattle)

Sara Goering is Professor of Philosophy and the Program on Ethics, and has affiliations with the Department of Bioethics and Humanities, and the Disability Studies Program. In addition, she currently leads the ethics thrust at the UW Center for Neurotechnology. She teaches courses in bioethics, ethics, philosophy of disability, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of medicine. She also spends time discussing philosophy with children in the Seattle public schools, through her role as the Program Director for the UW Center for Philosophy of Children.

Carole J. Lee
Philosophy (UW Seattle)

Carole J. Lee is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Washington, an Adjunct Professor at the Information School (iSchool), and Affiliate Faculty at the Center for an Informed Public, Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, eScience Institute, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, and the Society + Technology Program. She studies the social structure of science from both normative and descriptive perspectives.

Amanda Friz
Communication (UW Seattle)

Dr. Friz is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine in the Department of Communication and an Associate Director of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity and its Heal Equity Action Lab. She is currently writing her first book, A New Materialist Critique for a Radical Politics of Pleasure, which proposes shifting the locus of feminist pleasure activism from liberal subjectivity toward a radically inclusive plurality as the basis for more equitable sexual relationships.

Daniela Rosner
Human Centered Design & Engineering, DXARTS (UW Seattle)

Daniela Rosner is Professor of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXArts) and Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington, where she serves as Associate Chair of External Affairs. She holds adjunct appointments in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) and the Allen School for Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). She also serves as an associate member of the Einstein Center for Digital Futures in Berlin, Germany.

David Ribes
Human Centered Design & Engineering (UW Seattle)

David Ribes is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Dr. Ribes’s research focuses on the sociotechnical facets of eScience and how research infrastructures can support scientific investigations across changes in technology, policy and social organization.

GIX Master’s Course Features Society + Technology at UW Affiliates Lecture Series

The 2025 cohort of students in the Society + Technology at UW course for the Global Innovation Exchange. Photo credit: Justin Horne

Society + Technology at UW is pleased to announce a renewed partnership with the University of Washington’s Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) for 2026. This is the second year of collaboration that brings affiliated scholars from across the UW community into a lecture series for the Master of Science in Technology Innovation (MSTI) program for the course, The History and Future of Technology: Responsible Innovation.

Led by Monika Sengul-Jones, Ph.D., the course draws on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and guest lectures from Society + Technology at UW affiliates to guide students in understanding technology as a socio-technical process shaped by—and shaping—structures of power.

Guest Speakers

(Alphabetical Order)

Jessica L. Beyer

Topic: Information Sharing and Cybersecurity
Jessica L. Beyer is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at UW Seattle and a leader of the school’s Cybersecurity Initiative. Her award-winning research examines international technology politics, online communities, and dis/misinformation, including projects on COVID-19 information flows and Internet of Things security. She is an expert in the politics of cybersecurity and mentors student research across multiple programs. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the UW Population Health Initiative. Jessica is the author of Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Alex Bolton

Topic: Tech Policy
Alex Bolton is Executive Director of the Tech Policy Lab at UW Seattle and a 2025-26 Non-Resident Research Fellow with the Siegel Family Endowment. The Tech Policy Lab is an interdisciplinary collaboration crossing the School of Law, the Information School, and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Alex leads the strategy and programming, convenes campus-wide discussions on technology policy, and co-teaches courses on technology law, policy, and ethics. He is also a founding member of the Public Tech Leadership Collaborative Steering Committee, a program of Data & Society. Alex previously worked in state government and higher education, including for former Washington Governor and U.S. Senator Daniel J. Evans. He holds a J.D., M.P.A., and B.A. from the University of Washington.

Agnieszka Jeżyk

Topic: Tech Anxiety
Agnieszka Jeżyk is the Maria Kott Endowed Assistant Professor of Polish Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UW Seattle. Her research focuses on marginal subjectivities, avant-garde literature, and representations of technology in Central and Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on psychoanalysis, horror, and material culture in the Cold War period. She has held academic positions at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Toronto. Her work connects literary and cultural analysis to broader questions about technology, affect, and modernity.

Beth Kolko

Topic: Responsible and Creative Innovation
Beth Kolko is a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at UW Seattle. Her work focuses on human-centered entrepreneurship and the role of design in shaping more equitable forms of innovation. She leads initiatives such as REgroup, which brings together students, founders, and investors to rethink entrepreneurship, and previously directed labs focused on digital inclusion and technology design. Kolko is also co-founder and former CEO of Shift Labs, a company developing low-cost medical devices for emerging markets. Her career crosses academia, industry, and global consulting, with experience at Microsoft Research, the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, and organizations in multiple countries.

Giveaway winners announced for S+T at UW survey

The results are in! The Society + Technology at UW initiative review survey reached a 59% response rate! Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond. A summary report will be shared soon and every response was read.

As promised, when we reached over 50% participation rate, all members of the Society + Technology at UW listserv were entered into a random drawing for two books: The AI Con by Emily Bender (Linguistics, UW Seattle) and Alex Hanna, and Law or Technology: A Methodological Approach by Ryan Calo (Law and Information, UW Seattle).

Well, drumroll, please, the lucky winners are:

Annuska Zolyomi (Computing and Software Systems, UW Bothell)

Annuska Zolyomi is an assistant professor in the School of STEM in the Department of Computing and Software Systems at UW Bothell, where she brings an inclusive lens to human-computer interaction and software engineering pedagogy. She teaches courses on usability, accessibility, and co-design, and her research focuses on the experiences of users who identify as blind or low-vision, neurodivergent, autistic, and more. Read her work to discover why in 2016, users gave up on Twitter before it became X (clue: it wasn’t to signal disagreement with the online politics, but something else entirely). Learn more here: https://faculty.washington.edu/annuska/

Martin Saveski (Information, UW Seattle)

Martin Saveski is an assistant professor in the Information School at UW Seattle. His work develops tools for analyzing large-scale social data to better understand online social structures and behaviors, while also shaping the design of digital systems. One of his papers that I’ve read explores how social media platforms reward certain human values—personal agency, stimulation—and then proposes how it might be redesigned to support other values. Who decides on which values are important? And how can such values be known and changed? You can read more here: https://faculty.washington.edu/msaveski/

Annuska and Martin, please get in touch to claim your books!

Not on the Society + Technology at UW mailing list? Join here!

Society + Technology at UW reflection survey open until March 2, 2026 — Tell us what you think!

Students, faculty, and S+T at UW community members are invited take a reflection survey, open through March 2, 2026, and share what you value about Society + Technology at UW to date. As we plan for 2026 and onward, we’d like to hear from you about the themes and topics, programming logistics, and the people involved that matter to you, and what you’d like to see more of in the future.

Your feedback plays an important role in shaping the direction of the initiative, truly! This will take approximately five minutes or less to fill out.

Take the survey