Where I'll be next week

This should be a good time, despite the fact that the tone will be substantially lowered by my being one of the presenters.

Does STS Mean Business 2?

A one day international workshop at Saïd Business School
University of Oxford
9am - 5.30pm, Wednesday 29th June 2005

Science and Technology Studies (STS) continues to face key questions about its value, impact and future directions. This is especially the case as its perspectives are increasingly taken up by areas such as business, policy and the law, and in academic disciplines such as business and management schools. What can STS offer these domains? What in turn can they offer to STS? Does this kind of engagement inevitably dull the radical cutting edge of STS or raise new possibilities and audiences for provocation?

Our 2005 workshop takes up the questions initially posed in 2004. What are the uses and transformations of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in recent years, especially as STS is appropriated within new contexts, including management studies and business schools?

As usual, I'm in the session right after lunch, and competing with the rising temperature of the room and the post-lunch endorphins is always a challenge.

At a time when the people who display the greatest amount of epistemological flexibility seem to be corporate-sponsored climate change deniers and proponents of intelligent design, it's well worth asking where STS fits in the world, and how it can be used for good rather than evil.

Plus, I hear Oxford isn't entirely unpleasant at the end of June.

[To the tune of Todd Rundgren, "Torch Song," from the album "Something/Anything? (Disc 2)".]