Conference Season is now over, and I participated in quite a few this year. Â It began for me in June with three conferences/workshops in the UK. Â At Oxford, I attended the Oxford Intelligence Group’s discussion of whether the UK needs an intelligence doctrine (notes available on their website). Â In London, UCL put on a workshop concerning the current work which has developed off of the late Dame Mary Douglas.
I then attended the Science Democracy Network‘s joint meeting with the Royal Society at Kavli House, where I presented a paper on “Imaginaries of State Security”. Â The main point of this paper was to outline three periods of history in (Western) international relations and how each period is characterized by a different set of assumptions about what should be considered militarily significant technology and how it should be controlled.
Back in the US, I presented a new case study on the BP oil spill that I am developing for next year’s Introduction to Technology and Society undergraduate course that I am helping run with Venky Narayanamurti.
My final conference was the Society for the Social Studies of Science meeting in Tokyo, where I presented a paper on “Technology control and imagined international orders,” which was a re-worked version of my SDN presentation.
Now back at Harvard, I plan on spending this semester getting several articles out and hopefully designing a couple workshops and grant applications.