Landfill, Platform, Diagnosis: How People in Crisis Use Science and Technology to Build New Ethical Worlds
The Program in Science, Technology, and Society invites you to the annual Arthur Miller Lecture in Science and Ethics on Monday, October 27th from 4:00-5:30 pm in the MIT Welcome Center, featuring Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, anthropologist and associate Professor at Bard University, as she speaks about her research into the intersection of waste, the environment, capitalism, and the concept of home.
Landfill, Platform, Diagnosis: How People in Crisis Use Science and Technology to Build New Ethical Worlds
Duress—whether it be ecocide, economic collapse, or disability—is usually experienced as a limiting of options. The logic of necessity intensifies the imperative to merely survive, and people’s choices appear to narrow to violence or solidarity. Stamatopoulou-Robbin’s first book on waste and its infrastructures in Palestine, as well as her current book on platform-mediated home-sharing in Greece, challenge these declensionist narratives of crisis. They show how people respond inventively to the material necessities of duress and the material affordances of technology and science. They respond in ways that may not make duress go away, but rather remake how it works in their lives.
Science and technology are not in and of themselves solutions to the political problems that generate duress. Yet when people tinker with them, they reshape the ethical contours of their worlds in unexpected ways. This talk tells stories of old technologies (a landfill in Palestine), a newly dominant platform (Airbnb in Athens), and efforts to establish a future diagnosis in the U.S. (an autism profile called “pathological demand avoidance”) to consider the unpredictable place of science and technology in dark times.
About Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is a New York-based anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College with interests in infrastructure, waste, the environment, platform capitalism, the home, and neurodivergence. She is the author of Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). Her current book, De/tachment: Airbnb in Athens, is under contract with Duke University Press. She is beginning fieldwork on her next project on the rise of "demand avoidance" as a diagnosis and lived experience for autistic people. She has served on the editorial teams of MERIP, Cultural Anthropology and Critical AI. More on her scholarship and films can be found here:
https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com
Please RSVP here if you plan to attend in-person, we hope to see you there!