#Disaster #History #Anthropocene #Risk #Policy #Technology #COVID

Scott Gabriel Knowles is a historian of disaster worldwide. He focuses on the historical processes that make disasters possible, and the application of history to reduce future disasters. Since March of 2020 Knowles has hosted #COVIDCalls every weekday, a live podcast discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is publication series co-editor (with Kim Fortun) of "Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster" with the University of Pennsylvania Press.

He was (2019) a research fellow of the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology, NOVA University of Lisbon. He has previously been a research fellow or visiting faculty member of CIGIDEN/Catolica Chile (2018), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2016), the Rachel Carson Center (2016), and the University of Tokyo (2015).

His work on the history of risk and disaster has appeared in the Natural Hazards Observer, History and Technology, Journal of Policy History, American Scientist, Technology and Culture, and Engineering Studies—he has also written for the The Hankyoreh, New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Slate, Conservation Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Hill. Knowles is completing two new books: The United States of Disaster; and, Slow Disaster.

Website: https://slowdisaster.com/

Knowles 416 Presentation Disaster Haggyo

#Waste #Material Politics #Slow Disaster #Anthropocene #Environmental Justice

Hyunah is interested in the materiality, and socioeconomic/environmental impacts of wastes. During her master, she did internship in the Jordan Program of Global Green Growth Institute, working remotely at the Seoul Headquarter. With this experience, she became more interested in the contemporary and practical issues around wastes. She wrote her master’s thesis in particular about plastic wastes during COVID-19 in South Korea, to investigate different practices to regulate or promote the use of plastic from the perspective of slow disaster. Throughout doctoral program, she wants to expand her research fields into revealing unequal relationships around waste, and its impacts on different beings, not just humans but also non-humans. Also, she is very keen to learn various skills (e.g. filming, making podcasts) which can transgress the boundary between academia and public.

#Disaster #Environmental history #Anthropocene #Multispecies studies (Human-nonhuman entanglement) #Justice

Hyeonbin majored in physics during undergraduate and Master's programs. However, any kinds of social and environmental disasters have attracted him and made him jump into STP. Hyeonbin is interested in how disaster shapes the world. Now he wants to expand his interest in the relation between nature, culture, disaster, and science in the urban and environmental history within the Anthropocene. He also wants to develop a way of living together with various humans and nonhumans caring for each other. He is looking forward to learning these from and with STP members.

#Smart city #Resilience #More-than-human studies #Everyday practices

During her bachelor's and her first master’s degree in Geography and Urban Planning at two different French universities, Joëlle had the opportunity to focus on the relationship between technology and human beings through the question of digital communities and their ability to interact with territories. She joined STP to further develop her interest in the intertwined relationship between technology and territories and worked in the transformation of everyday practices in smart cities during her master’s degree at STP. Her current research interests include cities and resilience, as well as cities and disaster, in Korea and in France.

#Disability STS #Human-Robot Relationship #User Innovation #Crip Technoscience #Women in Science and Engineering Field #Sewol Ferry Disaster

How can we design and deploy technology for an anti-ableist world while not ignoring the oppressive history of medical normalization? I’m a doctoral student at STP who tries to bridge the gap between STS and disability studies by investigating disability, medicine, and technology. For my master’s thesis, I conducted a one-year-long ethnographic study to examine how disabled people and non-disabled roboticists and medical staff cooperated to engineer walking in preparation for the Cybathlon. I’m now expanding my research sites into rehabilitation hospitals, welfare centers, and disability rights activism to document disabled people as experts, designers, and users of the accessible world. My other projects include the systemic discrimination of women scientist-engineers in Korea, the history of outdoor units of air conditioners, and scientific debates on the Sewol Ferry Disaster.

#Renewable energy policy #infrastructure studies #test beds #energy futures #Jeju Island

Seung Hee is interested in cultural and political analyses of infrastructures and how those aspects relate to policy. Having a particular interest on renewable energies, the title of her dissertation project is “Testing Futures: Jeju Island as Experimental Subject of Energy Policy.” Based on science and technology studies (STS) and ethnographic field research, she is studying how Jeju, the biggest island in Korea, is becoming a testing place for green energy futures. She was inspired by Jeju’s political histories and natural environments, which had deep relations with the Island’s technological projects and future visions. The aim of her doctoral research is to connect technological experiments with political and ecological histories of the testing site.

#Feminist-STS #Disaster Studies #Field Studies #Memorial #Justice #Sewol Ferry Disaster #Local context #Labor #Pohang City

Seulgi contemplates about situated cognition and based on this self-awareness, she wants to add more power to institutionalizing the perspective of justice. Seulgi studied chemistry in her undergraduate so is accustomed to the cognitive framework in which each element is combined to create a new substance. Seulgi wants each of the agent in the world to have their own share and harmonize. Seulgi is interested in the process of expanding what is perceived as others, such as women, cyborgs, and nature, and working with them to expand the horizon of cognition. She is interested in keywords such as feminism STS, Anthropocene and locality. Her goal is to weave an alternative story of how to live together in a precarious world.

Seung Chan Choi

Undergraduate Student

#Social Infrastructure #Geopolitics #Network #Network Development History #Network and society

SeungChan majored in School of Computing at KAIST undergraduate course. From September 2022, he will start studying as a master student of KAIST STP. He try to understand social infrastructure as a new artificial geopolitical element. Especially, interest at the network, communication infrastructure which built after the industrial revolution. He had several chance to learn the history about the development process of Internet in Korea. He has question about what role do companies and countries play in the development of social infrastructure.