“Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge”
Tuesday, December 3rd, 4:45 PM
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract
In this lecture, Rogers explores how the tools of Science and Technology Studies (STS) can provide critical insights into art and science projects, highlighting the practices of these knowledge-making communities as discussed in her book Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2022). In the book, Rogers challenges the conventional boundaries between art and science, suggesting that these fields may be understood as knowledge communities constructing, maintaining, and manipulating their own boundaries. By demonstrating how STS methodologies are being applied by STS scholars to artistic practices and, conversely, how art can inform STS inquiry, Rogers highlights the emergence of a new subdiscipline—Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS). This framework reimagines the categories of art and science and shows their changing states, with significant implications for understanding their roles in shaping social worlds.
Biography
Hannah Star Rogers holds the art and science postdoctoral fellowship at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, where she co-directs the Metabolic Arts Gathering with Adam Bencard. She is the author of Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press 2022) and the lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies(2021). Her current book project is an edited volume, What Curators Know: Art and Science in the Museum, due out from Rowman & Littlefield in 2025. She holds a PhD from Cornell University (2012) in Science and Technology Studies and an MFA from Columbia University (2018). Rogers works as a curator on art and science exhibits including “Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future” at Arizona State University and “Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures” at North Carolina State University and the University of Pittsburgh. Her exhibition “Making Science Visible: The Photography of Berenice Abbott,” received an exhibits prize from the British Society for the History of Science and resulted in an invited lecture at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
