Short Abstract:

This workshop invites STS scholars to engage with public interest technology (PIT), identify how STS theories can contribute valuable insights to PIT or generate new and important lines of inquiry, and asks STS scholars what tools they need to organize or sustain PIT-oriented collaborative research.

Long Abstract:

This workshop invites 4S/EASSTS attendees to ideate, strategize, and goal-set for the growing field known as “public interest technology” (PIT). Recently, scholars from across disciplines have felt a growing mandate to help students, lawmakers, and industry partners innovate both effectively and ethically - to develop technologies in the public interest (Parthasarathy and Guston, 2019). With support from Ford and Hewlett foundations, the New America Foundation has organized scholars under the banner of the Public Interest Technology University Network, a consortium with over 60 university partners worldwide.

PIT has served as a generative organizing concept in more STEM-oriented arenas, producing a PIT-focused special issue in IEEE Technology and Society (2021) and a workshop at the 2022 ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). In this workshop for 4S/EASSTS, we invite the STS community to explore what PIT means within various STS traditions - particularly how feminist, indigenous, decolonial, and disability STS could contribute to how PIT research is being approached. Moreover, this workshop will also ask STS scholars interested in interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral PIT research - both experienced collaborators and newcomers - what tools they need to do that collaborative work effectively, sustainably, and justly.

The aim of this workshop is three-fold. First, to foster a PIT-oriented community of global STS practitioners. Second, to develop a cohesive response to the definition of PIT for STS, including specific areas where STS is understood to offer new insights and perspectives to existing or imagined PIT projects. And, finally, to identify an agenda for future workshops to be presented at New America’s annual PIT Summit, aimed at helping practitioners from across academia, government, civil society, and industry cultivate the skills necessary to work together.

This workshop requires room for ~30 people where participants can organize in small groups and view projected slides.