Technoscience
Salon
The Technoscience Salon is an open forum for entangling intellectual and political questions about technoscience while remixing the disciplines composing STS.
Launched in 2008, the Salon aims to create a lively community of thinkers with interests in technoscience studies in Toronto. Drawing participants from multiple universities as well as artistic and technical communities, the Salon aspires to prompt playful and experimental engagements, as well as new collaborations and conversations.
The Salon encourages experimental, short, playful and conversational forms of gathering. Instead of typical research papers, we invite our co-organizers and speakers to deliver provocations that are geared towards opening up discussions and further collaboration. Discussants stir up the conversation with short improvisational responses that kick start our collective thinking.
We are committed to pushing the form and genre of intellectual gatherings and collaborate with our speakers to that end.
We are incredibly thankful to all the co-organizers, funders and participants who have made the Technoscience Salon so successful over the past 13 years. Thank you to everyone who has taken the lead on organizing the Technoscience Salon in past years, including:
M. Murphy; Kristen Bos; Natasha Myers; Patrick Keilty; Nicole Charles; Nehal El-Hadi; OmiSoore Dryden; Metalab; Rohini Patel; Reena Shadaan; Vanbasten de Araujo; Sophie Jaworski; Lindsay LeBlanc; Sajdeep Soomal; Dawn Walker; Shiho Satsuka; Sebastian Gil-Riaño; Astrid Schrader; Sofie Afriat; Emily Simmonds; Sarah Tracy; Edward Jones-Imhotep and Sergio Sismondo.
The Salon has received generous financial and in-kind support from many peoples and places since it started in the late 2000s. From 2007 – 2013, the Salon was funded by the Toronto Node of the SSHRC Situating Science Research Cluster Grant and between 2014 – 2015, it was sponsored by the Institute of Science and Technology Studies at York University.
We thank IHPST for sponsoring the 2015-16 Salon. The 2016-17 Salon was supported by a grant from the office of Graduate Studies and Research in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies and the Jackman Humanities Institute.
From 2017-2021, the Salon was supported by WGSI, the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory (DREC), and the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. Our 2024-25 Salon is supported by the Acceleration Consortium.
Andrew Barry x What is a Chemical?
Tuesday, January 28th, 2025
4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Andrew Barry is an accomplished scholar who studied Natural Sciences and the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, completed his DPhil in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Sussex, held academic positions at various universities, including Oxford University and UCL, and has made significant contributions to the field of science and technology studies through his publications, fieldwork, and involvement in social and geographical theory initiatives.
Join us for the
2025 Technoscience Salon:
What is a Chemical?
Chemicals are one way of understanding the substance of being. In turn, synthetic chemicals have become an integral part of life ways and lifeforms across spatial and temporal scales. Chemicals are life-giving and debilitating. However, what exactly is a chemical?
In the 2025 Technoscience Salon, we ask ourselves this question inspired by multi-disciplinary works in the field of science and technology studies. Chemicals have been rendered differentially in sensory studies, studies of historical ontology, and inquiries into environmental health and justice. These works offer expansions on what the chemical is and how it might be recognized, apprehended, and manipulated. We invite scholars, artists, community organizers, and activists to collectively re-consider the prevailing scientific descriptions and studies of chemicals that reduce them to functionalist molecules for the sake of biopolitical management. To this end, what other ways of conceptualizing, representing, and relating to “the chemical” might we take up as we strive towards less harmful futures?
Jayson Porter x What is a Chemical?
Tuesday, March 4th, 2025
4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Jayson Maurice Porter is an environmental writer and historian. He is Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department and a Black and Indigenous Climate Faculty Fellow in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He specializes in black and Indigenous environmental histories, agricultural and food systems, agrochemicals (especially arsenic-based insecticides), cultural histories of ecology and botany, and environmental histories of revolution, resistance, and land reform.
Suzana Sawyer x What is a Chemical?
Wednesday March 26th, 2025
4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Suzana Sawyer is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, author of Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of The Politics of Resource Extraction: Indigenous Peoples, Multinational Corporations, and the State. Sawyer’s research examines struggles over resources in the Ecuadorian Amazon, focusing specifically on conflicts over land and petroleum development among forest peoples, the state, and multinational oil companies.
