A collective of current and former affiliates to the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard University put together a nomination of Professor Sheila Jasanoff and the Harvard STS Program at Harvard for the 2023 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) Infrastructure Award.

The Harvard STS Program is an inclusive label for a cluster of infrastructural elements that have served the global STS community for decades.

At the 2024 Annual meeting in Amsterdam, the award went to the editorial team of the journal Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS). We congratulate the ESTS collective and thank them for their crucial work for the development of the field.

We, the co-signatories of the nomination, believe that the account of the Harvard STS program provided by the nomination letter and what it has meant for several generations of international STS scholars might nevertheless be of interest to a broader audience.

━━━ Introduction ━━━

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Few scholars better illustrate how dedicated institution-building can turn one life into a generative infrastructural support for many lives. This letter chronicles Jasanoff’s extraordinary contributions to building and maintaining infrastructures with and for others that have enabled STS to become a vibrant field for reflection and action in our contemporary world. Specifically, this nomination foregrounds the intellectual and social spaces, networks, projects, collectives, practices, and pedagogical approaches that Jasanoff has spearheaded through her position at Harvard over the last 25 years.

With this nomination we also draw attention to the significance of these achievements in light of the structural obstacles Jasanoff herself has faced as a woman of color working within elite institutions. We honor her work in supporting women and scholars from diverse backgrounds and in building and nurturing a global STS community that is inclusive of and responsive to cultural differences. Her forms of field-building offer vital supports for a caring and rhizomatic cosmopolitan community.

For Jasanoff, building an STS thought collective has been a lifelong commitment conducted with unparalleled generosity. To illustrate this, in the attached Appendix 1 we highlight the convenings hosted by Harvard STS, and the wider communities it serves, in the last 12 months [2023] alone. Our collective nomination for the 4S infrastructure award speaks to the fact that we share this commitment and have been inspired to actively contribute to the development and maintenance of an infrastructure that reaches far beyond any one of us.

━━━ I. Democratizing and Internationalizing the Harvard Platform ━━━

In 2002, Jasanoff founded (and has ever since directed) the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The Program’s activities epitomize how resources of often-inaccessible elite institutions like Harvard can be opened up to the benefit of a broader community through the efforts of a creative and determined entrepreneur.

For over a decade, each year approximately 15 to 20 graduate and postgraduate Fellows (over 220 in all) have joined the STS Program to conduct research and receive advanced training in STS. They come from many countries and represent a wide range of institutional and disciplinary backgrounds and research interests. Fellows benefit from Sheila’s personal mentoring, though they are not Harvard students, and many have gone on to faculty positions in STS and have made important scholarly contributions, in several cases developing STS programs at their own institutions. For many former Fellows, the Harvard STS Program remains a center of gravity, which provides continuing professional and academic support.

━━━ II. Infrastructures of Engagement ━━━

The STS Program at Harvard has served as an anchor for collaborative research projects that bring together members of the extended SDN community to translate STS theory into domains of legal and policy practice. The Global Observatory for Genome Editing seeks to expand the range of questions about the human condition raised by recent biotechnologies like genome editing. Its co-directors Ben Hurlbut (ASU) and Kris Saha (Wisconsin) were STS Fellows over a decade ago. Their years of collaboration with Jasanoff led to the team’s success in obtaining a joint grant from the John Templeton Foundation which allows this experimental enterprise to import ideas developed through Harvard STS into global scientific and policy debates.

━━━ III. Collective Modes of Working and Collaborating ━━━

Through the activities of the Harvard STS Program, Jasanoff has established a model for how to nurture thought collectives that sustain themselves through collaboration. Many of the STS positions, training opportunities, and professional activities that support us and others in the field today would not exist without her commitment to creating spaces for thinking and working together. Our collective nomination letter, spanning junior and senior scholars on four continents, reflects this ethos.

The STS Program’s approach to bringing people from diverse institutional contexts to one table facilitates cross-national comparative work, a core methodology of Jasanoff’s own research. The Program hosts rigorous, high-profile workshops and public convenings that offer opportunities for Fellows to establish collaborations with senior scholars while also inviting scholars from other political cultures and disciplinary fields into the Harvard STS community. This model of broad-minded interdisciplinary outreach has enhanced STS’s impact and extended its reach and profile. The effects of the Program’s training efforts have extended to summer schools in Germany and the US, writing workshops in Switzerland, and collaborations with NGOs and academics in India.

━━━ IV. Pedagogical Infrastructures ━━━

Through the STS Program Jasanoff has developed innovative pedagogical practices that enable a shared analytic project structured by key concepts, rigorous training, and distributed and intergenerational mentorship and support.

Many of the theoretical ideas that Jasanoff has introduced were developed through participatory projects that culminated in edited volumes, such as States of Knowledge (2004) [co-production], Reframing Rights (2011) [bioconstitutionalism], and Dreamscapes of Modernity (2015) [sociotechnical imaginaries]. Students and Fellows in the STS Program contributed seminal articles to these volumes that were seedlings for their intellectual careers.

A central infrastructural support of Harvard STS is Jasanoff’s foundational course in STS called “Science, Power and Politics.” This course not only trains all participants in the complex genealogy and theoretical contributions of the field of STS, but also, by bringing together undergraduate and graduate students with Fellows, integrates the Fellows into academic life at Harvard and introduces students from numerous disciplines to STS. Many former students have used the syllabus as a foundation for their own teaching, as they carry this exemplar of rigorous STS training to other institutions.

━━━ A Lifetime of Infrastructure Building ━━━

Jasanoff is well-known for her pioneering intellectual contributions to STS, recognized most recently through the 2022 Holberg Prize, which celebrated her development of “much of the conceptual repertoire for theorizing the political and policy relations of science and technology in contemporary societies.” However, we the undersigned believe that another kind of recognition is in order, from within the field of STS, to acknowledge the central role that she has played in establishing and cultivating welcoming and sustainable spaces where STS scholars and scholarship can find a home and thrive.

She has done this against daunting odds, from co-editing STS’s breakthrough Handbook, establishing and chairing the S&TS department at Cornell, and serving as 4S President, to eventually developing the STS Program at Harvard without a disciplinary faculty or significant financial support from the University. Yet, these environments have nurtured and encouraged junior and senior researchers from diverse backgrounds to collaborate and contribute to the development of STS. Her community-building efforts, both intellectual and social, have enabled hundreds of careers and engendered sustained connections between STS scholars, social scientists, scientists and engineers, policymakers, lawyers, and social activists.

━━━ Signatures ━━━