MUSTS Events

Clinics, Concepts, and Moral Infrastructures: Doing Bioethics with History and STS

Colloquium 23 April 2025. Speaker: Dr. Noortje Jacobs (Erasmus MC)

What if history weren’t just background for ethical reflection, but a method of intervention? We’ll present work-in-progress from our ongoing project, history as empirical bioethics: an approach that uses historical analysis to interrogate how collective moralities are built, stabilized, and made actionable. Our work grows out of an unusual institutional configuration: the two of us—a historian and a philosopher—are based in the department of medical ethics of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. One of us, trained in the Maastricht STS tradition, recently became its head. This disciplinary entanglement is not just structural—it reflects a growing recognition that addressing the moral challenges of medicine requires methods that cut across conceptual, empirical, and historical domains.

Drawing on STS, we take seriously the idea that moral norms are not simply the result of deliberation or argument, but are enacted through practices, infrastructures, technologies, and institutions. Our historical-ethical research brings this insight into bioethics. We’ll illustrate this with two case studies. The first traces how voluntary and non-remunerated blood donation (VNRD) became a “collective morality” in the Netherlands, through a process we call immediation—where moral judgments become built into the object itself. The second examines how blood, breast milk, corneas, and eventually the entire body were made “moral twins”: ethically equivalent through shared infrastructures, discourses, and valuation practices.

These projects are part of a broader effort to build a framework for doing empirical bioethics with history—one that foregrounds the material, institutional, and temporal dimensions of moral life. In this view, history doesn’t just explain how moral concepts came to be; it opens space to question them, reimagine them, and potentially remake them.

Can We Transform our Planetary Future? Dancing between Science and Policy in the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment

Colloquium 26 March 2025. Speaker: Prof. Fern Wickson (UiT the Arctic University of Norway)

This session centres on the environmental governance boundary organisation of IPBES – the intergovernmental science-policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services – and the content of its latest assessment report on transformative change.

Humanity is facing multiple interconnected and accelerating global environmental crises (including climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution). These crises are converging in ways that now pose existential threats by undermining the conditions necessary for human survival and for meaningful cultural and spiritual lives. In response to continued warnings of rapidly deteriorating conditions for life on Earth, “transformative change” is now regularly being emphasized as imperative for securing sustainable futures. Such statements appear across science and policy communities, in multilateral environmental agreements, and in the work of both business and non-governmental organisations.

Following three years of work involving over 100 authors from all around the world, in December 2024, the almost 150 member governments of IPBES negotiated and accepted their commissioned thematic assessment on transformative change. In this session, Prof. Fern Wickson (coordinating lead author of chapter 1 of the report), will introduce IPBES as a boundary organization within environmental governance and present key content from their new report on transformative change. This will include the meaning of transformative change, the challenges and barriers involved, and the approaches and strategies identified for bringing it into being. She will then share some reflections and lessons learned from dancing between science and policy in the IPBES context and invite attendees into conversation about  how to approach interrelationships between science, ethics and politics in ways that enable transformations towards flourishing futures for all life on Earth.

Art, Science and the Politics of Knowledge

Colloquium 26 February 2025. Speaker: Hannah Rogers (University of Copenhagen)

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.

Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Still Not Raise the World? Value Tensions in the Articulation of Societal Relevance in Science and the Need for Narrative Responsibility 

Colloquium 5 March 2025. Speaker: Ruth Müller (TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology)

Articulations of societal relevance constitute central sites for negotiating science – society relations. In recent years, science funders have increasingly asked scientists to articulate the societal relevance of their work and used societal relevance as an assessment criterium in research funding. In this talk, I examine narrative responses by researchers to the introduction of relevance as criterium in research assessment. Concretely, I combine insights from four research projects that studied how researchers articulate, argue for and assess the value of academic work in variety of settings to critically discuss practices of overstating relevance in academic research. 

I contextualize my analysis by drawing on Ed Hackett’s work on value tensions in scientific work in the context of transforming academic landscapes. I argue that researchers increasingly navigate a value tension between veracity and overstatement when it comes to the articulation of the societal relevance of scientific work, and that the current narrative infrastructure in academia tends to push researchers towards to the polar value of overstatement. I trace (1) how overstatements become normalized in academic science and (2) how overstatements can in fact strain science – society relations rather than improve them, drawing on two specific forms of overstatement (the reinforcement of false political narratives and the displacement other important forms of problematization).  

I close by arguing for the cultivation of narrative responsibility, pointing out inroads that become visible by understanding these challenges as value tensions. I make concrete recommendations for how to work with science funders, institutional leaders and researchers from various fields to develop concrete practices of narrative responsibility in academia.

Securing Oil at Home and Abroad in the 1970s: Energy Security and State Oil Companies in the UK, West Germany, and Canada

Colloquium 4 December 2024. Speaker: Petra Dolata (UCalgary)

In the wake of the 1973/74 oil price crises, Western governments formulated energy policies to address their dependence on oil exports. One of the strategies of securing safe and affordable supplies in the long term was the founding of state oil companies who mainly focused on exploration and participation in existing upstream ventures. BNOC (British National Oil Corporation, founded 1975) in the UK, DEMINEX (Deutsche Mineralöl-Explorationsgesellschaft mbH, founded 1966) in West Germany and Petro Canada (founded 1975) are all considered corporate anomalies in jurisdictions which were known for championing private oil companies and relatively liberal oil markets. In this talk, Petra Dolata historicized the meaning and practice of energy security by examining the histories of state oil companies in Canada, West Germany and the UK in the 1970s.

Sinking Into Soils: A Phenomenological Exploration of Soil as Medium

Joint AMC/MUSTS colloquium 2 October 2024. Speaker: Nora S. Vaage

Which contemporary situations can facilitate sinking into soil? As PI of the work package Experiential Soils in the Norwegian Research Council-funded project Anthropogenic Soils: Recuperating Human-Soil Relationships on a Troubled Planet (SOILS, 2022-2028), my focus in responding to the above question is on how soils can be accessed and engaged with artistically and phenomenologically. Artworks providing an imaginative re-mediation of soil situations might engender wonder, fascination and discomfort, staying with the tensions of sinking into the vulnerable, dark, dirty, dangerous, vital world below-ground.

‘Imitation as Innovation: Recasting the History of Technology in Modern Korea’ 

Colloquium 26 June 2024. Speaker: Hyungsub Choi

Innovation is overrated. In recent years, historians of technology have challenged the historical narrative focusing on innovation and novelty, and turned toward "technology-in-use" and "maintenance." Yet, those working on the so-called "periphery" continue to search for the elusive technological innovations – just as the gold rushers sieved through mud and sand hoping to find precious metal – identifying trace-amounts of innovative technical practices. This project begins from the premise that no innovation occurred in modern Korea. All technologies were importations from or imitations of advanced industrial countries (mostly the United States and Japan). Taking this perspective allows us to see beyond the successful outlier cases and capture the diverse practices that shaped the meaning and purpose of technologies in the postcolonial nation going through rapid economic and technological transformation.

T(h)ink(er)ing with Microbes

Colloquium 29 May 2024. Speaker: Kristien Hens (University of Antwerp)

Although they have been long neglected in philosophy and ethics, microbes are now gaining some traction in these fields. More specifically, philosophers, anthropologists and human geographers have thought about the impact of findings regarding the microbiome-gut-brain axis on how we conceive of ‘the human’. Terms like holobiont and (endo)symbiosis have become part of the general philosophical imaginary. 

Negotiating (Technological) Sovereignty

Colloquium 24 April 2024. Speaker: Mario Daniels (Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam)

In 1984, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg ordered from the U.S. a supercomputer for work on climate models. The Reagan administration, however, blocked the necessary export license for a full year. The U.S. government wanted to allow the export only if the institute and the West German government were to accept special security measures called “safeguards” which would allow the U.S. to closely monitor of the installation and the use of the computer on German soil. The U.S. stance provoked strident public reactions, calling the U.S. demands “humiliating” and an open attempt to hurt German technological competitiveness.

Designing Democracy on Mars and Earth: Preliminary results

Colloquium 13 March 2024. Speaker: Julien Vrydagh (University of Stuttgart)

The ERC Advanced Grant “Designing Democracy on Mars and Earth” (DDME) sets up a bottom-up, reflective, deliberative and co-creative design to obtain a deeper understanding of citizens’ democratic preferences in the 21stcentury. DDME explores citizens' understanding of democracy by asking open-ended questions, allowing them to describe what democracy means to them and avoiding the limitations of closed-ended questions based on predefined theoretical models. 

Taxonomic Disagreement: From textual analysis to biodiversity conservation

Colloquium 21 February 2024. Speaker: Charles H. Pence (UC Louvain)

My talk analysed two parallel historical trajectories, and their uneasy convergence in contemporary digital cultures. It reconstructs a mode of financialisation that infrastructurally combines instant messaging and digital payments. How, why and for whom should these two ways of interacting converge? What are the economical stakes of combining platform and app economies? I inquired into these questions from a point of view that integrates history, STS, and media theory. Thus, the alternative title of this talk could have been “every mediation counts.”