Please join me for new faculty seminar series

Dear colleagues,

Since the moment I arrived at MIT, I’ve been astonished, time and again, by the wall-to-wall talent here. It started in my first week, when I sat in on tenure review presentations. I can easily recall the excitement and inspiration I experienced – which sparked the idea of a podcast where I could talk in-depth with fascinating young faculty. As president I get to talk to faculty from across the Institute and across disciplines, an incredible opportunity I believe we all should share.

So I’m trying something new: an informal seminar series, with talks on topics of wide interest. We’ll do two a year, alternating between recently tenured and more senior faculty. Speakers will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a Q&A, and then refreshments.  

This series will be a great opportunity to engage with fields outside of our own, tap into the rich resource that is the MIT faculty and connect with each other in space as well as time – so the seminars will be in person (sorry, no Zoom option).

We’re launching the series with Amy Moran-Thomas, associate professor of anthropology, who will give a talk titled “Undone Science” and Implications for Public Trust. (See below my signature for more detail.)

Please RSVP by May 2.

I hope to see you there.

Sally

Sally Kornbluth
President

“Undone Science” and Implications for Public Trust

This talk presents work from a collaboration with the Center for Coalfield Justice, a grassroots community organization based in a rural corner of western Pennsylvania along the West Virginia border. Chronic health issues associated with environmental exposures are impacting growing numbers of people in the area, including a spike in young cancer deaths that has left many local families grieving and searching for answers. Trying to piece together what is happening around health often leads to technical questions – from unanswered puzzles in earth sciences about sensing tremors, to models of air circulation that tend not to work accurately in Appalachian topography – local faces of much larger collective struggles for clean water and air around the world. Yet specific research questions generated by concerned communities and publics can be difficult to make legible within the conventional paradigms of either health or climate research. Thinking with the social concept of “undone science,” this presentation offers an ethnography of ongoing efforts between MIT Anthropology, EAPS (Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences) and the Center for Coalfield Justice to explore “community-guided science” in practice. The talk also uses anthropological concepts to reflect on deeper societal underpinnings of eroding public trust and mistrust in science and medicine, and it highlights examples of people finding ways to make gradual real-world steps forward.

Amy Moran-Thomas is associate professor of anthropology at MIT. Her ethnographic research focuses on how health technologies and ecologies are designed and come to be materially embodied – often inequitably – by people in their ordinary lives. Professor Moran-Thomas received her PhD in anthropology from Princeton University in 2012. Her first book, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic, explored global diabetes care in relation to chronic plantation histories and health between generations in the Caribbean. The book received an award from the caregivers in Belize whose work it describes, as well as the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems. Her current ethnography of science and medicine picks up similar threads of chronic disease care and environmental health closer to home in her ancestral state of Pennsylvania, this time including her own kin histories from coal country as part of the story.

At MIT, Professor Moran-Thomas has created courses such as “Planetary Change and Human Health” and “The Social Lives of Medical Objects” to bring students into related work, collectively exploring how social perspectives on design can contribute to producing more equitable technologies. More broadly, her work focuses on health between generations; the material culture of chronic conditions; embodied aspects of planetary health; and writing public anthropology.