Recollections (SK): In 2016, we were invited to convene a Feminist Theory Theater workshop as part of UCSD’s Science Studies Program’s weekly Colloquium. Scheduled for Halloween, we thought it would be appropriate to choose an archival document from the SSP’s history, as the program was under a new chairship and was reflecting on and considering extending participation in its PhD program to other departments. At the time, the participating departments included the classic Science Studies disciplines (History, Philosophy, Sociology) and our home department of Communication. We pored through the archive (a set of file folders in Bob Westman’s office) and found a memo that a sociology grad student had sent to the program on behalf of the students in the program. The letter’s themes about the identity, purpose, and imagined future paths of science studies resonated with the concerns of the moment, and we chose it as our text to read.

Normally, SSP colloquia were held in the SSP seminar room in the Humanities and Social Science building, but because we needed space to move, we wanted to have a larger and more open space. We booked the Mandeville Suite for the event. The Mandeville Suite is a mid-century one bedroom apartment on the top of a residence building at UC San Diego. It boasts a fairly large living room space and a modest kitchen and bedroom. It includes a walkout rooftop patio with views of the ocean. We knew this space because our programs (SSP and Communication) had hosted various celebrations there, including receptions for invited speakers, prospective student visits and end of year parties. It is known apocryphally as the Latour Suite because it is said that this is where Bruno Latour stayed when he visited San Diego (unclear whether this was when he was doing his Salk Institute fieldwork, or after he became famous for it). The site and its history was chosen both because it was large enough, and we also loved that its history/mythology resonated with (haunted?) the history of our program and of Science Studies and STS broadly. 

Scheduled for Halloween 2016, we envisioned this event as a spooky yet playful theatrical  encounter with the program’s past. It turned out to be a pretty tense and intense grappling with “what we are doing” as a program, and articulated some discomforts and frustrations that are not normally voiced in institutional spaces, certainly not by staging sketches with props and costumes, and not often articulated by graduate students directly to faculty.

Read (then-newly minted) SSP chair, Cathy Gere’s account of the event