Science, Technology and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard

Date: 

Monday, November 25, 2019, 12:15pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S250

"The Way We Trust Today: Encryption as an Instrument of Decentralization"

Speaker: 

Gili Vidan, PhD candidate, Department of the History of Science; Research Fellow, Program on Science, Technology and Society.

Moderator: 

Sam Weiss Evans, Science, Technology & Society Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School.

Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Contact:

STS Program
sts@hks.harvard.edu

Chair:

Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

Lunch is provided if you RSVP. via our online form before Thursday afternoon, November 21:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd7VGUkAvTU655Dub2FTGSNMjpVs6f8Qbu0kpmXh6oz11MgFw/viewform

Bio:

Gili Vidan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of the History of Science and research fellow at the Program on Science, Technology, and Society. Her work looks at digital technologies, changing notions of public trust and democratic governance, and narratives of crisis and future-making in the US. Vidan's dissertation traces technical attempts to solve the problems of trust and transparency, with a focus on the development of electronic authentication systems and public key cryptography in late 20th- and early 21st-century US. Her research received support from the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institute, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Charles Babbage Institute, and the Microsoft Research Social Media Collective. She is the recipient of the 2019-20 Ambrose Monell Funded Fellowship in Technology and Democracy. Vidan has served as a teaching fellow for courses on digital technology and culture, science, technology and law in the US, and postcolonial science fiction. She holds a MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford and an AB in Social Studies from Harvard.

A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on
http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/events/sts_circle/