Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard

Date: 

Monday, November 26, 2018, 12:15pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S050

"Investing in the Stars: The Astrology of Money and Markets in the Modern United States"

Speaker:

Moira Weigel, Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows.

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

Contact:

Kasper Schiølin
kasper_schiolin@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 by Thursday, October 25th

Abstract:

Over the past several years, a range of scholars have taken up the task of interpreting the so-called “alt-right,” creating several maps of the affinities, histories, and practices that connect people using that label. I propose that one set of communities that overlaps with the “alt-right” warrants further investigation: “pickup artist” (PUA) or “seduction” forums. To the extent that these communities have been studied as “gateways” to radicalization, they have been studied journalistically and ethnographically; in this talk, I will take a different approach, turning to their history. Specifically, I will investigate a set of techniques developed in the 1960s and 1970s that have been influential on PUA communities ever since: “neurolinguistic programming” (NLP). Tracing the multiple origins of these techniques in cybernetics, linguistics, and the Bay Area counterculture, as well as their afterlives in self-help and management discourses, I examine the models of mind and communication that they deploy, as well as their points of proximity to more mainstream therapeutic practices and cyberutopian beliefs.

Biography:

Moira Weigel is a writer and scholar currently at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and a founding editor of Logic magazine. She received her PhD in the joint program in Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies at Yale University in 2017. Her work examines emerging media technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in a transnational and comparative perspective. She also have a strong secondary interest in histories of feminism, gender and sexuality. Her first book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2016. This talk comes out of preliminary research for a new project tentatively entitled Hating Theory.