The Science, Technology, Medicine and Society (STeMS) Speaker Series features scholars doing research across the range of STS subject matter. This term:

Are we humans cooperative or warlike, rational or delusional, fixed or flexible? These questions have philosophical bite and political stakes. Indeed, they always have. But recent work in a range of disciplines asks us to go deeper. What if “we humans” are more fiction than fact? If we can’t assume the stability of the human across time and place, what happens to debates about human nature? Humanistic approaches, including actor-network theory, posthuman criticism, and multispecies ethnographies, challenge the idea of an autonomous human nature, while scientific studies of organ development, neuroendocrinology, and the microbiome are revealing how much nature there is inside of us. We explore these questions through a braided history of the human and environmental sciences.