Recollections of Early Affiliates of the Holtz Center

At the end of the 1990s, then-Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences Phil Certain announced that he wanted to begin a discussion of what the “arts and sciences” should become in the 21st century. He tied this idea to the anticipated organization of new interdisciplinary programs and research centers, and he invited L&S faculty to join him in planning for this future.

Simultaneously with this announcement, Certain learned of the arrival at the UW Foundation of a major gift from Robert and Jean Holtz of La Jolla, California, that was intended to give engineering students a wider appreciation of the ramifications of technological change in society. The backstory that I heard (I believe it came from Certain himself) is that the University did not quite know what to do with this gift, and L&S and Phil Certain were given the job of putting it to work. Certain was already aware of the growing prominence of Science and Technology Studies in the academic world, and he consulted with prominent figures in the field, including Sheila Jasanoff, who was then head of STS at Cornell. Jasanoff in turn suggested that he work with the History of Science department at UW.

Accordingly, Certain approached one of the senior historians of science, Dave Lindberg, about the potential for History of Science proposing an STS program at UW. The carrot for doing so, if I recall correctly, was the application of some of the Holtz money to create a new faculty position specifically intended to represent STS. These preliminary ideas were discussed with Dean Certain by Lindberg and Eric Schatzberg, then an associate professor in the History of Science department. Schatzberg, with the help of other History of Science faculty, began drawing up a proposal to be submitted (I believe) to the L&S Academic Planning Council.

These plans were scuppered/modified/tossed in the dumpster by announcement of a new round of cluster hires by Chancellor David Ward and Provost John Wiley in August of 2000. Announced in 1998 with funds from WARF and from the state of Wisconsin, the original cluster hires were almost exclusively housed in STEM departments and were intended to open new pathways in scientific research. But the new clusters extended funding to arts and humanities, and this opened the door to launching STS at Wisconsin on a larger footing than previously envisioned. Eric Schatzberg took the lead in drawing up a proposal for a cluster in STS consisting of three faculty positions – two senior appointments, one for History of Science, one for Sociology, and a third position at the assistant level in a department to be named later.

Once the cluster was approved, an STS search committee, led by Schatzberg, had to negotiate with a handful of home departments to accept the faculty positions. The search committee had its own views of who the best candidates were, and these preferences had to be reconciled with the departments that would house the faculty members. Cluster hires were complicated things to bring to fruition!

Even before the cluster searches began, Dean Certain had appointed a provisional steering committee in Science and Technology Studies during the summer of 2000 that I led in the titular role of “Director”. This committee began work on giving STS an institutional identity at UW. One part of this work involved drawing up governance procedures for things like the choice of Director and responsibilities of the Steering Committee. In this work, we were guided by examples of other recently created interdisciplinary programs in L&S.

The second and more taxing work consisted of creating an undergraduate curriculum for a proposed STS certificate and a graduate STS minor. As with the cluster hires, this involved consultation with a variety of departments, which was time-consuming but also essential to obtaining buy-in from the various parts of campus that featured STS in one guise or another, and for getting the program off the ground and approved by the L&S and university Curriculum Committees.

After Joan Fujimura, Gregg Mitman and Clark Miller arrived on campus at the beginning of the 2001-2002 academic year, I remained for one more year as Director of STS to provide continuity with what was still incomplete work on the curricular parts of the STS undergrad and grad programs. That was a particularly fruitful year, highlighted by STS hosting a campus forum on the practice and ethics of stem-cell research in the Pyle Center that drew a huge crowd of attendees, including the Chancellor, John Wiley, news media and figures in state government.

As one of my final duties as Director of STS, I went out to La Jolla in the spring of 2002 at the behest of the UW Foundation to meet with Jean Holtz, and to describe to her all that we had accomplished. I spent a happy afternoon with her at her home, and I came away from that meeting with the confidence that she was delighted by how Bob’s vision had been fulfilled at UW.

I first gravitated toward Science and Technology Studies in my PhD Program in Medical Anthropology (UCSF). STS provided the groundwork and tools to enable me to marry my backgrounds in clinical medicine and hospital administration with social science perspectives. My mentor Adele Clarke, a pillar of the field, introduced me to a community of scholars who fundamentally changed my research and career direction. STS scholars offered insightful, penetrating approaches to studying phenomena that opened a vista of possibilities for me beyond disciplinary boundaries. I brought STS into my postdoc training in Bioethics (Stanford), hoping to broaden the conventional thinking typical of bioethicists, in order to address issues related to emerging medical technologies.

I was recruited to UW-Madison as part of the Regenerative Medicine Interdisciplinary Cluster amid political and social controversy in the early days of stem cell research. I quickly became involved with the Holtz Center with its focus on research and teaching of social, ethical and political issue around technologies, and its commitment to engaging various publics. During my time as its second Director, we initiated an annual member meeting, travel awards, and other STS community activities, building on an existing popular speaker series. Membership expanded to be more inclusive of students and faculty from engineering and science, enabling cross-disciplinary collaborations and teaching. My interest in transdisciplinarity led to a Robert Woods Johnson grant (“Transdisciplinary Studies in Health and Society”). The resulting working group and conference drew participants from data science, environmental scientists, humanities, public health and social scientists from the US and abroad, just the sort of community-building activity the Holtz Center is known for.

My research focusing on the use of human biological materials grew to include the use (and misuse) of data about them as a proxy for individuals and populations. My interest in social information as ‘medical’ data, especially in its proposed predictive capacity, grew with so-called Precision Medicine initiatives and the rise in Value-based infrastructures in healthcare.

When the Holtz Center later created thematic clusters to continue fostering cross-cutting collaborations, the first one was awarded to the project, “Disclosing and Enclosing Knowledge: Paradoxes of Information Flow in Knowledge Communities.” Led by Linda Hogle (Anthropology, Bioethics), Nicole Nelson (History), Pilar Ossorio (Law), Kris Saha (Biomedical Engineering), and David Page (Computer Science), our research brought together critical data studies, privacy law, and technical data science expertise to explore the tensions between the need for access to personal health data for research and treatment on the one hand, and the need to protect individuals’ privacy on the other. The cluster connected UW the STS community with internationally-known scholars: we held symposia, sponsored a student essay contest and working groups, and the crowning activity was a STS Summer School, with multinational students attending. Participants and speakers throughout the cluster project included Alberto

Cambrosio, Sabine Leonelli, Louise Amoore, Sheila Jasanoff, Stefan Timmermans, Sergio Sismondo and Steve Hilgartner, among others. Such activities heightened visibility of the Holtz Center both on campus and abroad, and introduced students and faculty from many disciplines to the unique contributions of STS for understanding contemporary phenomena.

The Summer School took considerable work and planning, but was highly successful, and students went on to enter STS programs and pursue STS directions in their research. The Holtz community might consider replicating the model with appropriate themes in the future.

The Holtz Center has been a welcoming place for faculty and their students wanting to pursue research that crosses disciplinary boundaries and uses novel modes of inquiry. Sharing our research and teaching to broader audiences beyond the campus is crucial to having an informed public in a time of so much political and technoscientific controversy, and debate about the value of higher education. Significantly, such forums open a space for meaningful dialogues (not one-way communications). I hope the Center will continue to play this role through innovative means.

From its inception, the Holtz Center has brought together academics from a wide range of departments and programs who found a critical, energizing setting for innovative research. Though geographically separated on campus and drawing on often vastly different disciplines, these scholars, some of whom were previously isolated in their academic units, found a home in the Holtz Center.  This home offered a venue within which they could and did support each other and pursue exciting new projects.  In the Center, together they–we– expanded and invigorated the emerging field of science and technology studies. This is an effort that continues to be vital today.

I joined UW-Madison as a new assistant professor in 2001, around the same time the Holtz Center began. I had just completed a joint/interdisciplinary doctoral education in both human geography and the history of technology, and I was here at Wisconsin to begin an interdisciplinary faculty role in both the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and what is now the iSchool. I remember being worried that I would be pulled in too many new directions to find a familiar and welcoming intellectual community.  My graduate training had introduced me to the vibrant science and technology studies field which it seemed to me was having an important moment of visibility and impact in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was so pleased to learn that at UW-Madison, the STS community seemed open to many different approaches, disciplines, and connections — especially, and I think rather unusually, mobilizing colleagues who studied science and technology in society using the interpretive social sciences as a sort of “bridging social capital” to connect interests and students across the disciplinary spectrum from engineering to the arts and humanities. This was very different and refreshing as opposed to some of the more tightly-focused and, really, doctrine-bound STS departments at other peer universities in the US that I had interviewed with as a faculty candidate. Over the course of my career I gradually learned that such interdisciplinary openness was a ubiquitous feature of research, teaching, and service at Wisconsin. I’m glad I ended up in Madison, and I very much appreciate the intellectual support and personal collegiality I have found through Holtz Center colleagues and students over the years.  

Early on, my (sociology department) colleague, Nora Cate Schaeffer, and I were studying survey research from a science and technology perspective. It was related to more general endeavors known as the sociology of Social Scientific Knowledge (SSK), which previously involved the investigation of practices in natural science laboratories. Analogously, we were interested in how surveys and its practitioners (designers, interviewers, and others) assembled data and findings through practical forms of knowledge (tacit endeavors) that resulted in findings about demographic characteristics, attitudes, opinions, social trends, behavior patterns, and other aspects of, or tendencies in, human populations. Our methodological orientation was in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. We had a major paper in Social Studies of Science, entitled “Toward a Sociology of Social Scientific Knowledge: Survey Research and Ethnomethodology’s Asymmetric Alternates” (2000), and (with two other scholars from the Netherlands), we co-edited a book, Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview. (New York: Wiley Interscience, 2002). We made presentations at the Holtz Center brownbag seminars. We also published a number of other papers related to the production of social scientific findings and knowledge, including one in our mainstay sociological journal (the American Sociological Review), and a companion piece in the prime journal for survey research methodology, Public Opinion Quarterly.

Later, and still in affiliation with the Holtz Center, I had an NSF-supported study regarding the testing and diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. This involved a number of Research Assistants from the Sociology Department, and one Post-doctorate fellow. We had a lab supported by, and at the Waisman Center on campus. Again, we did a number of presentations at the Holtz Center, and the Center supported travel to ASA and SSSS meetings for the grad students. From this project, we have published over a dozen single- or co-authored papers, and Jason Turowetz and I wrote a book entitled, “Autistic Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). We—Turowetz and also the former post-doc, Waverly Duck (who are both on the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara—are still engaged in collaborative research from this project, and I am working on a monograph about he language and logics of autism. Holtz Center financial support and its forum for presentations have been invaluable for this long and still ongoing research project.

During these years, I was mostly teaching classes and seminars on social psychology, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis, and I brought Science and Technology Studies into these classes, seminars, and more informal meetings as well.

My involvement in the Holtz Center predates the Center’s official establishment in 2001: an institutional milestone that illustrates the importance not only of “place” as the concept is now often used in the field of Science and Technology Studies, but also of the significance of place in the sense of local physical proximity.

According to my distant (and therefore foggy) memory, the Center began with a chance encounter that occurred in what is now the Sewell Social Science Building in the late 1990s. Prior to that, the Social Science Building was the home of the separate departments of Economics, Anthropology, and Sociology, while faculty members of the Department of the History of Science were housed elsewhere in dispersed locations across the UW campus. Under this arrangement, historians of science had no connection with faculty members from the Department of Sociology. For example, in my first two decades in the Sociology Department (where I joined the faculty in 1979), I myself had next to zero contact – intellectual or otherwise — with any of the university’s distinguished historians of science, despite my open interest in the sociology of science, the history of the social sciences, and Science Studies, which had by then emerged elsewhere as an exciting, international hub of theory and research on the relationship between science, technology, and society.

Like many space-minded deans, however, those at UW sometimes relocated departmental units – albeit more to economize on the availability of office space in different campus buildings than to comport with faculty research interests. As a comparably small department, History of Science was easier to relocate physically than many larger units; and by the 1990s some of its core faculty were moved into some recently-vacated offices on the 7th floor of the Social Science Building, within a stone’s throw of the Department of Sociology which occupied the 8th floor.

As new neighbors from different disciplinary lands, sociologists and historians of science naturally struck up casual conversations with one another as they rubbed shoulders daily in hallways and during elevator rides. From these conversations, historian of science Eric Schatzberg learned that I had a strong interest in the sociology of science and Science Studies. So (as I remember it) one day he came by my office to tell me about the pending Holtz gift to the University and to ask my opinion on whether there was sufficient common ground on which members of our two departments (and other potentially-interested UW faculty members) might build an interdisciplinary program of Science Studies, which at the time was nearly invisible on the campus. My immediate answer was “yes”; and from this initial conversation and many follow-up conversations with faculty members in our respective departments (and elsewhere on campus), there crystallized a plan, which the deans of the College of Letters and Sciences eventually approved, to establish the Robert and Jean Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies – a center where the intellectual contributions and tools of the disciplines of sociology and the history of science (both of them fields sometimes relegated to the periphery of Science Studies) would both play a central role.

To make the plan a reality, the deans assembled a steering committee (of which I was a member) to identify a distinguished scholar to serve as Director of the Center. The committee took up the charge; and after a careful national search, it successfully recruited to UW for this role Joan Fujimura, a leading scholar in both sociology and Science Studies (and, in 2023, winner of the coveted Bernal Prize, awarded by the Society for the Social Studies of Science), who set the Center on the thriving path it has since followed.

I obviously don’t know how the Holtz Center would have launched under local geographical circumstances different than those I’ve just attempted to recall. Perhaps its birth was overdetermined, and something like it would have emerged as well under other conditions. Even so, without the coincidental bringing together of scholars from the two previously separated Departments of Sociology and the History of Science within the same physical space — and the resulting regular, direct interaction between these new disciplinary neighbors — it seems unlikely to me that the start of the Holtz Center would have taken the unique and fruitful intellectual and institutional direction that it has.