Symposium Overview

The Center’s 25th anniversary symposium took place on April 30-May 1, 2026. The two-day event provided a timely opportunity to reflect on the vocabularies and frameworks that can be used to make sense of the current and future social contract of science, technology, higher education and the state more broadly. The symposium opened space for dialogue and debate regarding recent policy and political shifts, and showcase the heterogeneity of perspectives about what STS thinking can bring to science and technology research and development across campus and beyond. 

As the University of Wisconsin–Madison responds to shifts that impact scientific knowledge and technological innovation on campus, the symposium provided an apt moment to reimagine the role of STS research and education. By accounting for the specificities of Wisconsin political history and political culture, the symposium explored how STS at UW–Madison can meaningfully make sense of shifting relationships between science and democracy as well as science and “the public good.” 

The symposium also offered an occasion to reflect on how individuals and intellectual currents at UW–Madison have grappled with various issues related to science-society dynamics in the past, including decades before the formal establishment of the Holtz Center in 2001. In the past 175 years and especially during the early and mid-20th century, a unique history of knowledge production unfolded in specific parts of UW–Madison that can today be labeled as “proto-STS” or STS-adjacent.

Various aspects of thinking and research on campus have at different moments reckoned with the complex relationship between science and society, including in relation to knowledge produced at the university itself. More notably, they have had significant impact not only on public discourses on the role of intellectuals and expert knowledge in democratic society, but also in the formulation of institutional arrangements between universities and state agencies here in Wisconsin and beyond.

Above all, the symposium highlighted the power of STS thinking in providing unique analytical depth regarding the challenges facing higher education as well as science and technology more broadly at the contemporary conjuncture while simultaneously making sense of how this conjuncture itself will affect the future of STS research and education in the UW System and beyond.