Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life

On Friday, January 30, from 12 to 1:30 p.m., the research team for The City on Life Support: Los Angeles as a Laboratory for Planetary Health will hear a presentation by Sam Silva, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Population and Public Health Sciences. Silva will discuss his research on air quality and atmospheric chemistry, including his work on measuring toxic residues in the aftermath of the 2025 Eaton Fire. This event continues a series of presentations and site visits that are taking place over the course of the academic year featuring faculty from numerous component schools of USC. Each talk brings scientists and practitioners into dialogue with humanistic social scientists to explore objects of shared concern.

If you are interested in taking part — or in getting involved with “The City on Life Support” more broadly — please write to James Bradley, Postdoctoral Researcher with STPL, at jamesb20@usc.edu for more information.

During the spring semester, STPL is convening a group of USC faculty around the theme of “Simulation as a Technology of Knowledge Production.” It will join humanists and social scientists, whose work reflects critically on how simulations generate provisional knowledge about the future, with a set of practitioners of simulation. Activities will include a series of visits to sites where simulation techniques are being developed — in climate futures, biotechnology, world-building, and other domains.

The project emerges from a set of empirical and conceptual questions: We are faced with myriad societal challenges that require anticipating an uncertain future. Technical experts and policymakers rely in part on simulations and models to help plan in the face of such uncertainty. But exactly how do simulations and model-making techniques perform this work of anticipation in fields ranging from urban planning to resource management to private-sector consulting? What epistemic assumptions are built into these tools of simulation? How do the designers of simulations make decisions about the ways their anticipated futures will unfold? And how, in turn, do strategic actors draw on simulations in defining the course of future action? This project will critically address the social and political implications of such technical practices of future-making.

If you are interested in getting involved with this project, please write to Peter Ekman, STPL’s Coordinator of Programs, at pekman@usc.edu for more information.

Christina Dunbar-Hester, Professor of Communication, published an article titled “Pin the Tail on the Researcher: From Distributed to Meshy Accountability in Decentralized Social Media” in the Journal of Community Informatics.

Tara McPherson, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, has received three additional years of grant funding for the Reclaim Project, a student-centered research initiative concerning stereotypes of masculinity and the role of progressive media. It is part of the larger Data Fluencies project based at Simon Fraser University. Previous work from the project has been featured in film festivals and gallery exhibitions.

Mike Ananny, Associate Professor Communication and Journalism, published an article titled “AI Governance as Scale Work: Synthetic Journalism Across Scalar Collisions” in Information, Communication & Society. With Matt Pearce of Rebuild Local News, he published “How We’re Using AI,” a Columbia Journalism Review edited collection of leading journalists, technologists, publishers, and policymakers reflecting on their relationships to Generative Artificial Intelligence. During the spring semester, Ananny is the Orion Visiting Scholar in the Arts in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Andrew Lakoff, STPL’s Director and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, published an essay titled “A Regulatory State of Exception,” on the politics of vaccine approval during the Covid-19 pandemic, in the collection An Anthropology of Global Immunization: Vaccine Politics and Realities in Ethnographic Perspective (Berghahn, 2026), edited by Rebecca Irons, Sahra Gibbon, Joanna Cook, and Aaron Parkhurst.

STPL Director Andrew Lakoff’s most recent book, Planning for the Wrong Pandemic: Covid-19 and the Limits of Expert Knowledge, was recently released in the U.S. by Polity Press.

Peter Ekman, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture and STPL’s Coordinator of Programs, has just published his first book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America’s Postwar Urbanism, with Cornell University Press.

Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and Environmental Studies, recently published an article in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East titled “Precarious Petroleum: Volatile Reservoirs, Varied Natural Gas Compositions, and Development in 1960s Iran.”