c:o/re Fellow 01/25 – 12/25
Hannah Star Rogers is a scholar, curator, and theorist of art-science. She does research on the knowledge categories of art and science using interdisciplinary Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) methods. Rogers is the author of Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press 2022), and the lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (2021), as well as the curator for six major art-science exhibitions. Rogers next book is an edited collection with Rowman and Littlefield, What Curators Know: Art and Science in the Museum, forthcoming in 2025.
STS by Material Means
Most STS scholars work with text, but what if there was another way? By Material Means investigates science and technology-engaged artists practicing STS using materials. These artists share in STS’s concerns: who gets to set the agenda of science, participate in its workings, how science creates and maintains its knowledge corpus, and related power structures. Equally importantly, STS scholars’ thematic concerns: how metaphors and ideas about human ability to intervene shape our understanding of climate change (Catt’s Autotroph, 2010; Sobecka’s Cloud Machine, 2012), how gender and surveillance align around pregnant bodies (subRosa’s SmartMom, 1999), corporate and military control of science (®TMark’s Mutual Funds 2000; CAE’s The Marching Plague 2006), how the role and reuse of model organisms shapes laboratory biology (Zaretsky’s WorkHorse Zoo, 2002), and DNA “fingerprinting” and proprietary enzyme use by crime labs (Vanouse’s Latent Figure Protocol, 2007-2009), and a plurality of other issues.
By examining a series of artworks engaged with science and technology subjects in relation to STS scholarship which deals with related subjects, this project argues that many core STS ideas are being represented through materials by communities of contemporary artists. Reading art and STS together has the potential to unlock new doors to our understanding of the ways knowledge is produced and verified and the ways that STS might learn from work with materials on subjects already in its wheelhouse. As I argued in Art, Science and the Politics of Knowledge, these categories are produced by their respective networks of people, institutions, and objects capable of producing and verifying knowledge. Art and science can be studied in the STS tradition of following the people to understand the practices but the use of the terms by relevant actors must also be considered. This project investigates the factors which make these radical transitions in interpretation possible.
Publications (selection)
Rogers, Hannah Star. 2024. What art can show STS about oil: Engaging spillover’s anthropocene landscapes. In: History and Technology: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2024.2431372 
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Rogers, Hannah Star, Hussey, Kristin Diana, Whiteley, Louise, Bencard, Adam, Gad, Christopher and Eduardo Abrantes. 2023. Curating Complexities in Art, Science, and Medicine: Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) in Public Practice. In: STS Encounters 15(2).
Rogers, Hannah Star. 2022. Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Rogers, Hannah Star, Hannah, Delia, Halpern, Megan K. and Kathryn de Ridder-Vigone (eds.) 2021. Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies. New York: Routledge.
Rogers, Hannah Star. 2020. STS by Material Means: Art Critiquing Science. In: Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies, eds. by Henk Borgdorff, Peter Peters, and Trevor Pinch. New York: Routledge.
