ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–All Abstracts

1. Accommodating A Plurality Of Values When Engaging Emerging Technologies In Sustainability Transitions – On Designing For Safety And Security In A Warming World

Pim Klaassen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Megan Palmer, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University

Climate change is a wicked problem [1], which many hope technological innovation will effectively resolve. Technologists themselves frequently claim their work will help pull off sustainability transitions successfully, e.g. to keep the temperature rise within acceptable limits [2] or feed the 10 billion people projected to inhabit Earth by 2050 [3].

However, many factors complicate technologists’ hopeful stories [4]. Firstly, techno-scientific developments will interact reciprocally with perceptions of societal values and needs, whether associated with climate change or not. Insofar as these perceptions diverge, so will the acceptance of technologies, affecting their potential impacts. Secondly, technological developments’ shape and direction is contingent on market and political constraints. This can compromise future technologies’ capacity to serve public interests well, irrespective of any good intentions behind them [5]. Finally, technologies that serve one specific goal – such as mitigating climate change – risk (unwittingly) justifying all means. Solving one problem then potentially means creating others [6,7].

Contributions to this session shed light on how to resolve value conflicts that arise where emerging technologies feature in sustainability transitions, e.g. to sustainable agriculture or a circular- or bio-economy [8]. While focusing on accommodating safety and security to sustainability [9], values like democracy, equality or justice are not excluded. We welcome contributions using transdisciplinary (possibly arts-based) methods geared towards bridging gaps between science, society, policy and industry [10,11]. Since technologies cannot realize sustainability transitions by themselves, we stimulate contributions presenting novel narratives of change, while refiguring the problem space of safety, security and sustainability [12].

References

[1]          Hulme, M. (2009). Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

[2]          Keith, D. W., & Irvine, P. J. (2016). Solar geoengineering could substantially reduce climate risks—A research hypothesis for the next decade. Earth’s Future, 4(11), 549-559.

[3]          Haraway, D., & Endy, D. (2019). Tools for Multispecies Futures. Journal of Design and Science. https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/q04b4o74

[4]          Groves, C. (2019). Sustainability and the future: reflections on the ethical and political significance of sustainability. Sustainability Science, 14(4), 915-924.

[5]          Stilgoe, J. (2018). Machine learning, social learning and the governance of self-driving cars. Social Studies of Science 48(1). doi.org/10.1177/0306312717741687

[6]          Van de Poel, I. (2015). Conflicting values in design for values. Handbook of ethics, values, and technological design: Sources, theory, values and application domains, pp.89-116.

[7]          Hulme, M. (2020). Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)? An editorial. WIREs Clim Change, doi:10.1002/wcc.619

[8]          Lynch, D., Klaassen, P. & Broerse, J.E.W. (2016). Unraveling Dutch citizens’ perceptions on the bio-based economy: the case of bioplastics, bio-jetfuels and small-scale bio-refineries. Industrial Crops and Products. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.indcrop.2016.10.035.

[9]          Millett P., Binz T., Evans S.W., Kuiken T., Oye K., Palmer M.J., Yambao K., Yu S., van der Vlugt C. (2019). Developing a Comprehensive, Adaptive and International Biosafety and Biosecurity Program for Advanced Biotechnology: The iGEM Experience. Applied Biosafety 24(2). doi.org/10.1177/1535676019838075

[10]        Klaassen, P., Verwoerd, L., Kupper, F. & Regeer, B. (in press) Reflexive Monitoring in Action as a methodology for learning and enacting Responsible Research and Innovation. In Yaghmaei, E. & I. van de Poel (ed.), Assessment of Responsible Innovation: methods and practices. London: Routledge.

[11]        van der Meij, M.G., Heltzel, A.A.L.M., Broerse, J.E.W. et al. (2018) Frame Reflection Lab: a Playful Method for Frame Reflection on Synthetic Biology. Nanoethics (2018) 12: 155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-018-0318-9

[12]        Loorbach, D., Avelino, F., Haxeltine, A., Wittmayer, J. M., O’Riordan, T., Weaver, P., & Kemp, R. (2016). The economic crisis as a game changer? Exploring the role of social construction in sustainability transitions. Ecology and Society, 21(4). https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08761-210415

Contact: p.klaassen@vu.nl

Keywords: climate change, emerging technologies, sustainability, safety and security, transdisciplinarity

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

2. Aesthetic Interventions: Exploring emerging worlds through art

Regula Valérie Burri, HCU – HafenCity University Hamburg; Joseph Dumit, UC Davis

This panel explores art interventions into sociomaterial worlds and their implications for STS. It draws on the assumption that the complexity of emerging worlds requires innovative modes of approaching and engaging with these worlds. Building on recent discussions of the potential of art in exploring the nexus of science, technology, and society (Salter, Burri & Dumit 2017, Sormani, Garbone & Gisler 2019), we aim to further this conversation.

The visual and aesthetic dimensions of scientific knowledge production have been discussed in STS for a long time. More recently, art in particular has attracted more attention by STS scholars who have addressed connections and boundaries between art and STS, relations between science, art, publics, and democracy, and project collaborations between scientists and artists. In this panel, we explore art in/as STS research. Art may serve as a way to express feelings of unease, confusion and powerlessness while at the same time has the potential to critically reflect sociomaterial developments and challenge power structures. By engaging with such issues, art interventions into emerging worlds are a form of “acting now”. In this panel, we aim to discuss in what ways art may open up grounds for realigning and adding to STS practices.

We welcome contributions that reflect on the potential of art in exploring emerging sociomaterial worlds. We are interested in both theoretical papers discussing the implications of art in/as STS research, and presentations of art practices / projects / interventions that examine science and technology driven realities of our times.

Contact: regula.burri@hcu-hamburg.de

Keywords: science and art, art and STS, art research, methods, knowledge

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

3. AI through an education perspective: concerns, potentials, and trade-offs

Rodrigo Barbosa e Silva, Stanford University; Ana Carolina Goes Machado, Stanford University

Educators, policymakers, and civil society have attempted to address the complex phenomena behind the continuous advancement of artificial intelligence. Several educational systems currently use AI to promote personalization, adapt content to different learning styles, and to understand student characteristics. These AI applications have raised ethical concerns, such as data protection, fairness, and equity. Should we allow data processing on learner behavior, history, and actions? What biases does AI mirror, and how do these biases affect students?

We are interested in ways that Science, Technology, and Society practitioners can interpret and act on AI developments for  improving student educational achievement when considering the risks and social concerns. Paraphrasing Paulo Freire, how can we have an educational system as a practice of freedom, when taking into account the latest (ab)uses of AI in education and society at large?

National strategic plans, universities, social movements, and organizations around the world have begun to create specific programs to take steps towards an understanding of AI as a matter of public concern. Historically, STS scholars have warned of potential benefits, trade-offs, and risks of technologies. We invite submissions on AI as it applies to education and policy including but not limited to:

Emerging issues

Data fairness and equity

Ethical aspects of commercial platforms in Education

Power relations, control, and agency

International trends: how different countries address freedom, control, classification, and critical thinking

Public policy on AI and Education

Engagement in civil society and policymaking at large amidst the dynamics of “alternative facts” in AI?

Contact: rodrigo7@stanford.edu

Keywords: education, artificial intelligence, public policy, critical pedagogy

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Governance and Public Policy

4. Alchemical Transformations: On Matters of Substance and Change

Bradley Jones, Washington University in St. Louis; Heather Paxson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

This panel explores transformation through the lens of alchemy. We conceptualize alchemy capaciously, emphasizing acts of transubstantiation in which matter undergoes physical and discursive change, thereby acquiring new value, vitality, or meaning. Medieval alchemists sought to transform base into noble metals through proto-scientific practices. Catholic Christians convert bread into the body of Christ though ceremonial consecration. Alchemical transformations abound. Fermentation and prescribed fire, DIY drug labs and biotech benches, compost teas and artisan cheese: everywhere are transitions of raw to cooked (Lévi-Strauss), profane to sacred, waste to worth, and rot to regeneration—not necessarily in that order, not necessarily for the good. Alchemical change occurs at the levels of substance and symbol. It is mediated by rituals, regulations, institutional regimes, and technical apparatuses. Of interest are black boxes and boundary objects—occult or opaque technologies of transformation and the mutable materials that traverse them. Alchemical transformation invites examination of matters at once ontological, political, epistemological, and ethical.

We seek papers that explore alchemical transformations, material and metaphoric, that are attentive to matters of concern as well as care (Latour, Puig de la Bellacasa). What is modern alchemy, and how might alchemical transformations inform our understanding of (alter) scientific practices, bio-capitalism, ecologies of production, intra-action, and social change? We strive to bring decolonial and feminist science studies into dialogue with “alternative” sciences to better understand processes of transformation and the agency of STS (its subjects and objects) in a time of accelerating change and emerging worlds.

Contact: bradleyjones@wustl.edu

Keywords: Alchemy, Feminist STS, Transformation, Matter, Meaning

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

5. Alternative Knowing Spaces

Henk Borgdorff, Leiden University; Sven Dupré, Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands; Peter Peters, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands

Alluding to the ‘end of the cognitive empire’ (De Sousa Santos), this open panel focuses on how alternative ways of knowing are practiced in a variety of disciplinary, cultural, regional and historical contexts. In the humanities and social sciences mainstream research cultures are increasingly supplemented or amended by alternative epistemologies, questioning the dominance of propositional forms of knowing. In line with the agenda of this conference, these alternative ‘knowing spaces’ (Law) share an interest in the constitutive role of practices and things, in participatory and collaborative experiments that engage with matters of public concern, and in inclusivity with regard to the agencies and voices of the people involved in the generation of knowledge and understanding.

What do ‘knowledge’ and ‘discursivity’ mean in these enhanced and performative epistemic cultures? And what consequences does this entail for the way people document, share and disseminate research? Through this open panel, we hope to advance these fundamental questions by tracing and discussing concrete knowledge practices and how they stabilize over time – or not – in research fields and traditions, ranging from visual ethnography and artistic research to the history of knowledge and 4E-cognitive sciences. We invite papers touching upon one or more approaches, including but not limited to re-enactment and reconstruction, citizen science and ‘epistemologies of the South’, co-creation and artistic work, enactivism and activism, with a focus on how knowledge and understanding are generated, stabilized and shared in these fields of investigation.

Contact: h.a.borgdorff@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Keywords: knowing spaces, alternative epistemologies, artistic research, discursivity, epistemic cultures’

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

6. AMR in Globalized Economies: Knowledge, Regulation, Markets

Henri Boullier, INRA – IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine; Nicolas Fortané, INRA – IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine

Over recent years, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become a central global health issue, as well as a stimulating object of inquiry for STS scholars. The development of resistant bacteria impacts our possible futures in a world deprived of (working) antibiotics and raises a lot of questions about contemporary healthcare and food systems, innovation and circulation of medicines, medical and veterinary practices in a globalized world. This panel wants to bring together scholars studying AMR and proposes to follow three lines of research:

(1) by focusing on the controversies that have emerged in and structured the field of AMR, which often take the form of attempts to draw a line between medical and veterinary uses (e.g. with the notion of “critically important antimicrobials”) or to put the blame on end-users’ shoulders (e.g. with the concept of “antimicrobial stewardship”);

(2) by investigating the policies and expertise that have been set up to mitigate AMR risks (national and regional plans, surveillance and monitoring systems, etc.), in particular those promoted by prominent international organizations which tend to produce knowledge without taking local specificities into account (e.g. policies framed through the northern concern of fighting antibiotic “excess” while “access” remains the major issue for southern countries);

(3) by studying circulation of antibiotics in a globalized world, through, for instance, the trade of animal products (basic standards or “antibiotic-free”) or industry strategies on pharmaceutical markets in the North and South (e.g. regarding the articulation of formal and informal distribution channels or the mechanisms of price formation).

Contact: h.boullier@gmail.com

Keywords: AMR, antibiotics, expertise, public health, pharmaceutical industry

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

7. Applied Interdisciplinary Sustainable Transitions Research

Ruth Woods, Dept. of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, NTNU; Antti Silvast Silvast, Dept. of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, NTNU

Academic scholars examining sustainable transitions are increasingly working across disciplines and professions, in order to address complex and multidimensional issues facing contemporary societies and their infrastructures. The turn to interdisciplinary research is seemingly at home within multidisciplinary research institutes and research projects, where industry partnerships and innovation strategies are high upon the agenda. They are locations where STS intervenes and tries to be relevant in situations at hand. Focusing on sustainable transitions this panel examines the challenges of solution centered applications. Inspired by an interest in the production of scientific knowledge and its use in interdisciplinary research, we want to create a space for practitioners and scholars to reflect upon their own concepts and practices when working in interdisciplinary teams. The panel seeks presentations that scope, for example: what type of knowledge is required by the ‘end users’ of anthropological or sociological skills? What ethnographic locations are found within interdisciplinary collaborations? How do we get to know the end user needs and does problem solving challenge STS’s own premises? Or is it rising to the challenge of solving problems posed by other disciplines and engaging in their critical debates? Which actors do we want to speak and act with and which want to speak and act with us? We welcome presentations from different geographical and research contexts, highlighting the diversity of engagement between disciplines, and professional groups involved in sustainable transitions.

Contact: ruth.woods@ntnu.no

Keywords: Applied, Interdisciplinary, Sustainable Transitions Research

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Energy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

8. Approaching the Digital Anthropocene

James Maguire, IT University Copenhagen; Rachel Douglas Jones, IT University Copenhagen; Astrid Andersen, Aalborg University

It is becoming increasingly more difficult to address digital questions without considering how they overlap and intersect with environmental concerns. We make the digital from the natural world, crafting metals and plastics into sleek handheld forms, while powering our data through vast quantities of energy consumption. We observe and make our understandings of environments through digital devices, spreadsheet accounting and carbon calculations. We have brought epochal shifts into being through rhetoric, disciplines, and geological measures. The Anthropocene is a digitally mediated and produced time.

Yet the ‘we’ of these statements is an unevenly distributed set of actors, and the politics of producing (knowledge of) the Digital Anthropocene are pressing. From planetary observation and oceanic measurement to marine tailings, the appropriation of precious metals and labors of pollution, anthropogenic knowledge is deeply woven in with computation, tools, media and devices. It is also constituted through histories of colonialism, political economy, and ways of being in and knowing the world.

This panel invites scholars with an interest in the manifold interfaces and overlaps between and within the environmental and the digital. Our aspiration is to begin a conversation on how researchers can approach what we are provocatively calling the Digital Anthropocene. We invite papers from those who are already conducting research at this interface, as well as those who are interested in contributing to the generation of an ambitious and newly emerging field within STS.

Contact: jmag@itu.dk

Keywords: digitalization, anthropocene, temporality, politics, environmental knowledge making

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

9. Articulating and Relating to Different Forms of the Good in Bad Situations

Jeannette Pols, Amsterdam UMC/University of Amsterdam; Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent, Amsterdam University Medical Centers; Jonna Brenninkmeijer, Amsterdam UMC; Maartje Hoogsteyns, Amsterdam UMC; Stephanie Meirmans, Amsterdam UMC; Annemarie van Hout, Hogeschool W

Unsafe healthcare, climate disasters, migration threats, scientific misconduct – all tend to steer our focus towards fear and critical analyses of things that are overwhelmingly and singularly bad. With our present day challenges requiring urgent action, how to not get carried away by the urgency to act? How not to overlook everyday, situated efforts of forms of the good already going on and ways in which we can articulate the good in its different guises? What would happen when we analyse ‘wicked problems’ by picking out the forms of goodness and badness that are inscribed in such calls for alarm? And even more intriguing: what good might these challenges also bring?

In this panel we explore how forms of the good are constantly shaped and articulated by the people and things we study, and also by ourselves as researchers. What imaginations and repertoires for acting and doing research can such articulations open up? How does it transform understandings of how we might act, and in what terms could this be labelled as ‘good’? And how difficult is it to act or not to act with forms of the good? How can empirical ethics be a way to tell a different story than the stories of overwhelming alarm for problems that clearly exceed individual agency?

We welcome contributions that focus on good care, good (environmental) living, good education or good science, and also explicitly welcome contributions from other empirical domains and ‘overwhelming’ problems.

Contact: s.jerak-zuiderent@amsterdamumc.nl

Keywords: Forms of the good, Empirical Ethics, Care

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Medicine and Healthcare

Other

10. Artificial Africa: Seeing urban algorithms through infrastructure, labour, justice and aesthetics

Kerry Holden, Queen Mary, University of London; Matthew Harsh, Cal Poly; Ravtosh Bal, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science are taking off in African cities, and with it, a new incarnation of development policy and practice is emerging. Following knowledge for development and ICT4D, AI4D targets transport, health and finance in anticipation of transforming African societies. The resultant problems with AI typical of debate in the Global North are also anticipated to impact African societies: displacement of labour, data protection and privacy, bias in algorithms and so on. We aim to move away from the idea that doing technoscience in African cities generates artificial social realities that are dislodged and disassociated from more authentic experience. In challenging the assumed universalism of AI, we invite paper proposals exploring four critical dimensions: infrastructure, justice, labour and aesthetics. What kinds of materialities support algorithmic-life in Africa, and how do tensions in the extension of critical infrastructure become points of creativity and vulnerability? What counts as the everyday work of data science and to what extent does it subvert the distinction between informal and formal labour that has long characterised studies of work in African cities? Does data science make possible a regenerative, ground-up form of justice in which un-alienated value circulates? What are the aesthetics of artificial intelligence in African cities and how are technoscientific futures infused with socio-political imaginaries? How do art and fiction provide alternative future-scapes? We hope to open up scope for critical interventions that rethink the relationship between knowledge, technoscience and society in Africa.

Contact: k.holden@qmul.ac.uk

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Africa, Afrofutures, infrastructure, labour

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

11. Assessing Policy Mechanism of “Avoiding Group/Community Harm”

Shirley Sun, Nanyang Technological University

This panel seeks to examine the principle of “avoiding group/community harm” and assess whether this research ethics policy mechanism is adequate to prevent/reduce harm for the minority populations/groups. Because of their position in society, some groups may be at risk of experiencing harm from research.  For example, the usage of race and ethnicity in human genome variation studies has been demonstrated to be problematic (Benjamin, 2009; Bliss, 2011; Duster, 2015; Hinterberger, 2012; M’Charek, 2013; Tallbear, 2013).  Nonetheless, such usage persists.  For example, the National Human Genetic Research Institute (NHGRI) is engaged in race/ethnicity-labeled population genomic research and funds projects such as “National Cooperative Study of Hereditary Prostate Cancer in African Americans”, and “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder among Hispanic Children”. Such projects are also shaping the future of precision medicine.

The problem of potential harm to human subjects at the group level is typically handled by resorting to the research ethical framework of “avoiding group harm”. In practice, researchers typically seek local ethics board review, hold consultations with concerned group(s), disclose research results ahead of time, and ensure benefits are made available to the groups.  Nonetheless, de Vries et al. (2012) has shown that if genomic research is conducted on groups that are already experiencing stigma and discrimination, such studies still impose greater harm than good on these groups. 

Given de Vries et al. (2012)’s finding, it is important that we paying attention to hidden harms to groups, instead of thinking that the policy mechanism has addressed the problem.  Historical, contemporary, theoretical and/or empirical papers on how members of groups may be vulnerable in research and identify strategies that stakeholders can take are all welcome.

Contact: hlsun@ntu.edu.sg

Keywords: Group harm, minority population, special population, vulnerability, race/ethnicity

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

12. Asymmetrical Confluence: Justice, Inclusion, and the Quest for Health Equity

Sarah Blacker, Department of Anthropology, York University; Melissa Creary, University of Michigan, School of Public Health

The intentional inclusion of historically underrepresented and marginalized groups in the design of clinical trials, public health initiatives, and biomedical therapies has been an ignored practice. Today, however, a new paradigm has opened up within which public health, genomics, and precision medicine initiatives have begun to prioritize the inclusion of marginalized groups–often at the prompting of funding agencies (Lee, 2019). How are biomedicine’s aspirational visions of a new era of inclusion and justice playing out on the ground?

Bounded justice (Creary) is a biopolitical and bioethical concept that illuminates how programs, policies, and technologies focused on justice (usually through so-called inclusionary actions) do so without recognizing how the beneficiaries have historically embodied the cumulative effects of marginalization, thus undermining the effectiveness of the intended justice.  This panel invites papers that make empirical and theoretical contributions to the intersectional, interdisciplinary viewpoints of how bounded justice is produced through biomedical and public health initiatives in neo-, settler, and postcolonial contexts. What are the ways in which inclusionary means towards health equity may undermine the (re)producibility of justice?  What does this intention towards inclusion say about the quantification of differential life worth (Murphy, 2017)?  How do technoscience projects “innovate inequity” (Benjamin, 2016)?  What is the role of researchers in working with communities to help create space for justice without bounds?  To interrogate the means and ends of STS in different places, we particularly welcome papers that pose questions about the complicated assumptions of justice in the global south.

Contact: sblacker@yorku.ca

Keywords: justice, public health, biomedicine, postcolonial/decolonial STS; global south; health equity

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

13. Be(com)ing industrial:  objects, scales, and power dynamics at play

Benjamin Raimbault, Institute For Research and Innovation in Society; Mathieu Baudrin, CSI-Ecole Des Mines De Paris

Since the organization of the sugar cane plantations, industrial processes have colonized not only the model of manufacturing production, but also logistics, bio-objects, and the digital world. The common statement describing the service and digital societies as post-industrial ones is weakened by the continuous expansion of industrial processes where the know-how to make things, people, processes, more scalable and more profitable.

In the STS literature, industries have been much more discussed regarding their role in risk and pollution than regarding their specific regimes of constitution and perpetuation. This panel intends dealing with contemporary industrial processes through a twofold questioning:

1/ How scalability can be studied in the making? What kind of knowledge are produced to make things and tasks scalable? How do industrial processes articulate initial projects, international norms and cost evaluation? What does it do to the objects, to persons and spaces that are absorbed in those processes?

2/ How do industries define themselves across time? How economic interests emerge? How techno-industrial assemblages are reshaped through critical moments? Being an industry is not as obvious that it may be, it requires a process of self-definition, collective identification, political representation, that can’t be taken for granted. The ability to identify what are the core and might shift across time to preserve the industry facing controversies.

This panel invites empirical and theoretical papers that document or help to answer to one or more of these questions.

Contact: raimbault.benjamin6@gmail.com

Keywords: Scalability-industrial processes-extension and maintenance of techno-industrial assemblage

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

14. Borders in the Anthropocene: Transformations of Climates, Human and Nonhuman Mobility, and the Politics of the Earth

Huub Dijstelbloem, University of Amsterdam; Polly Pallister-Wilkins, University of Amsterdam

This panel engages with the matter of the border in the Anthropocene. STS studies show that networks of humans, technologies and nature form the earth where we live, but are often left out of the political representation of this world. But how do these hybrid networks affect borders and the trinity of states, territory and sovereignty? How should borders be conceived in the Anthropocene when international mobility is increasingly concerned with nonhuman entities? 

“Borders in the Anthropocene” asks attention for the emergence of new kinds of migrants and new categories of migration such as climate migration and environmental refugees as well as new categories of disasters and humanitarian and security issues related to the Anthropocene. The panel investigates the transformation of borders in landscapes and seascapes, such as the role of borders in the Arctic, border surveillance in the Sahara or the emergence of new migration routes in mountain regions. “Borders in the Anthropocene” analyzes the hybrid nature of these transformations, the way these transformations are monitored and how information systems are set up to register mobility in the Anthropocene, varying from human migration to health surveillance, travelling pathogens and the circulation of species.  

The panel aims to bring scholars together who study the transformation of borders in the Anthropocene and engage with climate change, environmental disasters, epidemics, the geopolitics of the earth and the circulation of people and all kinds of nonhuman entities. “Borders in the Anthropocene” welcomes empirical, conceptual and normative contributions as well as visual presentations, artistic work and political interventions.

Contact: dijstelbloem@gmail.com

Keywords: Borders, Anthropocene, Migration, Politics, Nonhumans

Categories: Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

15. Broken and livable futures with automated decision-making

Tuukka Lehtiniemi, University of Helsinki; Minna Ruckenstein, University of Helsinki

The growing use of automated decision-making (ADM) makes automation increasingly relevant to the lived experience of people, with examples ranging from credit scoring and predictive policing to self-care within health services and automated content moderation. A technological imaginary favours the strengthening of existing infrastructures with ADM: it is characterized by political-economic aims of efficiency and optimization. A critical imaginary, in contrast, questions technological developments: recent research details problematic aspects of ADM systems, for instance, their connections to discrimination and inequalities, and their lack of transparency and accountability.

Our panel concentrates on re-articulating ways in which ADM systems are currently described and debated. To make possible a creative move beyond the dominant logics of automation driven by the technological imaginary, scholars themselves should bypass their critical imaginary and explore alternative conceptualizations and frameworks. Therefore, we seek to open a practical and analytical space for the re-articulation of ADM systems and their effects. We expect papers to demonstrate that new socio-technical directions are possible, bringing into being ADM futures that we would rather live in. Various theoretical or methodological approaches might be employed, including broken world thinking to highlight breakdown, dissolution and change as starting points in discussing ADM (Jackson, 2014); situated interventions that experimentally engage with ADM practices to produce new normative directions (Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015); or feminist approaches offering alternative ways to care for socio-technical arrangements (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012). Together, the papers can reinvigorate research on ADM systems and identify harms and benefits that are currently not addressed.

Contact: tuukka.lehtiniemi@iki.fi

Keywords: Automation, decision-making systems, technological imaginary, critical imaginary, socio-technical futures

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Big Data

16. Building digital bioethics: Transformations in theory and applied practice

Mustafa Ibraheem Hussain, University of California Irvine; Victoria Neumann, Lancaster University; Stephen Molldrem, University of California, Irvine

Technologies that facilitate the collection and use of electronic health data have increasingly become the tools used to diagnose conditions and administer services. Digital transformations are at the centre of scholarly critiques of power imbalances in healthcare, partly because developments in digital biomedicine have been accompanied by data misuse scandals and genuinely new bioethical problems. Just as scientific advancements and concomitant human rights violations in clinical research and practice led to the development of bioethics in the 20th century, the turn toward the digital in healthcare is giving rise to new transdisciplinary trends in the theory and practice of contemporary bioethics (e.g. Klugman et al., 2018).

In this open panel, we aspire to deepen conversations between theoretical and applied approaches in bioethics, and call for contributions aimed at “building digital bioethics.” Inspired by the work of critical bioethicists (see “bioethics of the oppressed” by Guta et al., 2018 and Benjamin, 2016), we solicit contributions in keeping with the STS commitment to centering  subaltern perspectives, and to bioethics’ grounding principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice (Belmont Report, 1976). How can emancipation and self-determination become possible in an area in which individual control is often reduced to check-box “consent”? Who is the digital bioethicist? What are digital bioethics? We welcome submissions including, but not limited to, the following:

Digital bioethical imaginaries and controversies

Feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, and queer positions in bioethics

The ethics of consent and data (re-use)

Governing digital biomedicine

Counter-hegemonic practices

Organizational transformation

The assetization of health data

Contact: mihussai@uci.edu

Keywords: Bioethics, Data, Governance, Health, Biomedicine

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Big Data

Governance and Public Policy

17. Building Digital Public Sector

Marta Choroszewicz, University of Eastern Finland; Marja Alastalo, University of Eastern Finland

Public institutions across Europe and beyond are investing effort and money to intensify data collection and the use of data-analytics across various welfare domains for reasons of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. New data-driven technologies transform public services in many ways and at many levels, from transactional situations to management and knowledge production practices. Public sector has countless experiments under way with its business partners to forge and deploy data processing infrastructures and technologies to enable data-driven decision and policy making. The shift toward automated decision-making challenges the traditional relationship between the state and its citizens, and possibly leads to a variety of tensions and inequalities. Nonetheless, we still know little as far as how new data-driven future of public services aligns with the mission of public sector based on democratic values and provision of social security to citizens.

This panel will focus on how data-analytics and AI systems are changing the existing welfare institutions and reshaping of welfare provision. The panel welcomes empirical, theoretical and methodological papers, though we are particularly keen to see ethnographic contributions that include, but are not limited to: 1) particular examples of use and implementation of data-analytics in public sector; 2) the activities and reasoning related to translation of social practices, public services and existing infrastructures into a data-driven mode, 3) collaboration between different groups of professionals across sectors involved in creating of data-drivenness, and 4) the power of data-analytics to allocate resources and thus enable or hinder citizens’ social participation.

Contact: marta.choroszewicz@uef.fi

Keywords: digital public sector, data-analytics, data-driven technologies, automated decision-making, inequalities

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Big Data

18. Can it Scale?: The scalability zeitgeist, entrepreneurial thinking, and the role of STS

Makoto Takahashi, Technical University Munich; Sebastian Michael Pfotenhauer, Technical University Munich; Brice Laurent, Ecole Des Mines De Paris; Gianluigi Viscusi, EPFL; Cian O’Donovan, University College London

Scalability is central to contemporary innovation discourses and, therefore, political and economic life. ‘Can it scale?’ Has become a cliche in venture capital firms and NGOs alike. Perhaps most prominent in discussions of platform technologies, big data, and new digital monopolies, scalability has also permeated public policy in the form of “grand societal challenges,” calls for “entrepreneurial statehood”, and scalable “living labs.” This panel questions scalability as a paradigm and ordering device in innovation and public policy. Our ambition is not to theorise scale, as geographers have long sought to do. Rather we aim to examine how actors mobilise and stabilise ideas of scale through their ‘scalable’ innovation instruments and practices, and the changing political economy associated with it. This opens the possibility of interrogating how actors mobilize, rationalize, and operationalize (the idea of) ‘scaling up’ and ‘scaling across’ space, and what it means to produce credible templates. Rather than repeating rehearsed objections to the very possibility of scalability, on the grounds that the local is irreducibly complex, this panel aims to work toward a new STS vocabulary for understanding and critiquing the entrepreneurial zeitgeist of scalability. We seek to open new avenues for enquiry, by attending to the practices through which spaces are hierarchically organised, like Russian-dolls, into scalar models of one another or ‘flattened’ into a single scalar register. The panel welcomes theoretical engagements with scalability, as well as efforts to broaden the STS toolkit for practically engaging with problems of participation, power, and justice at different scales.

Contact: mak.makoto.takahashi@gmail.com

Keywords: Scaling, Co-creation, Living labs, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Engineering and Infrastructure

19. Careful engagements

Doris Lydahl, University of Gothenburg; Niels Christian Nickelsen, Aarhus University, School of Education

During some time, interventionist research has become an important topic of conversation in STS (Zuiderent-Jerak 2015). This is important in a time where many research grants come with stipulations about partnership with actors outside academia. It appears that nobody offers clear advice on what to do or whom to turn to while engaging as a researcher in practice (Martin 2016).  Thus, in this panel, we will discuss dilemmas and ambitions to engage and intervene with STS. Jensen (2007) proposes to ‘sort’ the various attachments the researcher encounters to different parties in the studied field to be aware of which parties the research strengthens and weakens. This leads to a number of questions. What inequalities do we risk producing especially when there is funding involved? Are there ways to avoid these by engaging with care (Viseu 2015)? What tensions and struggles do we meet while engaging in practice? How does this affect academic work and output? There is not much doubt that considering closer engagement as a scholarly method for producing new STS-insights into our research topics is opposed to using strategic interventions for achieving normative goals defined by managers, professionals and researchers. We foresee that the prospect of engagement will help STS scholars to explore what it means to live in concerned communities. In addition, engaging as a STS researcher in practice undoubtedly evoke Howard Becker’s pivotal question “Whose side are we on?”

Contact: doris.lydahl@gu.se

Keywords: engagements, interventions, care

Categories: Other

20. Categories of Hatred: Unearthing algorithmic cultures of hate groups, marginalization, and surveillance of minorities

Melissa Adler, Western University; David Nemer, University of Virginia

Categories and classifications make algorithmic cultures possible. Unlike former bureaucratic classificatory technologies that assumed and insisted upon the stability of categories, the categories in Big Data machinery are on the move by design—shifting, modulating, defining, and redefining (Cheney-Lippold 2018). This modularity also functions to refine and tailor categories to their users and users to their categories. The consequences of these algorithmic functions depend upon their context—whether their purpose is policing or border patrol, selling goods and services, or organizing political movements. For example, one might argue that online hate groups gain power by specifying the characteristics of the targets of their hatred and installing those profiles within information communication technologies are intimately connected in and through algorithms, in vast, networked apparatuses that serve state capitalism. This panel will explore the use and formulation of categories in various contexts, including hate groups in instant messaging and social media platforms, surveillance of visible minorities, consumer profiles across different platforms, and so on. The panel has three primary aims: 1) To understand the ways that categories function in different algorithmic contexts and cultures. 2) To unearth the methods by which ICTs actively produce and refine categories, and to what ends. 3) To gather a sense of the role of categories in the interconnectedness of local and global contexts, governments, corporations, and militaries within and across ICTs.

Contact: nemer@virginia.edu

Keywords: hate group, classification, algorithm, social media, surveillance

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

21. Challenges of surveillance technologies in police and criminal justice systems

Sara Matos, University of Minho; Filipa Queirós, University of Minho; Aaron Amankwaa, Science & Justice RIG, Northumbria University; Ryanne Bleumink, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam

Over the past decades, threats of terrorism and organized crime, changes in crime pattern and the nature of legal issues, as well as irregular migration, have been used to legitimize major investments in technological surveillance mechanisms. These mechanisms create regimes of state regulation, surveillance and social control while simultaneously stimulating a culture of data collection and the construction of large information systems. This expansion of surveillance technologies raises major questions about their implications in both police practices and criminal justice systems. So far, the academic debate has been addressing how the use of these surveillance mechanisms may, on the one hand, enhance public security objectives, such as the resolution of crime, and on the other hand pose threats to citizenship and human rights, such as privacy, data protection, and presumption of innocence. The latter scholarship addresses how these technologies contribute to injustice, increased suspicion, and the criminalization of minority populations. Aiming to address democracy, citizenship, transparency, effectiveness/efficiency and accountability issues in the operation of surveillance technologies, this panel welcomes contributions that critically engage with governance patterns for surveillance mechanisms such as, but not exclusively, forensic DNA databases, phenotyping technologies, familial searching, big data, facial recognition systems and predictive policing within different national civic epistemologies. Particularly, how these surveillance mechanisms contribute to policing and criminal justice outcomes and reshape our lives and notions of democracy and citizenship. The original contribution of this panel is the generation of a balanced and research-informed framework to help address the challenges of surveillance technologies.

Contact: filipaqueiros@ics.uminho.pt

Keywords: surveillance technologies; civic epistemologies; policing; democracy; citizenship;

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Governance and Public Policy

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

22. Charismatic Technology: Promises and Perils

Francis Lim

In the last few decades scholars have intensified efforts to analyze and assess the deep connections between technology, society and human subjectivity. For example, David Nye’s (1994) work on the ‘technological sublime’ analyses the profound transformations of our relationship to technology in the present age, while David Noble (1999) argues that technology has become like a religion due to people’s faith on its role for human progress. Francis Lim (2009) proposes the concept of charismatic technology to describe ‘a feature of technology that inspires intense, and often unquestioned, confidence and optimism in it as the pre-eminent means for the improvement of our general quality of life’. The societal embedding of charismatic technology crucially involves the actions of powerful ‘technological clergy’ (e.g. scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, policymakers, state leaders, and intellectuals) which hold strong faith in technical solutions to humanity’s most challenging problems. The attraction of charismatic technology and the efforts of technological clergy have resulted in advances in technical solutions in diverse domains and fields such as medicine, biochemical sciences, artificial intelligence, big data, economy, environmental protection, ‘smart cities’, etc.

This panel seeks papers offering critical analyses on the political, cultural and economic circumstances that enable certain technologies to inspire strong belief in their powers, and how the technological clergy’s profound faith in technology such as strong AI, big data, precision medicine, quantum computing, etc., may result in new social configurations and inequalities, new challenges in governance, and deep moral dilemmas for humanity.

Contact: fkglim@ntu.edu.sg

Keywords: charismatic technology, theory, governance, social justice, inequality

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

23. China, Technology, Planetary Futures: Lessons for a World in Crisis?

David Tyfield, Lancaster University; Jamie Allen, Critical Media Lab; Andrew Chubb, Lancaster University

Two issues are set to become increasingly central in coming decades. First and foremost, amidst the Anthropocene, are issues of environmental crisis at planetary scale, and what this means for a global economy and associated model of science and innovation premised upon ever-accelerating exploitation of natural resources.  Secondly, and in comparison a highly neglected issue in mainstream (still largely Western) social science, is the rise of China.  But how these two issues will come together and shape the 21st century receives even less attention, even as their conjunction is likely to prove increasingly influential.  This is both an increasingly problematic oversight and a missed opportunity for insights that do not merely confirm relatively established, i.e. Euro-Atlanticist and short-termist, readings of the state of the ‘world’.  STS has much to contribute to the development of this missing analysis, not just because the construction of new environmental, infrastructural and technological (and, in particular, digital) innovations from and in China is already evident as a key dynamic. But also because of STS’s capacity to draw on empirical exploration that does not take theoretical categories as given but pursues development of new illuminating concepts adequate to a constantly changing socio-technical landscape of uncertain futures.  This panel thus invites contributions studying Chinese socio-technical projects (in China or overseas, e.g. via the Belt Road Initiative (BRI)) for insights into how these two ‘mega-trends’ may be coming together; and what may be learned from China, positively or negatively, to confront the current apparent impasse(s) regarding global crisis.

Contact: d.tyfield@lancaster.ac.uk

Keywords: China, Anthropocene, digital technology, infrastructure, futures

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Energy

24. Choreographies: Rhythms and Movements in Research

Andrea Schikowitz, MCTS; Niki Vermeulen, University of Edinburgh; Filip Vostal, Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

This session aims to explore intersections between temporal and spatial dimensions of research through the mobilization of the concept of ‘choreography’. With an origin in the Greek language, combining ‘dance’ with ‘writing’, the artistic metaphor evokes movements and their routinized sequences (cf. Pickering 1995 and his notion of ‘dance of agency’ and his overall theory of ‘mangle of practice’). Emanating Thompson’s (1998, 2005) concept of ‘ontological choreography’ – capturing the dynamic coordination of scientific, technical, legal, political, financial, relational and emotional aspects in clinics for Assisted Reproductive Technology – STS researchers have studied coordination and (de)alignment of research configurations, while leaving room for non-linear narratives, multiplicities and tensions. Analyses cover choreographies of disciplinary and trans-disciplinary fields, participation and identity formation (see work of Callard & Fitzgerald 2015; Felt 2016; Moreira 2018; Schikowitz 2017, 2020; Vermeulen 2018). In turn, Coeckelbergh (2019) recently used choreography to show how science and (digital) technology can shape and organize human thinking, movements and lives. Consequently, this panel invites papers that further explore rhythms and movements in research, including its embodiment and imprint. We would like to bring together scholars working on the role of time and/or space in research to discuss spatio-temporal patterns, e.g. pacing, duration, circulation,(de)synchronisation, (de)centering, ebbing and flowing, acceleration and deceleration, openness and closedness, and the like.

Contact: nikivermeulen@gmail.com

Keywords: Choreography, time, space, research practice

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

25. Citing the South: Infometrics and Open Science for Sustainable Development in the Global South

Julian David Cortes Sanchez, School of Management, Universidad del Rosario; Diana Lucio Arias, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Tangible and intangible knowledge exchange within the Global South (GS) is becoming increasingly important. A sustainable knowledge exchange agenda within the GS may consider the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite the setbacks, knowledge stock (KS) such as research articles and patents, is consistently increasing in the GS by the thousands. Both the (digital) access and the appropriation of KS by society is crucial for achieving the SDGs. However, several concerns may arise regarding these complex tasks: How to integrate that KS and societies’ access to it to the design and evaluation of STi policies at the micro-macro levels? How open is the access to KS related to the SDGs for communities in the GS? Is this KS responding either to local necessities or instrumentally to a global agenda?  What is the current impact and collaboration of the KS related to the SDGs produced by/within the GS? Which is the impact and influence of funding agencies, and corporate-academic collaboration in research related to the SDGs in the GS? Methods and analytical frameworks form Infometrics (Webo-Cyber-Biblio-Sciento-metrics) enable to gain insights over those and other inquiries. The aim of this open panel, therefore, is to debate around the production, structure, access, appropriation, and impact of the KS related to the SDGs and its positive, collateral or null effects in national socio-technical systems and national/international institutions, all above analyzed within the framework of South-South cooperation.

Contact: julian.cortess@urosario.edu.co

Keywords: Infometrics, Open Science, SDGs, Science Governance, Global South

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

26. Classic STS Papers

Nicole C Nelson, University of Wisconsin Madison; Sergio Sismondo, Queen’s University

This panel follows from a very successful one in New Orleans. We invite presenters to return to “classic” STS papers, and to reflect on the value of doing so for advancing scholarship and building community in STS. Classics might be papers recognized as such. Or, they might be papers that are not part of standard narratives of the field but should be incorporated or re-incorporated into these narratives—recognizing that while narratives can celebrate the collective and cumulative nature of scholarship, they can also marginalize or exclude. In remembering earlier moments in STS, we ask presenters to explore how those moments can be usefully or interestingly recalled today. We hope that presenters will not only engage with their chosen paper, but will also devote some of their time to freshly delivering parts of it. Such reenactments might commemorate the contributions of particular scholars, or be performances intended to trouble existing categories or narratives in STS. By engaging with past scholarship through re-enactment rather than citation alone, we aim to foreground the performative aspects of citational practices, making clear how the meaning of a classic paper shifts as it is read aloud by a different speaker, in a different venue, in a different historical moment. In so doing, we aim to create space for thinking about how earlier moments in STS might be productively re-staged as we collectively shape narratives of the field’s trajectories.

Contact: sismondo@queensu.ca

Keywords: classic STS, marginalized STS, history of STS

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

27. Collective Forms Of Governance: Rethinking The Role Of Civic Engagement With Science & Technology In Epistemically Fragmented Societies

Madeleine Murtagh, Policy, Ethics & Life Sciences Research Centre, Newcastle University; Barbara Prainsack, University of Vienna; Alessandro Blasimme, ETH Zurich

Western democracies are facing harsh criticism for their alleged inability to meet their own standards of inclusivity and justice. Against the backdrop of rising inequalities within and across societies, dissatisfaction with the rituals and symbols of representative democracy is mounting. A pronounced anti-establishment rhetoric is eroding the institutional culture of democracy, its reliance on scientific and other established sources of knowledge, and the credibility of expertise and competence. Consequently, collective decision-making about complex sociotechnical options (such as genome editing, access to sensitive personal data for research and care, and climate change) is increasingly taking place within a legitimacy void. Resistance to a Western normativity, both in the Global South and Global North, demands alternative modes, reference points, spaces of decision making.

In this panel we ask: How might we deploy collective forms of governance in epistemically fragmented and diverse societies? What role can civic engagement – understood as the involvement of publics in the governance of science and technology within and outside of the traditional institutions of representative democracy – play in producing democratically legitimate decisions on complex sociotechnical matters? What practices of public deliberation can enhance the quality of science and technology governance? Can civic engagement be an antidote to the political manipulation of public opinion? We do not assume civic engagement to be an unproblematic ‘good’. Rather we encourage critical reflection and engagement with these questions to ask what can be or might be the effects of such civic engagement? Particularly, looking beyond the precepts of a Western sensibility.

Contact: madeleine.murtagh@newcastle.ac.uk

Keywords: collective governance, governing science and technology, diversity, normativity

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Science Communication/Public Engagement

28. Commodifying environmental data: markets, materiality, knowledge

Aguiton Angeli Sara, EHESS CAK Centre Alexandre Koyré; Sylvain Brunier, CNRS – Centre de Sociologie des Organisations; Jeanne Oui, EHESS

As digital tools promise to resolve environmental problems by leveraging new sources of data and by creating new services, this panel calls for papers focusing on the market logics involved in these processes. STS research on informational infrastructures warned us not to dissociate data production and circulation, we aim to enrich this approach by considering that market and economic dimensions are not processed downstream, but that they are already at stake when environmental data are produced. In many cases, the manufacturing of environmental data and their markets is simultaneous. The panel proposes to study both the production of environmental data and services, the role of public and corporate actors, the uses of natural sciences and market knowledge, the invention of new measurement tools and their economic valuation.

Case studies could include a variety of objects such as predictive maintenance applied to water distribution networks; index insurance based on the integration of climate parameters; customized services based on global infrastructures and low-cost sensors measuring air quality or crop development; forest certification schemes by remote sensing for ecological compensation or biomass valuation; etc. We aim to grasp a broad range of questions: using infrastructures that are often fragile and labor-intensive, how do various actors develop profitable models? What are the links between the trade and circulation of data on one hand, and the associated service market on the other hand? Which types of knowledge are being used and what roles do they play in the valuation of environmental data? In what way is data labor shaped by its commercial use?

By exploring these various issues, we hope that the contributions of this panel will deconstruct the promises of the greening of public policies and industrial processes through the development of an environmental services economy.

Contact: sara.aguiton@ehess.fr

Keywords: Data, Environment, Infrastructure, Market, Commodification

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

29. Conceptualization and Evidence of Social Innovation

José Francisco Romero-Muñoz, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla – Centro Universitario de Vinculación; Rollin Kent, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla

In recent decades, several international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Economic Forum and the European Commission have stated that nation’s progress must be understood in a broader set of ideas, including not just technological innovation but also social innovation. The importance of social innovation has increased because it represents an alternative to the conventional top-down assistance approach of some governments to face the social, economic, political and environmental challenges of the 21st century. Unlike such an approach, social innovation implies the active participation of society in the solution of its own problems. That is to say, we understand social innovation as the intentional change of social practices aimed at the solution of collective problems, through the active participation of a community. In other words, social innovation means social change, especially that intentional change of social practices. Despite its known relevance and conceptualization, several authors point out that social innovation still lacks a coherent theoretical structure and that more empirical research is necessary to understand and promote it. In response to this concern, through this panel we invite STS scholars to join a conceptual discussion on social innovation, helping to define its actors, conditions, potentials and possibilities. Likewise, an additional purpose of the panel is to present results of empirical investigations that show evidence of social innovation processes of particular cases. If the progress of nations requires not only technological innovation, but also social innovation, those who study innovation within the field of STS are the ones indicated to provide a better conceptualization on innovation, involving both concepts in processes that affect the welfare and sustainability of our societies.

Contact: fyi.idcb@gmail.com

Keywords: Social innovation, social change, collaborative solutions, social technology, social capital

Categories:

30. Contesting the ‘migration/border control machine’: entanglements of information and surveillance infrastructures with the making of publics/’non-publics’

Nina Amelung, University of Minho; Silvan Pollozek, MCTS, Technical University of Munich

In recent years information and surveillance infrastructures of migration and border control have gained more attention of civic actors, activists and researchers. Work at the intersection of STS, critical migration and border studies scrutinizes the hidden processes of data and information processing and their consequences on citizens and migrants, the seemingly neutrality of technologies or the role of technocratic experts.

But what could or should enable ‘non-publics’, those affected by the infrastructure’s consequences of social sorting, to transform into visible collectives and publics? How are other critical voices part of larger publics and controversies? How do publics emerge, and which issues and concerns gain authority and affect the design and working of surveillance and information infrastructures?

The panel engages with the making of ‘non-publics’, publics and controversies around information and surveillance infrastructures of migration and border control and addresses multiple forms of critique and contestation. It explores the arenas in which controversies unfold, the actors involved and the issues and concerns being articulated. It critically examines which actors’ voices are in- and excluded, amplified or silenced, as well as the processes and dynamics which enable or restrict public contestation. Furthermore, it reflects upon the ontological politics of research and researchers themselves. How is epistemic authority constructed within publics and beyond when engaging as experts, opinion makers and (expert) activists?

We invite contributions that study emergent publics and their arenas, actors, issues and contestations unfolding around the regulation, implementation and use of surveillance and information infrastructures of migration and border control.

Huub Dijstelbloem, University of Amsterdam, will act as discussant of this session.

Contact: nina.amelung@gmail.com

Keywords: infrastructures, migration and border control, contestation and (non)publics, ontological politics, epistemic authority

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

Science Communication/Public Engagement

31. Cosmogrammatics. Nature(s) in planetary designs

Johannes Bruder, FHNW Academy of Art and Design; Gökce Günel, Rice University; Selena Savic, FHNW Academy of Art and Design

Since the 1960s, the ‘environmental age’ has churned out ecologies in pursuit either of technologically controlling “nature” or of loosening the modernist grip on that which is supposed to be untamed. However, one is rarely to be had without the other: even the most romantic attempts at rewilding that which surrounds us tend to involve sociotechnical imaginaries and are typically bound to the will to and practices of design. At a time where the Earth and the living environment are conceived to be in an irreversible state of crisis, all attempts at grasping the essence of, rescuing, reclaiming, reinstating or repairing the world’s natural (dis)order have become infrastructural and involve unapologetically technical concepts such as biodiversity, equilibrium and sustainability. In fact, it seems increasingly impossible to think nature independent of its enclosing and regulating architectures and technologies.

This panel is conceived to assemble an image of nature and the natural based on contemporary planetary designs. Countering the “prevailing scholarly trend of materialist critique” (Hu 2017), we seek to emphasize the imaginary aspects of those designs instead of their physical manifestations and aim at investigating how nature and the natural have been defined through what we conceive as contemporary ‘cosmogrammatics’ – technical manuals, architectural plans and diagrams, logistical patents, policy documents, post-anthropocentric exhibitions, speculative (design) fictions etc. This panel invites contributions that are topically, theoretically, and methodologically related to the intersections of ecology, design (incl. architecture) and STS; we hope to include classic academic papers as well as alternative (e.g. practice-based) contributions.

Contact: johannes.bruder@hotmail.com

Keywords: Ecology, Energy, Design, Urban Planning, Geotechnicity

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Energy

32. Crafting Critical Methodologies in Computing: theories, practices and future directions

Loren Britton, University of Kassel; Claude Draude, University of Kassel, Germany; Juliane Jarke, University of Bremen; Goda Klumbyte, University of Kassel

In the past decades there has been an explosion of “critical studies”, and computing is no exception. Working to bring insights from critical theories developed in the humanities and social sciences, the diverse scholarship that can be located under “critical computing” is engaged in the laborious and relevant project of translational work between disciplines, and generative avenues for knowledge developed in the “subtle” sciences to bear implication to how computational technologies are designed, produced and deployed.

Critical computing draws inspiration and methodological tools from fields as diverse as participatory design and design research, feminist theory and gender studies, STS, artistic research and post-/de-colonial theory, among others. In this panel we wish to investigate what are the methodological approaches that can be employed within, by and for computing, which would be capable of generating critical technical practices (Agre 1995), accurate and critical accounts of power dynamics and processes of marginalization, and craft space for alternative modes and methods of doing computing.

Specifically, we encourage contributions that address questions, including, but not limited to:

– How can critical thought/theory inform methodology building (or reflecting upon) in computing?

– How can interactions between (feminist, postcolonial) STS and computing establish new methodological considerations?

– How do we decolonize computing and its methodologies?

– Where do we locate artistic research, arts practice and design in regards to questions of methodology in computing?

– How can feminist and other critical epistemological knowledges generate knowledge about and in computing that from an STS perspective challenge well worn power dynamics?

Contact: claude.draude@uni-kassel.de

Keywords: critical computing, feminist STS, methodologies, postcolonial studies, artistic research

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

33. Death Itself: Technology, Ethics, and Ambiguity

Dylan Thomas Lott, Center for Healthy Minds/University of Wisconsin-Madison; Amanda van Beinum, Carleton University

Modernity in the time of the Anthropocene is marked by a growing, mutating tension between life and death. Even as scientists discover new ways to revive and sustain ex-vivo brains, mass extinctions and life-limiting disasters accelerate. A key engagement of STS research has been to understand rapidly mutating conceptions of “life itself,” mediated through the technological advances of genetic discoveries, cloning, and electronic health records. In this panel we wish to push these insights further to consider how death has changed as a result. How have these shifting conceptions of life itself also affected what it means to die? How can we understand ethics and responsibility in spaces where the very possibility of finite endings has become at once unclear and imminent? 

This panel invites papers that employ STS methodologies to critically examine who (or what) can die, and how (and where) this becomes possible in the complex contexts of modern life. We especially invite investigations that integrate an ethical perspective into this critical work that seeks not only to explore the material aspects of death, dying, and endings, but also to creatively imagine how we might make sense of ambiguous or absolute ends. We also encourage papers exploring the material and ethical aspects of what it means to study this multiplicity of endings from an STS perspective, including those that imagine new, reflexive methodologies for doing so.

Contact: amanda.vanbeinum@carleton.ca

Keywords: death, dying, ethics, end of life, life support technologies

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

34. Decentralized and Distributed Systems: Technologies of Resistance

Victoria Neumann, Lancaster University; Anna Adamowicz, Institute of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University

The internet has been called the “largest experiment involving anarchy in history” (Schmidt & Cohen, 2013) and is characterized by decentral and distributed network technologies which disseminate information. However, there is a tension as these (infra-)structures incorporate dialectic contradictions of “radically distributes control into autonomous locales” and protocological “control into rigidly defined hierarchies”(Galloway, 2004).

Politically, control in and over cyberspaces is often fought along the lines of (1) governments expanding surveillance and automated, algorithmic decision-making that reinforce traditional hierarchies (Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018; Zuboff, 2019); (2) neoliberal and libertarian tech enthusiast reconfiguring capitalism based on cybernetic logics (Kelly, 1994; Marks, 2006); and (3) (h)activist movements striving for emancipation and create spaces for sovereignty, autonomy, and withdraw from censorship/repression (Barlow, 1996).

In this panel, we are interested in works around distributed and decentralized systems as technologies of resistance. We invite contributions from a wide range of areas in which technologies are used to build infrastructures that foster counter hegemonies or highlight social and political power struggles. These contributions may be theoretical, practical, and/or empirical cases such as scientific studies, manifestos, declarations, or practical reports on collectives’ work.

Examples include, but are not limited to:

• Cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and distributed ledger technologies
• Decentralized or distributed social media outlets (e.g. privacy-preserving projects like Fediverse’s Mastodon, Riot.im, Diaspora)
• Alternative communication tools, infrastructures and protocols (e.g. Tor, local ISPs, Matrix)
• Protest, communities and movements using tech such decentralized server networks (e.g. Mesh, Police Tracking apps)
• Hacker and knowledge-sharing cooperatives, and non-centralized collaboration (e.g. open/free software developments)

Contact: v.neumann@lancaster.ac.uk

Keywords: Decentralization, Distributed Systems, Resistance, Information Technologies, Agency

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

35. Decentring datacentres: their politics, energy, waste and epistemics

Stefan Laser, Ruhr University Bochum; Estrid Sørensen, Ruhr University Bochum; Laura Kocksch, Ruhr University Bochum

Data centres have gained attention in STS for their politics of territoriality and geographic location (Vonderau 2016 & 2019, Maguire & Winthereik 2019). We seek to extend the focus to the material configurations of data centres by discussing them as situated spaces of high resource consumption and excessive waste production, of contested politics and of knowledge production.

Half of the information and communication industries’ greenhouse gas emissions comes from data centres (Belkhir/Elmeligi); roughly 1,5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Millions of gallons of water are used to keep data cool (Hogan 2015). Energy Humanities (Szeman &Boyer 2017) and Discard Studies (Lepawsky 2018) urge us to reflect on how such excesses are formed and maintained, by which actors and through which practices.

Data centres are important actors in configuring common resources: electricity, water, heat and knowledge. Nonetheless, they are hidden away and hardly accessible (Hogan &Shepard 2015). How are the politics of data centres made visible, and how can data centres be turned into a matter of democratic debate and regulation? This question is relevant both on state and industry level, as it is in workplaces where practices are increasingly shaped by the configurations of data centres.

Even though knowledge production of both corporate ‘data scientists’ as well as university scientists and researchers increasingly depend on data centres for both storage and data processing, little literature exists on the epistemic effects of data centre configurations.

We invite papers submissions addressing the political, ecological and epistemic entanglements of data centres.

Contact: laura.kocksch@rub.de

Keywords: data centres, data practices, ecologies, waste, infrastructure

Categories: Energy

Big Data

Governance and Public Policy

36. Defining the Patient in Biomedicine Today

Gareth A. F. Edel, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Addressing the state of biomedicalization and imagining its future this panel asks: “What are patients today?”

“Patient” is a subjective role – they are a subject of Foucaldian control, an unknowing research participant, a resource for business, a self-advocate, and the central component of the clinical encounter that stands as a metonym for all of medicine. The figure of the patient has been repeatedly reimagined as traditional medical roles and biomedicine itself change.

In the last ten years, shifts in global political economy, the rise of nationalist movements, and ongoing neoliberal governance reformations are changing the way biomedical practices are viewed and practiced around the world. Tomorrow’s patient seen through the lens of today’s politics is a consumer purchasing “personalized” medicine like any commodity. However that patient’s information is itself a commodity for the Big Data field, rendering them a product and a research subject. Are traditional categories distinguishing ‘patients’ and ‘research subjects’ still correct in a world where health and behavioral data is collected and used in research on Facebook, treatment records and information are increasingly produced intentionally as subjects of research and as people’s healthcare data is monetized, sold, and traded?

While clinical encounters represent a touchstone element of medicine, within STS we often focus on the actions of doctors and expertise within medical systems while patients remain implicated actors or victims. This panel instead directs discussion towards the patient, and requests submission of papers that center the patient as a topic of negotiation and ongoing redefinition.

Contact: garethedel@gmail.com

Keywords: Biomedicine, Patient, Clinical Encounter, Commodification, Neoliberalism

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Knowledge, Theory and Method

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

37. Democracy in the making

Jan-Peter Voß, Berlin University of Technology; Jason Chilvers, University of East Anglia

What is democracy? It is no news that democracy is an “essentially contested concept” (Connolly). We explore how this can be translated into a practice-oriented approach. We start by taking any democratic practice to be centred on a particular way of articulating the demos and how it wants to govern itself. This entails the construction of the people as a collective subjectivity. In practice, this works by making “representative claims” (Saward). If accepted such claims generate political authority and become performative in actually constituting the people as a collective with shared will and agency (Latour, Disch). But how specifically is this done in practice? And which are the broader arrangements or “hinterlands” (Law) that shape “felicity conditions” (Austin)? These questions lead into the machinery of doing liberal-representative democracy through party competition and elections, but they symmetrically bring into view practices of stakeholder negotiation, citizen deliberation, street rallies, and other radically different forms of representing the people through opinion mining in digital data or performative-aesthetic interventions. Enacting specific “political imaginaries” (Ezrahi) in a wider “ecology of representation” (Rosanvallon) they jointly constitute “the demos multiple” (cf. Mol). A next step for STS is to reconstruct the dynamics of different democratic practices in the making by tracing entanglements with specific “epistemic cultures” of democracy and their practices of theorizing and experimentally engaging with them (Knorr Cetina). Ultimately, the question is how realities of democracy, along with the political authority they generate, are shaped through specific sciences and technologies of democracy.

Contact: jan-peter.voss@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: sciences and technologies of democracy, performativity, political representation, public engagement

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

38. Digital Experiments in the Making: Methods, Tools, and Platforms in the Infrastructuring of STS

Lina Franken, University of Hamburg; Kim Fortun, University of California Irvine; Mike Fortun, University of California, Irvine; Gertraud Koch, University of Hamburg

Digital infrastructures are ubiquitous in the technosciences and in everyday life, and have become crucial objects of analysis for diverse STS researchers and their arrays of approaches. Digital infrastructures are also emerging as instruments for STS research itself, composed of an expanding array of methods, modules, data tools, visualizations, and platforms that create new possibilities and places for experiments in how we “do STS”, and for academic knowledge production writ large. At the same time, our new sociotechnical research infrastructures raise their own technical, epistemological, and ethical questions and difficulties, asking us to re-visit and re-invent some of our own methodological assumptions, analytic habits, and goals, scholarly and political.

This open panel invites contributions from researchers engaged in fresh ways of developing and using digital technologies for ethnographic and other kinds of qualitative research on the technosciences. We are especially interested in presentations from researchers developing or using new digital technologies and media in their own research, experimenting with new approaches to data sharing and analysis, and to open access publishing and other forms of scholarly communication with engaged publics. We encourage epistemological and ethical analyses and reflections on these digital modes of knowledge production in STS, including presentations that explore new tools and concepts pertaining to privacy and related issues in the digital realm.

Contact: lina.franken@uni-hamburg.de

Keywords: digital infrastructures, methods, digital knowledge production, tools, qualitative research

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

Knowledge, Theory and Method

39. Digital Phenotyping –  Unpacking Intelligent Machines For Deep Medicine And A New Public Health

Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh; Ger Wackers, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Digital phenotyping has become a popular practice in the world of data-driven health research. It has developed into a tool to syphon structured health data from online populations. As a practice, it is hailed to refine the classification and understanding of psychiatric, infectious and chronic conditions. A new phenomics is developed to match the genomics of previous years and close the gap between the genotype and phenotype. In the widest sense, digital phenotyping has become identified with a medical knowledge production entirely based on the analysis of digital borne data, providing new ways of knowing disease with more granular insights from digital data. Digital phenotyping schizophrenia, dementia, the flu or Parkinson’s disease is supposed to overcome vague and unstructured clinical observations and to offer new, highly standardised pathways towards a complete symptomatology. Conceptually, the digital phenotype has been shaped with reference to Dawkins’ elaborations on the ‘extended phenotype’ while its practices are strongly aligned with the ‘deep medicine’ movement, which seeks to build and to exploit vast datasets of different kinds to achieve novel insight into drivers of disease.

Underlying this new conceptual tool are a series of imaginaries that we like to unpack in this panel. We invite contributions that engage the impact of digital phenotyping in mental health research, that reconstruct historical genealogies of such infrastructures and which engage the phantasies of total insight, vast understanding and deep comprehension build into this budding tool at the bleeding edge of digital medical research.

Contact: ger.wackers@uit.no

Keywords: Digital phenotyping, deep medicine, public health, digital epidemiology

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Big Data

40. Digital Platforms, Knowledge Democracies and the Remaking of Expertise

Warren Pearce, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield

Traditional forms of expertise appear in crisis. Digital platforms such as YouTube, Wikipedia and Zhihu increasingly shape the knowledge and expertise that constitute the infrastructure of modern knowledge-based democracies. Techno-optimism about the democratisation of knowledge has given way to dismay that the internet has eroded the shared truths that enable rational discourse. Digital platforms’ business models incentivise audience over accuracy, with publics increasingly concerned about the resulting online misinformation. Meanwhile, a new wave of right-wing ‘populist’ politicians in the US, Brazil and elsewhere have come to power by fostering an anti-expert culture. Yet within this bleak picture, new kinds of experts and expertise, particular to digital platforms, are emerging in domains as diverse as finance, science and culture.

This panel brings together researchers investigating the nexus of experts, publics and platforms across a range of topics, and employing a range of methods. Potential questions include: How are experts establishing credibility on digital platforms? How do digital platforms shape the production and communication of expertise? What are publics demanding from experts on digital platforms? How is epistemological power being reinforced or disrupted by platformisation? Are there potential futures for experts, digital platforms and democracy beyond the dystopian imaginary of the post-truth society?  This panel will contribute to STS by assessing the impact of platformisation on existing, canonical theories of expertise, and provides opportunity for reflection on the conference themes of changing digital identities and the challenge of public engagement in democracies teeming with ‘alternative facts’.

Contact: warren.pearce@sheffield.ac.uk

Keywords: expertise, digital platforms, knowledge democracies,

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Science Communication/Public Engagement

41. Digital pollutions: resource consumption, waste and environmental problems in information societies

clement marquet, IFRIS, Costech

While digital technologies are often presented as tools that could foster energetic and ecological transitions, little studies have paid attention to the environmental consequences of the digital growth of our societies. The proliferation of data and the multiplication of digital systems in homes, offices, factories and infrastructures have yet increased the production of digital devices, relying on extractive industries, intensifying electricity consumption and multiplying digital waste. What kind of pollutions does digital development produce? What difficulties do actors face when trying to make visible digital pollutions and deal with it? This panel intends to address these questions through empirical studies investigating three lines of research. The first one focuses on the environments produced by the materiality of digital activities, exploring, for example, the pollutions generated by digital industries, through production, extraction or mining; the growing need of power for computer facilities and the production of new energy infrastructures; the local effects of the material organization of networks; the local and globalized production and management of electronic waste. The second axe is interested in the question of knowledge and ignorance production and environmental metrics, investigating the practices of actors who try to measure and make visible digital pollutions, tackling the difficult emergence of digital pollutions as public problems. The third axe welcomes studies investigating with a critical glance the various initiatives of the digital industry to prove its efforts to develop “green” activities (like the investments in non-carbon energy, the improvement of data centers and electronic devices energy efficiency, etc.).

Contact: clement.marquet@meandres.me

Keywords: environment, digital infrastructures, pollution, waste, ignorance

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

42. Digital Technologies in Policing and Security

Simon Egbert, Technische Universität Berlin; Nikolaus Pöchhacker, MCTS, Technical University of Munich

Recent and globally disseminated technologies and processes of data analysis and computational science – mainly in reference to terms (and myths) like big data, algorithmic decision making and artificial intelligence – have transformed many processes of knowledge production in the field of domestic security practices. With predictive policing as one of its currently most prominent representatives, the data-driven production of (prospective) knowledge has now also affected the security systems at every level – from policing to criminal justice, from border control to counterterrorism policies. Different predictive models include generating risky spaces – like PredPol; risky individuals – like Chicago’s ‘strategic subject list’, EU-border risk assessment system EUROSUR and US’ Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System; or calculating the recidivism risk of convicted offenders in order to inform the sentence decision – like COMPAS. Thus, regardless of whether suspects or spaces are objects of (predictive) knowledge production, or if recidivism risk scores for convicted offenders are generated, in the end, these practices are increasingly characterized by a socio-technical interwovenness with digital data production and algorithmic technologies. This calls for an exploration of the sociotechnical dynamics involved in the co-construction of risks, (in)justice, (in)security and technological development. Correspondingly, this panel seeks to ask how STS can provide analytical tools for grasping the entanglement of technology and society involved in the development and implementation of digitally mediated knowledge production in policing, criminal justice, border control and other fields of security by presenting globally disseminated case examples as well as theoretical approaches on the digitalization and datafication of policing and security practices.

Contact: simon.egbert@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: policing, criminal justice, security, legal technologies, digitalization

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

Governance and Public Policy

43. Digital technologies shaping the politics of science and the science of politics

Florian Eyert, Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society; Hannes Wuensche, Fraunhofer FOKUS

In the wake of the #DigitalTransformation we observe a multiplicity of new practices emerging in science. Digital technologies like #BigDataAnalytics, #MachineLearning or #Crowdworking tools gain importance as scientific instruments, ousting established #EpistemicPractices. On the one hand, this reconfigures the politics of science, setting new epistemic norms for the organization, evaluation and communication of science. On the other hand, the science of politics incorporates new paradigms, assumptions and epistemic affordances into the ways in which scholars perceive and analyze the political and social world, thus producing new political epistemologies.

The panel aims to explore the dialogue between these two perspectives and the presentations in it will address one or more of the following questions: 

1. How do digital technologies affect the making and doing of science and the ways in which the politics and negotiation of scientific knowledge unfolds? How, for instance, are new distributed arrangements in science, like #OpenScience or #CitizenScience, shaped or enabled by digital instruments?
2. How do digital technologies affect the production and perception of scientific knowledge about the political? How do, for instance, the #ComputationalSocialSciences and #DigitalHumanities challenge and transform the science of politics? How does #ComputationalModeling impact the premises of political advice?
3. How do these two aspects affect each other and how are they intertwined?
4. What do these shifts imply for our own epistemic practices within the STS community?

The panel invites contributions that offer theoretical perspectives on digital technologies as epistemic practices as well as empirical studies of relevant cases.

Contact: florian.eyert@wzb.eu

Keywords: digitalization, epistemic practices, computational social science, citizen science

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

44. Digitalizing Cities and Infrastructures

Sulfikar Amir, Nanyang Technological University

This panel focuses on urban digitalization defined as a techno-institutional transformation of cities in which information technology and digital platforms become the principal infrastructure and the basis for providing essential services to residents. In many cities around the world, urban digitalization is taking place through projects initiated by both city governments and private companies. It is manifested in the organized utilization of various digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Internet of Things that transform a wide range of public sectors, including transportation, finance, security, food, and healthcare. The increasingly adopted concept of “Smart City” exemplifies how city governments across Asia are taking the efforts to digitalize their governing operation. This is coupled with a rapid growth of digital-platform companies such as Uber, Lyft, Alibaba, Grab, Gojek, Ola, DiDi, etc. that provide vital services in ride hailing, food delivery, and electronic payment. While it signifies progress, the growing trend of urban digitalization raises a compelling question: What are the impacts of digitalization on citi resilience and vulnerability? This question is highly relevant in times when cities are growing more vulnerable than ever to disaster and crisis. The panel aims to critically examine the impact of urban digitalization on city resilience. Specifically, it probes how digitalization of public services affects city capacity to respond to crisis and disturbance. This panel invites scholarly works, which shed light on the ways urban digitalization turns into a new structure shaping social life in the city.

Contact: sulfikar@ntu.edu.sg

Keywords: Urban Digitalization, Cities, Resilience, Vulnerability

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

Governance and Public Policy

45. Dilemmas in advisory science

Kåre Nolde Nielsen, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway; Sebastian Linke, University of Gothenburg; Petter Holm, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway

Interfaces between advisory science and policy are subject to a number of practical and theoretical dilemmas, inviting continuous empirical attention and conceptual refinement.

   One such dilemma concerns the separation between the respective bodies in charge of providing advice and of using it in decision-making. A close association between these bodies ensures that scientific advice is useful. However, the association can also be too close, as this may undermine the reality as well as the external perception of objective advice and legitimate decision-making.

   Another dilemma concerns accountability, e.g. when scientific advisory processes are opened up for participation by interest groups, lay experts and citizens. While there are substantive and normative reasons for stakeholder participation in the provision of relevant knowledge, this may challenge accountability and credibility of the advice.

   A third dilemma concerns tensions between complexity and transparency. Supported by model development, rising computing power and data availability, scientific advice increasingly draws on integrated model frameworks that aim to account for interactions between multiple factors. While promising more comprehensive assessments, the advice based on highly complex models may become difficult to explain and understand.

   This open panel invites studies about the relationships between scientific advice and decision-making with a particular emphasis on practical dilemmas faced by various actors at different levels (local, national, global), the steps taken to address them as well as conceptual developments on science-policy interactions.

Contact: kare.nolde.nielsen@uit.no

Keywords: Advisory science, science-policy interactions, lay expertise

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

46. Disciplining the senses

Sandra Calkins, Free University of Berlin; Marianna Szczygielska, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Many disciplines in the natural sciences still privilege the idea of an external physical reality that human sensory perceptions are mistrusted in revealing. Thus, sensual perception has been largely written out of scientific work and delegated to instruments that can produce standardized measures of physical reality. Much work in the social studies of science and technology has analyzed this whole arsenal of devices, experimental set-ups and technologies mobilized to circumvent reliance on human senses and deemed to produce “objective” data. While the focus of classic studies has been to show the ways in which experimental systems, disciplinary logics and epistemic cultures contribute to fact-making, less attention has been paid to scientists’ own sensory engagements with their research materials and resulting more-than-human affective dynamics. This holds true even as newer scholarship has grappled with sensory practices distributed across a widening array of sites, materials, and organisms. This panel addresses how the training and equipment in specific academic disciplines also “discipline” the senses and their affective potentials. It invites us to unravel the role of “disciplining” in enhancing, limiting, or distilling olfactory, tactile, gustatory, acoustic, visual and/or other multisensorial experiences in knowledge-making practices. It further asks whether and how the ways in which science is practiced in specific sites and geopolitical locations contributes to disciplining or challenging sensory perceptions. Which and whose sense perceptions are modified in the scientific endeavor? By exploring these questions, this panel seeks to drive conversations about underexplored connections between sensory experience, affect, and epistemic cultures.

Contact: sandra.calkins@fu-berlin.de

Keywords: sciences and the senses, epistemic cultures, affect, disciplines

Categories: Other

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

47. Discursive Traps in Global Health: Neglect, Poverty, and Emergence

Lina Beatriz Pinto-Garcia, York University; Mady Malheiros Barbeitas, Sociology – CERMES 3/ Unité Inserm 988 – Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales – Paris); Bernardo Moreno Peniche, Independent

In global health discourses, vector-borne diseases are typically portrayed as neglected problems that affect people in impoverished settings. Since they inhabit the margins of the economy, so continues the argument, they do not constitute a priority for states nor an attractive market for pharmaceutical companies. To stimulate neglected diseases R&D, public-private partnerships were proposed in the 1990s as a solution that would lure pharmaceutical companies into the game. Also, in 2007, the FDA established the priority review voucher program to promote the development of drugs for diseases considered neglected. Yet, these strategies have been criticized for leaving unchallenged a pharmaceutical development model that is profit-oriented and for obscuring severe differentials of power and influence between the public and the private sectors. In a similar vein, since the 1990s, some of these diseases have also been categorized as ‘emerging’ threats, seeking to highlight their potential of becoming epidemics of global proportions. Yet, this term often helps reanimate colonial stories of containment that regarded the tropics as natural hotbeds of diseases that required strict population management to prevent microbes from spilling over the metropolis and its colonial settlements. Thinking critically about ‘neglect,’ ‘poverty,’ and ‘emergence,’ this panel aims to unpack the politics behind these “official stereotypes” in global health narratives. Is this terminology sufficient to account for the problems that vector-borne diseases represent? Is it always useful to delimit the ways in which possible solutions are framed? What do these categories make visible and invisible? What do they enable and constrain?

Contact: lina.pinto.garcia@gmail.com

Keywords: global health, neglect, emergence, poverty, vector-borne diseases

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

48. Disgust

Salla Sariola, University of Helsinki; Luisa Reis de Castro, Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT); Jose A. Cañada, University of Helsinki

A series of recent scientific and technological innovations have brought about changes over what, in popular cultures, have been distinctly categorized as objects of disgust. The current ecological crises call for novel solutions that sometimes are counter-intuitive to these cultural affects associated with cleanliness and what ‘is disgusting’.  Fecal transplantation to counter gut dysbiosis, edible insects as sustainable alternatives to animal protein, mosquitoes as helpful vectors in global health interventions against dengue and malaria, and critters thriving in polluted environments are but a few examples demonstrating changes to notions of purity and danger as they manifest in the notion of disgust.

In this panel, we invite papers that reflect on disgust as a cultural specific, visceral response,  with historical attachment to ideas of impurity and pathogenicity as well as how these notions might be reversed in new technoscientific practices. By sidelining human cognitive responses to disgust, we instead want to query the processes by which ‘disgusting’ is transmorphed into acceptable, normalized, or even desirable outcomes through technoscientific endeavours. How are notions of disgust reconfigured and to what ends? What kinds of novel multi-species entanglements are drawn in these practices? What kind of new practices do these reimaginations make possible? How do scientific understandings of ‘disgusting’ non-humans intra-act with our ingrained affective experiences of them? Enquiring the changing meanings of disgust enables deeper understanding about the creativity with which new solutions are crafted during extreme times.

Contact: salla.sariola@helsinki.fi

Keywords: disgust, multi-species, visceral, affect, technoscience

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Medicine and Healthcare

Food and Agriculture

49. Disrupting Biomedicine: The Politics and Practice of Open Source and Biohacked Drugs and Devices

Colleen Lanier-Christensen, Harvard University; Nicole Foti, University of California, San Francisco

Frustrated with the existing landscape of drug and medical device development—including its high costs, top-down research and development processes, and proprietary, non-interoperable systems—grassroots efforts have emerged that counter dominant structures and practices in the production and use of biomedical knowledge. Biohackers, DIY biologists, medical device modifiers, and open source pharmaceutical and medical hardware initiatives are examples of such burgeoning critiques and reactions. Rather than submit their bodies to clinically defined models of patienthood and government-regulated commercial products, these individuals strive to reshape biomedical science and technology to address systemic failures, or to fit their wills. These projects—such as developing open source estrogen, insulin, epi-pens, prosthetics, and automated insulin delivery systems— aim to disrupt the hierarchical structure of traditional healthcare systems and challenge the role of professionalized, credentialed experts in determining medical care.

This panel seeks to explore open source, DIY, and hacking practices—past and present—across diverse health conditions and diseases, therapeutics, regulatory spaces, and healthcare systems. We invite contributions exploring these practices’ modes of resistance, as well as their opportunities, barriers, and limitations. Papers might examine, for example, how such projects build on or depart from more traditional patient advocacy and medical social movements; the different forms of risks, conceptions of empowerment, and promissory claims entailed; critical forms of knowledge production; or the shifting socio-technical landscape enabling these developments (e.g., smartphones, 3D-printing, predictive algorithms, open software, novel hardware tools). The diabetes space is especially rich for such inquiries; scholars working in this area are encouraged to contribute.

Contact: colleenlanier@fas.harvard.edu

Keywords: Biohacking, biomedicine, social movements, pharmaceuticals, medical devices

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

50. Doctoral Research, Inventive Inquiry and Making New Spaces within and beyond the Academy

Lisa Lehner, Cornell University; Jade Vu Henry, Goldsmiths, University of London

Amid concerns about the “neo-liberal university,” we see a surge in studies *about* early-career researchers and the precarity of career trajectories. In turn, more and more special events, like pre-conferences and self-care workshops, promise supportive settings *for* early-career academics. While these developments are important, they do not always consider how scholarship carried out *by* new scholars themselves might be working to re-shape the academy. This panel seeks to foreground the agency of doctoral researchers, as well as their particular constraints, by inviting them to share how their practices resist, subvert and reconfigure the spaces where scholarship comes to matter. 

We wish to offer a platform for “inventive” and critical doctoral inquiry that generates “alternative ways of combining representation of, and intervention in, social life” (Marres et al. 2018, 18), using e.g. art, design, performance, activism, alternative methodologies and more. We contend that this creative and active relationship with “the social” is reflexive–that inventive research both transforms, and is transformed by, its “objects” of study. Our panel asks: How do emerging researchers “invent the social” within the contemporary university and beyond? And, critically, who bears the costs and/or consequences of such change?

We invite doctoral students from all disciplines to present the space-making potentialities of their inventive research, and collectively forge a space of solidarity for early-career scholarship. We welcome all presentation formats to explore how this emerging body of inventive work might contribute to existing knowledge structures and also reconfigure the spaces where scholarly careers are constituted.

Contact: ll723@cornell.edu

Keywords: early-career scholarship, research practices, inventive research, higher education, alternative knowledge production

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

51. Doing STS amid the Procession of Disaster

Steve G. Hoffman, University of Toronto

The procession of disaster – extreme weather events, industrial legacy hazards, and the cascading failures of sociotechnical infrastructures – is the new normal. The impact of this procession on daily life ranges from inconvenient (e.g. campus closures due to extreme weather) to catastrophic (e.g. ice storms, floods, toxic contamination, catastrophic wildfires, increasingly angry hurricanes, etc.). As the regularity of large-scale tragedy accelerates, calls for sustainability, climate adaptation, and disaster resilience are converging. This open panel invites contributions that draw out the continuities and discontinuities in this convergence, especially where the links are tense for STS scholarship. Governance practices around sustainability and climate adaptation, for example, have developed from technocratic planning frameworks that promote economic growth while trying to preserve bio-physical resources. Here we find a persistently practical if pollyannaish emphasis on human behavior change and less wasteful consumption. STS scholars of disaster, in contrast, have focused on longer term sociomaterial legacies of modernity. Here we find theoretically rich but often quite removed deconstructions of the very concepts of crisis and disaster, accounts of the unequal distribution of vulnerability, exposes of entrenched institutional power, or broad denunciations of post-colonial and/or neoliberal governance. Where can STS scholars locate a constructive engagement with the programmatic emphasis of sustainability governance, disaster and emergency management, and climate adaptation? How do we continue to raise challenging epistemological and ontological questions while also engaging practical contributions to the climate crisis and procession of disaster? How are we to live, work, suffer, mobilize, and love within the new normal?

Contact: steve.hoffman@utoronto.ca

Keywords: disaster, catastrophe, climate adaptation, climate crisis, sustainability

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

52. Dying at the Margins: Emerging Material-Discursive Perspectives on Death and Dying

Philip R Olson, Virginia Tech; Natashe Lemos Dekker, University of Amsterdam; Jesse Peterson, KTH Stockholm

This session seeks to explore socio-ecological networks of the dying and dead that exist at the margins. The borders between life and death are sometimes unclear. Death may get interrupted, delayed, or come undone, disrupting culturally shared norms and expectations surrounding death and dying. We acknowledge such disruptions as material and discursive; that is, bodies, minds, geographies, stories, technologies, and more act to challenge human perspectives on how people, animals, plants, or things ought to die and where and how the dead ought to be laid to rest. Suddenly, what seemed coherent no longer is, in the breakdown or dissolution of that which is dying but also in the way one orders worlds and afterworlds.

This session aims to identify and develop ways to explore and establish connections between dying and death from perspectives that refute a nature/culture binary—to ask questions such as: What boundary work takes place to construct and maintain the categories of alive, not-alive, dead, dying, and undead for places, objects, and beings? How do states and processes of acquiescing to, existing in between, manipulating, or overcoming life and/or death affect normative assumptions about dying and death? What might it mean to reconfigure human understanding of death to a more ecological frame that accommodates more-than-human lives and/or deep time? How might the memories, spirits, or spiritualities related to the dead and dying limit, expand, or explode a material-discursive frame? How do such challenges alter ethical approaches or values attached to dying and death?

Contact: prolson@vt.edu

Keywords: Death and Dying, Environment, Vital Boundaries, Worlds and Afterworlds, Ethics and Policy

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

53. Editing future life and biotechnological utopias/ Bio-political materialization and potentialities of CRISPRcas9

Eva Slesingerova, Masaryk university

We are inhabiting multiple bio-political potentialities, futures echoing ideas of life-as-it-could-be. This panel analyzes biotechnological not-only-human networks, their utopian and dystopian potentialities in the context of recombinant DNA technologies. For fifty years, assorted technologies for human genome editing and recombinant DNA have been used. The current applications of genome editing on human germlines have provoked significant attention and raised a number of ethical and legal questions as well. Specifically considering CRISPR/Cas 9 technology, the rhetoric about revolution, new promises, new breakpoints for humankind, also fears and concerns have emerged recently. Speaking about CRISPR/Cas9 and the media frenzy, anthropologist Kirksey (2016) referred to “emergent 21st century biotechnology dreams,” noting that “science fictions and fantasies are quickly becoming facts with CRISPR” which he described as “a gene editing technology that is opening up new horizons for the human species.” Miscellaneous futurities, as material-semiotic reconfigurations, biotechnological utopias, media hypes, are present in the topics of the current genome editing technologies. We meet to bring together various views on questions like:

–              What kinds of biotechnological utopias, spaces of hope and hype, visions, also fears and concerns we face today in the context of human genome editing technologies?

–              Which social and political issues are mirrored and created by these technologies? How they stratify groups of potential patients?

–              What modes of de/politization are involved in the context of editing genome technologies? What kinds of new social control, hierarchies, exclusion, domination but also care, social inclusion can genome editing technologies help accomplish?

Contact: eslesi@fss.muni.cz

Keywords: editing genome, biotechnological utopias, techno-fantasies, biopolitics, CRISPR-Cas9

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

54. Emerging Worlds of Eating: Interrogating the logics of digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of food

Tanja Schneider, University of St Gallen; Jeremy Brice, London School of Economics and Political Science; Karin Eli, University of Warwick

Food is increasingly caught up in processes of digitalisation, datafication and platformisation which are rapidly (if unevenly) reshaping exchange and interaction among those who produce, prepare, consume, (re)distribute and review it. These processes appeal to numerous values and logics: Food delivery services emphasize speed and convenience; surplus food redistribution apps promote sustainability by redirecting and revaluing the excess of conventional food commerce; and social dining platforms encourage unconventional socialities and economies around shared acts of cooking and eating. Meanwhile, platforms and devices promise consumer empowerment through knowledge: supply chain transparency platforms promise to demystify the provenance of food through aggregating data sourced from across the globe, while dietary tracking devices afford novel forms of digitised (self-)knowledge and modes of dietary intervention.

Elaborate socio-technical assemblages of people, capital, software and devices are thus engaged in reinventing foodstuffs and eating practices, along with the knowledges, affects and values which accompany them. In this session we aim to interrogate the diverse and intersecting logics which underpin, guide and govern the digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of food. In particular, we invite researchers working in critical innovation studies, food studies, studies of financialisation and capitalisation, and digital ethnography to join us in tracing the varied worlds of eating emerging around these socio-technical assemblages. In so doing, we hope to explore how the conventions, constraints and accumulation strategies of digital platforms, of data-driven innovation and of those invested in them both enact food futures and participate in ordering present day food cultures, materialities and practices.

Contact: j.brice@lse.ac.uk

Keywords: Food, digital, financialisation, data, eating

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

55. Engaging Health Activism, Sexual Politics and STS

Lisa Lindén, Departement of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg; Emily Jay Nicholls, Goldsmiths University of London

The relationship between activism, biomedicine and sexual politics has been a focus in STS since Steven Epstein’s 1996 book Impure Science: AIDS Activism and The Politics of Knowledge. In focusing on how patients, citizens and organisations mobilise to transform biomedicine and healthcare, STS has taken a particular focus on public/expert entanglements, such as how health advocacy groups collaborate with healthcare professionals and mobilise citizens’ experiences to influence health practice (Akrich et al. 2014).

In this panel we want to combine this focus on health activism with recent calls to address the possibilities afforded by a greater attention to pleasure and to sexual bodies in STS (Race 2019). Here we also include an attention to the ways sex and sexuality are mobilised in political engagements with health and illness. As digital technologies open new possibilities for doing politics, sex and intimacy, and uncertain and turbulent times raise new problems for health programming and notions of expertise, we hope to explore the analytical generativity of doing STS research at the intersection of sex, sexuality, health and activism.

We welcome contributions that engage with ‘health activism and sexual politics’ in various ways, and from a range of empirical areas. This might include:

• Public/expert entanglements
• Sexual bodies, affect and pleasure
• The enactment of ‘biosexual citizenship’ (Epstein 2018) in health activism
• Continuities and discontinuities: troubled pasts (Murphy 2012) and possible futures
• Health activism and LGBTQ movements (Roberts & Cronshaw 2017)
• Categorisations, standards, risk and politics of (sexual) inclusion
• Engagements with Queer Theory

Contact: lisa.linden@gu.se

Keywords: sex, sexuality, health, activism, biomedicine

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

56. Engineering Extinction: Prospects, Uncertainties, and Responsibilities in Planned Extinction

Josef Barla, Goethe University Frankfurt

While more and more policies are sought to be implemented and countless efforts are undertaken as immediate and urgent responses to the rapid loss of biodiversity—which is often described as the sixth mass extinction in the geological history of the planet—novel genetic strategies are becoming a technoscientific reality for vector control purposes and the containment of so-called invasive species. Aiming at the suppression, if not complete annihilation, of entire species that are considered as pest or ‘out of place’, genome editing techniques such as, for example, gene drive systems are presented as technological solution to manifold epidemiological, environmental, and economic problems. Differing from other forms of extinction—which are often understood as unintentional consequences of the reckless extraction and exploitation of natural resources—these experimental forms of extirpating entire species are raising their own pressing regulatory, ethical, and ecological questions. This panel seeks to explore the prospects, promises, and uncertainties associated with novel genomic strategies for controlling biological vectors and undesired species. To what problems are these techniques responding, and how is responsibility addressed and embedded in the narratives of a controlled species extinction? How and on what scale is risk assessed? How is life and death reworked on a molecular scale? How are these novel approaches not only irritating prevalent understandings of a linear progression of life into death, but also practices of governing life if death and even extinction becomes that which entails value?

Contact: barla@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Keywords: Extinction, Genome Editing, Bioeconomies, Governance, Vector Control

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

57. Environmentalities of Health Security

Carolin Mezes, Philipps-University Marburg; Sven Opitz, Philipps-University Marburg

Discourses of Global Health Security are saturated with buzzwords like “holism”, “comprehensive approaches”, or “systems thinking”, and increasingly push concepts that make a strong case about the ecological and environmental aspects of health, like “Planetary Health” or “One Health”. Concerns about the circulation of antibiotics through sewage systems and soils, the proliferation of vector populations due to rising temperatures, or the conveyance of “invasive species” through logistical infrastructures are just some cases that point to what we observe as a rearticulation of health threats in environmental terms. In our panel we would firstly like to deepen the understanding of such a (re-)actualized environmental orientation, and secondly do so by investigating how it corresponds with transformations of the security apparatus designed to tackle health crises. We suggest focusing on the governmental, technical and scientific means that address disease emergencies as a matter of ecology. Correspondingly, we invite papers to address the following questions: How do techno-political devices and legal protocols transcribe the changing spatio-temporal constitution of disease into an administrative topology? What calculative machineries, such as seemingly trivial paperwork technologies, sensing devices or computer simulations draw together epidemic environments and enact ecological concerns for health security? What techno-scientific interventions, from outbreak research on vaccines, over epidemiological sentinel systems to microbial engineering, are put to the field? Using these questions for investigating a broad range of phenomena, we hope to clarify whether and how contemporary apparatuses of health security intertwine with an ecosystem view on disease.

Contact: carolin.mezes@uni-marburg.de

Keywords: Health Security, Environment, Ecology, Global Assemblages

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Medicine and Healthcare

58. Envisioning a Decentered Academic Knowledge System Online

Gareth A. F. Edel, New Jersey Institute of Technology; Nathan Fisk, University of South Florida

With increasing attention paid to exploitative labor practices in scholarship, marginalization of non-dominant scholars, and exclusionary pricing of access to knowledge, this panel asks what alternatives exist or could exist to the  online version of traditional paper journals.

Scientific norms focusing on access and sharing information have been fundamentally at odds with the idea of intellectual property in recent decades. However, science, and technoscientific society broadly, depend on sharing information among scholars, and communities. With ownership at issue we ask- are the current systems matching or failing aspirational norms, such as Mertonian Communalism (1942) or the more radical public or communitarian access imagined in DIY movements and Citizen Science (Cluck 2015, Ottinger 2010). We ask, what would happen if we did not assume scientific “journals” as the core method of knowledge sharing? What would an open public and expert community reviewed information system look like? Can we look at online communities and technically enabled information systems outside of the sciences and see analogues or affordances?  Many practices and technological models present options, but how can we consider an alternative to, or an adjunct to, traditional journals and peer review?

Presenters and discussants are invited to contribute case studies of knowledge development and distribution outside of the ‘online paper journal’ model, or to offer theoretical or developmental models for considerations contributing to a collaborative discussion of the possibilities and practicalities of an alternative forms of “journals,” or Shared open and public expert community reviewed information system.

Contact: garethedel@gmail.com

Keywords: Open Journals, Open Access, Knowledge Systems, Peer Review, Expertise

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Science Communication/Public Engagement

59. Ethea Alternativa:  Undoing Capital’s Techno-Economic, Exploitative Thrall over the Earth

Brian Noble, Dalhousie University

Contact: bnoble@dal.ca

Keywords: Ethoecologies, Counter-Capitalism, Indigenous Peoples’ Alliances, Earth Futures, Disruptive Techniques

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

60. Experimenting With Inclusive Technologies: Saying No By Saying Let’s

Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Athena Institute, VU Amsterdam; Nicole Sylvia Goedhart, Athena Institute, VU University, Amsterdam; Mike Grijseels, Athena Institute, VU University, Amsterdam; Barbara Regeer

The role of technologies in producing exclusions has long been a topic for scholarship in STS. Rather than merely studying successful technologies – through what Leigh Star called the ‘executive model’ of ANT – shifting the focus to their exclusions has given rise to critical scholarship of the marginalisations produced (‘saying no’ to exclusions), but also to feminist attempts to develop inclusive alternatives (‘saying no by saying yes’). Inspired by such work, this session focuses on the experimental involvement of STS scholars in the development of inclusive technologies. We aim to combine the optimistic search for inclusive technologies (as a way to combat the ‘powerlessness’ mentioned in the program theme) with an experimental and speculative approach, sensitive to the complexities of doing inclusion (our balancing antidote to the ‘feelings of urgency’ the theme mentions). We call this experimental involvement in the production of inclusive technologies ‘saying no by saying let’s’.

We welcome contributions on – but not limited to – the development of technologies for disability inclusive employment, for digital inclusion of vulnerable groups in digitizing societies, for reconfiguring gender norms, and for technologically enhancing participatory methods themselves (participatory vlogs, data-driven participation, etc.). Questions can relate to: How is technological inclusion enacted? What does inclusion thereby become? And which novel exclusions result from – or even become necessary for – this version of inclusive technology? Contributions on inspiring, as well as failed or ambiguous attempts at developing inclusive technologies are equally welcome.

Contact: teun.zuiderent-jerak@vu.nl

Keywords: Inclusive technologies, experiment

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

61. Exploring Empowerment in The Co-creation of Innovation

Shelly Tsui, Eindhoven University of Technology; Cian O’Donovan, University College London; Makoto Takahashi, Technical University Munich; Sophie Nyborg, Technical University of Denmark – DTU; Erik Laes, Eindhoven University of Technology; Mandi Astola, E

Co-creation continues to be a powerful way to frame practices of technology development and governance. On its own terms, it transforms passive recipients into active co-creators, lending a participative hue to innovation imperatives that otherwise urge disruption and scale-up. And amongst design, business and policy practitioners, co-creation provides a usefully ambiguous framework with which to guide the design and deployment of experiments, interventions and instruments in domains as diverse as energy production, health care and agriculture.

The promise of co-creation is the empowerment of those usually excluded from processes of knowledge production. Advocates claim it affords more meaningful and material participation where the inputs of a diversity of stakeholders are taken on an equal-footing. Yet what exactly empowerment is in co-creation remains unclear, and this lack of clarity has implications for the extent to which co-creation will be adopted by influential actors such as policy-makers as an approach to include society in technoscientific innovation.

This panel seeks to explore questions about the empowerment and co-creation nexus. Who or what is empowered, by what means (emergence), and to what ends? Which concepts of power and agency might help us to think this through? Does empowerment for some mean disempowerment of others? What are the implications for ethics, responsibility and governance? What makes empowerment under co-creation different from existing calls for participation in innovation?

We welcome conceptual and empirical papers that explores these questions and others that deal with the role of empowerment, communities, agency in practices of co-creation and knowledge production.

Contact: s.tsui@tue.nl

Keywords: Co-creation, empowerment, knowledge production, stakeholder engagement, innovation

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

62. Extractivism Revisited: STS Perspectives

Giorgos Velegrakis, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, NKUA; Aristotelis (Aristotle) Tympas, National and Kapodistrian U. of Athens

Extractivism has been key to the emergence of climate change and the rest of the symptoms of the unprecedented environmental crisis. Extracting coal, oil, gas, uranium, as well as all kind of metals and other materials, from gold to all sorts of substances used in the manufacturing of, for example, electronic devices, was never so developed and, at the same time, so problematic. This open panel invites attention to the STS study of the co-shaping of science/technology and extractivism. Focusing on the politics, economics and ideologies embedded in (and advanced through) the science/technology of extractivism, it aims at a conversation with studies that have so far focused on the explicit political, economic and ideological dimensions of the various versions of extractive activities. We propose a closer look at the socialites privileged by the very design of the technologies that extractivism is based on, which are concealed/black-boxed by the way the artifacts involved in extractive activities -engines, motors, other machines, devices, machine ensembles, platforms, mechanical and other technoscientific processes and apparatuses- are constructed and communicated. In this context, we are further interested in the way the advance of this design interacts with the emergence of a special kind of an expert, one that is preoccupied with extractivist initiatives. Contributions that experiment with STS approaches to the integration of electronic computing and related technologies (automation, control, telecommunication, etc) to extractivist technologies are especially welcomed. By inviting attention to the scientific-technological materialities of extractive enterprises, and to the construction of the expertise linked to them, we aim at a critical revisiting of what we know about the complex workings of extractive explorations and operations worldwide. The panel welcomes contributions that attempt to open the “black box” of the technology of extractivism from any of the fields that contribute to STS (history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, policy, etc).

Contact: gvelegrakis@phs.uoa.gr

Keywords: climate change, environment, extractive activities, extractivism, technology design

Categories: Energy

Engineering and Infrastructure

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

63. Fakes and legitimacy reordering

Cristina Popescu, EHESS – Centre d’Etude des Mouvements Sociaux

“Fakes” come in multiple forms and shapes. With the new career of the “fake news”, and the “crisis of objectivity”, the discussions on truth, validity, legitimacy became a new impulse and developed a new, transdisciplinary profile: philosophy, social sciences, economics, but also science and technology studies, approach this topic at different levels and with different results.

The session draws on this multiple approaches to the question of fakes, and yet tries to go beyond a simple recollection of paradigmatic approaches and argumentative constructions. Far more, the contributions should aim at a comparative perspective on different modes of valuation, which are implied in producing fakes across different realms of the social life. The session welcomes contributions which look at practices of classification and categorization, but also at typical ways of thinking about normative representation of actors dealing with phenomena of ascribing and assessing worth to things, people, or institutions. How are fakes produced within the new imaginative regimes at work in our societies? Which are their consequences? And which strategies do the policy actors deploy during this acute period of legitimacy reordering? These are a few questions the session intends to answer.

Contact: cristina.popescu@ehess.fr

Keywords: fake news, truth, legitimacy, valuation, imaginative regimes

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

64. Feeding Food Futures: From Techno-solutionism to Inclusive Human-Food Collaborations

Marketa Dolejsova, Charles University In Prague; Danielle Wilde, University of Southern Denmark; Hilary Davis, Swinburne University of Technology; Ferran Altarriba Bertran, UC Santa Cruz; Denisa Reshef Kera, University of Salamanca

Human-food practices are key drivers of personal and planetary health and have the potential to nurture both. However, current modes of food production and consumption are causing ill health and amplifying climate change (Willet et al., 2019). A burgeoning realm of food-tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists propose solutions for healthier, more sustainable and more efficient food practices—from smart kitchenware and diet personalization services to digital farming platforms. Yet, such techno-solutions offer uncertain food futures. The ‘disruptive potential’ of food-tech products and associated celebratory narratives of the next food revolution are, to a large extent, exhausted by techno-solutionism. Many such products are problematic in their impacts on food cultures. Scholars from STS and elsewhere have discussed the negative role of food-tech innovation: for instance, in deepening socio-economic inequalities on global food markets, disturbing social food traditions, and jeopardizing consumers’ privacy (Biltekoff & Guthman, 2019; Choi, Foth & Hearn, 2014; Lewis & Phillipov, 2018; Lupton & Feldman, 2020). This panel will address the challenges of food-tech innovation through a diversity of post-disciplinary and intersectional contributions from food-oriented researchers, designers, and other practitioners. We call for a wide range of empirical explorations, theoretical reflections, critical speculations, and experimental inquiries into uncertain food-tech futures to be presented as traditional paper formats or participatory interventions and walk-shops around the local Prague foodscape. We aim to support a productive exchange among authors of diverse geographical and professional backgrounds to collectively unpack our troubling global and local food conditions, and feed food futures that are inclusive, safe, and just.

Contact: marketa.dolejsova@gmail.com

Keywords: food cultures, human-food interaction, food technology, food-tech innovation, inclusive food futures

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Information, Computing and Media Technology

65. Filling the Gaps Between Observations with Data: Nature, Models and Human Agency

Catharina Landström, Chalmers University of Technology; Dick Kasperowski, University of Gothenburg

STS case studies have shown how observations and measurements of phenomena in nature are transformed into scientific data in different practices. In light of the rapid digitalisation and a growing interest in ‘big data’ it is important to continue investigating the ways in which environmental science produce scientific data for use in research and policy. This panel invites papers that discuss how environmental data generation and processing is mediated by models.

There is a wide range of data collection practices in environmental science, ranging from remote sensing, to scientific field work, to citizen science observations. Data generation can also involve new mobile applications, or DIY counter monitoring, or computer model simulations. Papers analysing the many ways in which environmental data is collected by humans and non-humans are welcome.

Regardless of the starting point, data must be processed to become useable in scientific analysis. As the increasing digitalisation produces a deluge of data to order in scientific classification schemes, the human ability to discern and judge is delegated to models. Modelling of environmental data also enacts human agency when filling the gaps between empirical measurements or observations. Data processing algorithms perform imagined epistemic subjects. The consequences of the merging of numbers representing nature, machine calculations and scientific skills in the generation of environmental data are important issues for STS investigation and we invite presentations of ongoing research into the relations between nature, models and human agency.

Contact: catharina.landstrom@chalmers.se

Keywords: big data, environment, computer modelling

Categories: Big Data

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

66. Flows and overflows of personal health data

Mary Ebeling, Drexel University; Tamar Sharon, iHub, Radboud University Nijmegen; Niccolò Tempini, University of Exeter, Egenis

With the explosion of digital technologies that generate massive sets of personal data, from internet networks and big data infrastructures, to wearable devices and sensors, many actors see the analytical potentials of these collections for healthcare and medical research and knowledge production. These data circulate across domains, amongst different types of actors – e.g. academic scientists, corporations, non-profit organizations, individual data subjects, and patient groups – and according to different logics of exchange – e.g. donation, sharing, commodification, and appropriation (Ebeling 2016; Sharon 2018; Tempini and Teira 2019). The promises for the increased circulation of health data are many, including: greater patient empowerment, better population health, and improved interoperability ensuring continuity of care, as well as less health-specific outcomes such as national economic growth. But so are its potential harms, including risks (e.g. privacy breaches), epistemic uncertainties (e.g. questions of data quality and algorithmic transparency), disruptions to existing research standards and protocols (e.g. the conduct of clinical trials), as well as wider concerns regarding the generation of profit based on donated or otherwise publicly available personal health data, and the emergence of new power asymmetries and conflicts of interest between data subjects, data users, and new data intermediaries.

This track invites papers that explore the complex dynamics of the increasing circulation of health data. In particular we seek analyses asking not only how benefits are construed and by whom, and what harms may result, but also what frameworks currently exist for governing flows and what alternative frameworks might be imagined.

Contact: n.tempini@exeter.ac.uk

Keywords: Personal health data, circulation, value, data practices, governance

Categories: Big Data

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

67. Fossil Legacies – Re-Assembling Work, Gender and Technology in the Coal Phase Out

Jeremias Herberg, Leuphana University Lüneburg; Thomas Turnbull, Max Planck Institute For the History of Science

The certainty of climate change and the availability of alternative pathways have not brought about post-fossil societies. In the Czech Republic, Australia, Germany and many other regions, coal is still continuously extracted. In this context, the prospect of a just energy transition is being disrupted by ‘fossil legacies’: Be it the technological cultures of fossil fuels, the populist distortion of worker interests, male worker pride and culture, or the corporatist alliances of democratic parties – these and other legacies jeopardize the economic livelihood of some, and the survival of others.

STS contributions to energy research have focused on transformative dynamics, innovations, and engagements. In the present context, STS can also trace and reconfigure the relational ties that fossil legacies engender. The coal phase out in particular is a process that involves re-assembling inherited technologies, businesses, worker identities, and political alliances. Transformative openings and practices are re-distributed and the role of science and technology must be re-assessed.

– How do involved actors dis-/associate themselves with/from coal-related notions of work, gender, or technology?

– What connections emerge when fossil legacies are challenged by political movements or climate diplomats?

– How does right-wing mobilization intervene in the (dis-)association of fosil-fuel associated work, gender and capitalism?

The contributions in this session historically trace, sociologically map or philosophically question the re-assembling of gender, work, technology and capitalism in the process of the coal phase out. Contributors theorize the transformation of fossil assemblages and reflect on their role in transforming fossil legacies.

Contact: jeremias.herberg@iass-potsdam.de

Keywords: coal phase out, assemblages, gender, work, populism

Categories: Energy

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

68. From Citizen to Citizen-Subject? Exploring (Re)-Configurations of ‘The Public’ in Innovation

Shelly Tsui, Eindhoven University of Technology; Benjamin Lipp, Technical University Munich; Anja Kathrin Ruess, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich; Meiken Hansen, Technical University of Denmark; Bozena Ryszawska, Wro

In the European innovation policy discourse, the role of the public, namely citizens, is changing. There have been calls for more forms of public engagement with citizens in science, technology, and innovation to promote more transparency, democratization of information and knowledge, and the matching of societal needs and outcomes. To achieve this, initiatives such as living labs, demonstration projects, test beds, makers-spaces, innovation labs and fab-labs are increasing in number in public spaces (e.g. universities, neighborhoods, and popular streets). The hope is that by including the citizens directly in the innovation process through real-time feedback loops through approaches like co-creation and co-design, not only would the needs and outcomes better align, but citizens would become more knowledgeable through first-hand experience.

However, in co-creating, co-designing, and engaging in the innovation’s design process, new trends are emerging. Citizens are no longer passive recipients of innovative outcomes, and instead take an active role in shaping them. Simultaneously, citizens are treated as subjects. As a result, the distinction between “end-user”, “citizen”, and “subject” are no longer clear, and has implications for agency, power, and challenging existing structures of participation and knowledge.

We seek to explore these emerging configurations of the public’s engagement in innovation and welcome conceptual and empirical contributions. What is the relevance of the terms “users”, “subjects”, and “citizens”? How does this ambiguity affect knowledge production and the discourse of “expert” versus “lay-people” expertise? What implications do these trends have for policymakers as public experimentation initiatives become more commonplace?

Contact: s.tsui@tue.nl

Keywords: citizens, innovation, configuration, knowledge production, public engagement

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

69. Global Imaginaries of Precision Science: Diversity, Inclusion and Justice

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Columbia University; Janet K. Shim, University Of California, San Francisco

Precision science targets individual and group differences as a path towards greater accuracy, efficiency and efficacy by using techniques of big data analytics, algorithmic prediction, and large-scale data sharing and applying them in a growing number of domains.  This panel focuses on the sociotechnical imaginaries of the promise of precision that fuel the increasingly global infrastructure for collecting personal data and biospecimens in many different domains. For example, the promise of precision has been motivated by and operationalized in the quest for greater inclusion and diversity of historically underrepresented groups in precision medicine research as evidenced in initiatives such as the US All of Us Research Program and the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. Extending beyond biomedicine, these processes are being taken up in studies of genetic associations of socio-behavioral traits such as criminality and educational attainment that are leading to new fields of “precision forensics” and “precision education.” This panel calls for papers that interrogate the constituent concepts, practices, and discourses of precision science – its actors, institutions, networks, values and cultures – and its applications and uptake in a wide range of domains, including medicine, criminal justice, and social policy. We are interested in examining forms of knowledge and practices in precision science, their impacts on emerging subjectivities and data-driven publics, and the development of frameworks on justice, ethics and inclusion. We aim to use this panel to build a global collaboratory of scholars who will use this opportunity to share their work and build future collaborations.

Contact: sandra.lee@columbia.edu

Keywords: Precision medicine, sociogenomics, ethics and justice, knowledge production, Diversity

Categories: Big Data

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

70. Governing Reproductive Bio-economies: Policy Frameworks, Ethics and Economics

Nicky Hudson, De Montfort University; Vincenzo Pavone, Consejo Superior Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); Cathy Herbrand, De Montfort University

Reproductive bio-economies, i.e. economies that are built around reproductive tissues, cells and processes, are largely consolidated economies, which have seen considerable growth in terms of treatment cycles, technologies, revenues, actors, and countries. Since the first IVF birth, reproductive bio-economies have expanded to include a range of stakeholders including: clinics, legal firms, donors and surrogates, intermediaries and agencies, gamete and embryo banks, investment funds, research institutions and public health care systems, in a global network worth billions of Euros. Amidst this expansion, questions about the policy and governance of reproductive bio-economies become a matter of considerable interest.

A consideration of regulatory systems that govern reproductive technologies raises questions about how bio-economies emerge within different national and supranational contexts, how and if they challenge existing governance arrangements and how existing or new policy frameworks contribute to their re/shaping. An exploration of the regulation of reproductive bio-economies allows for improved understanding of how “moral regimes directed towards reproductive behaviours and practices are fully entangled with political economic processes” (Morgan & Roberts 2012), and allows consideration to be given to the distribution of actors and affects within different moral frameworks and regulatory formations.

This panel therefore welcomes contributions on:

–              Policy actors, configurations and policy change in the context of reproductive bio-economies

–              Interactions of public policy with private medicine

–              Local/global medical regulation

–              Questions of quality and safety, conflicts of interest and informed consent

–              The regulation of different valuation practices and commercial actors

–              Questions of under or over regulation

Contact: nhudson@dmu.ac.uk

Keywords: IVF, reproductive technologies, tissue economies, bioeconomies

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

Medicine and Healthcare

71. Grassroots Innovation: Hacking, Making, Hobby, Entrepreneurship

Chen-Pang Yeang, University of Toronto; Wen-Ching Sung, University of Toronto

A hallmark of our emerging world is that the general public obtains not only access to modern technologies but also the knowledge, means, and incentives to generate new products and applications from them.  While self-made inventors populated history, do-it-yourself and technological explorations outside big companies, government, and academia nonetheless become a social movement with conspicuous collectives, information channels, and media coverage.  Today, hackers work on open-source, free-access software and firmware for fun and profit.  Makerspaces spread everywhere for the cause of sharing manufacturing, participatory design, recycling and reuse, nurturing start-ups, or community building.  Made-in-garage is a common myth in high-tech.  “Mass innovation” or “STEM for everyone” is promoted by the states around the globe.  In this panel, we welcome various approaches and perspectives to make sense of this phenomenon of grassroots innovation.  We ask: What are its connections to the longstanding traditions of technical hobbies?  Which organizational and managerial platforms do grassroots innovators introduce that influence the development of new technologies?  What is the nature of the tension between non-profit and commercial, between amateur and professional, in these activities?  How do the hackers’ and makers’ political actions intertwine with their technical innovation?  While hacking and making are seemingly global, what are their major differences in different countries and regions, especially between the affluent North and poor South?  How does grassroots innovation reconfigure the current technological landscape?  What are the roles of the state and capital in shaping grassroots innovation, and how is such shaping grappled from below?

Contact: chenpang.yeang@utoronto.ca

Keywords: innovation, hacking, makerspace, technical hobby, entrepreneurship

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

72. Grotesque Epistemologies

Lee Nelson, RPI; Joanna Radin, Yale University

Decomposition, putrefaction, decay, rot. These phenomena/processes have always been an important and vital part of organic and inorganic existence, but have often been neglected as unseemly, abject, or grotesque. When they have been scientifically engaged with, they tend to be framed as problems to prevent or managed away into disavowal. Recently, some scholars, such as Caitlin DeSilvey in Curated Decay (2017), have addressed these phenomena ‘head on,’ asking “what happens if we choose not to intervene? Can we uncouple the work of memory from the burden of material stasis? What possibilities emerge when change is embraced rather than resisted” (p. 4)? Similarly, Lucinda Cole, in her introduction to the 2017 Configurations edition on putrefaction, explains that while putrefaction is “regarded as both a process and a stage in organic decomposition” (p. 139), the inattention to such omnipresent phenomena provides historic possibilities for questioning “how to theorize rot and decay in ways that are attuned to the material and political consequences of the discourse” (p. 140). These phenomena, beyond any disruption to the senses, disrupt categories of thought by “thinking ontologically in reverse” (Radin) and insist on a ‘trans-corporeal’ (Alaimo) recognition of material existence. This session seeks submissions from scholars working in part to re/habilitate an appreciation for decomposition, putrefaction, decay, rot, and others, for their unique and significant epistemological, ontological, and political a/effectiveness that are affirmatively grotesque – not for their abjection, but rather for how the grotesque “frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities” (Bakhtin).

Contact: lee.lcnelson@gmail.com

Keywords: grosteque, decomposition, putrefaction, decay, rot

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Other

73. Growing old in a more-than human world: Materialities of care and interspecies entanglements

Nete Schwennesen, Copenhagen University; Daniel Lopez Gomez, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya; Joanna Latimer, SATSU, University of York

This panel calls for papers with an interest in exploring the recent ‘post-humanist turn’ within ageing studies (Andrews & Duff 2019).  While age studies has privileged anthropocentric visions of agency, usually as a way to contest the deficit-based visions of later life in care, a recent interest has grown around studying how late life is shaped and emerge through more-than-human ecologies which involves digital technologies, robots, architectures, plants, landscapes, animals, music etc. At the same time, new theoretical orientations such as new materialism, material-semiotics, assemblage theory, non-representational theory, and affect theory have come to inform studies on later life about the need to explore more-than-human entanglements in aging, and the configuration of later life. In this panel we invite papers with an interest in exploring how later life are configured through more-than-human entanglements, and asks: What does ageing becomes, when ageing is seen as a stage of becoming-with more-than-humans? How does ‘post-human’ theories challenge human centric notions of care? How does imaginative visions of eldercare shape future entanglements of late life and more—than-humans? What are the new opportunities for intervention and experimentation, that opens up, when we think about later life as constituted through more-than-human entanglements?

Contact: ns@anthro.ku.dk

Keywords: ageing, care, ecologies, more-than human, materiality, technology, affect, interspecies entanglements

Categories: Other

74. Hacker Cultures: Understanding the actors behind our software

Paula Bialski, Leuphana University Luneburg; Mace Ojala, IT University of Copenhagen

The spiraling changes around how we experience our social and physical world have stemmed from the massive amount of digital technologies that are ubiquitously used in all parts of our society today. Big data, offshore data centres, universities, grocery stores run by software companies of all shapes and sizes, are often hard to grasp and black-boxed, deeming the user unable to participate. These infrastructures are constructed by a wide range of “hackers” – a slippery term generally applied to anybody building or maintaining software or hardware. They (or we?) go by a wide range of labels such as programmers, developers (or “devs”), designers, analysts, data scientists, coders, sysadmins, dev/ops, or sometimes simply tech. They build, break, fix, and secure our navigation system, our banking database, our doctor’s healthcare software, our games, our phones, our word processors, our fridges and toasters. They work in massive software corporations, in teeny startups, or in something in-between. They volunteer for, or are employed by, free and open-source projects. While their work is ubiquitous, hackers can hold a lot of power but also none at all – as the software they are building oftentimes overpowers their capabilities of understanding and managing it. Inspired by research around hacker cultures, such as Chris Kelty’s work among free software communities, Biella Coleman’s work on the Debian communities (2012) and the politically-motivated hacker collective Anonymous (2014), or Stuart Geiger’s embedded ethnography in Wikipedia (2017 with Halfaker) – this panel shines a light on the people who build our opaque and oftentimes confusing technical worlds. In doing so, we wish to challenge the role of the STS scholar in describing the powers and agencies, and the practices and struggles of hacker cultures – a challenge that, in our increasingly complex, commodified technical worlds might never be fulfilled.

Contact: bialski@leuphana.de

Keywords: software, hackers, culture, agency, data collection, ethnography, computing

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Big Data

Engineering and Infrastructure

75. Health Made Digital

Hined A Rafeh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Danya Glabau, The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

With the rise of digital information technologies, the work of aggregating and exchanging data about our health and habits has become faster and easier. From genetic screening to self-tracking apps, and from electronic medical records to digital data archives, digital technologies are reconfiguring healthcare systems and our notions of health. Following from pioneering STS work on genetic health data (Nelson 2016), precision medicine (Ferryman and Pitcan 2018), and self-tracking devices (Lupton 2016, Schull 2016, Nafus and Neff 2016) on the one hand, and recent work on the “bioeconomy” (Birch 2017, 2018) and speculative bioeconomic futures (Benjamin 2016) on the other, this panel aims to stage generative exploration of what counts as health data in the digital age and how it impacts individuals, patient communities, and practices of public health. In a variety of professional and geographic contexts, we hope to consider questions like: What gets considered health data by regulators, and how does that shape its governance and exchange? How do information systems adapt to the introduction of new forms of “health” data, like social media use or purchasing habits? And what publics and expert communities will, or should, have a say in defining, collecting, and governing new forms of health data? By framing these questions in STS literatures, this panel will illustrate how the discipline’s approach to defining slippery objects like “digital health” and “health information” contributes to understanding health and biomedicine as deeply political matters.

Contact: danya.glabau@gmail.com

Keywords: digital health, health information, bioeconomy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

76. Hegemony, counter-hegemony and ontological politics

Andrzej Wojciech Nowak, Philosophy Institute Adam Mickiewicz University; Christian Nold, University College London; Krzysztof Abriszewski

STS often seem far from some direct actions that implicitly articulate political aims. The problem was directly addressed by H. Collins discussing the waves of STS, their primary vision of science, and the social function of experts. It has become all the more urgent when political measures were globally taken to discredit or block scientific expertise – climate change being an example as well as the anti-vaccine movements.

Yet there is a question: How do researchers ‘do’ politics with STS theory and methods? Is there any need for STS to engage with insurgent politics outside of parliamentary framings? (We believe there is.) Can we do that effortlessly? Or do STS have to combine ‘fire and water’ and bring together ontological analysis with politico-ethical sensibilities?

Our aim is to recognise the ontological politics embedded in practices, rituals, things, technologies and artefacts in order to intentionally give them an emancipatory direction. Yet this is not enough. One needs to ask how to establish and enact the policies we want by installing, using, or performing these technologies, objects, artefacts. Only this will bring a political and ethical dimension. We need not politics by other means, but direct political actions, as we need not just the third wave of STS – that would stabilise science anew –  or even a fourth wave, that would stabilise democracy anew in this turbulent time. We welcome contributions both theoretical and empirical, that show examples of using STS to support social movements or engage in political and artistic activities.

Contact: andrzej.w.nowak@gmail.com

Keywords: ontological politics, hegemony, counter-hegemony, insurgent politics

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

77. ‘Highs’ and ‘Lows’ of the Emerging Automated-Vehicles-Worlds: Location, Visibility & Alternative Futures

Nikolay Ivanovich Rudenko, European University at Saint Petersburg; Liliia Zemnukhova, European Univeristy at St. Petersburg; Andrei Kuznetsov, European Univeristy at St. Petersburg

An international media hype surrounding autonomous vehicles’ (AV) developments and tests conducted by multinational giants like Google and Tesla seem to obscure the whole world of small and scarcely visible actors. There is a variety of enterprises located at the periphery of the emerging world of AVs. Their marginal position may be construed as ‘backwardness’ without any hope to catch up with the ‘leaders’. However, it could be understood as a source of alternative sociotechnical imageries and designs of AVs. The ‘lows’ of the emerging AV-world are usually located in places and/or countries with the lack of access to global markets and investments. Their testing venues either too artificial or too harsh and messy. Though, AV projects proliferate in companies and countries that are not at the top of this world. They may bring about alternative designs and algorithms able to reshape and alter the futures of the AV-worlds technologically, socially, ethically.

Session suggests a comparative discussion on AV projects both at the center and periphery of this emerging world. How territorial and network locations of AV makers, planners, entrepreneurs, and visioners matter? How multiple are techno-socio-eco-legal AV designs? What (in)compatible sociotechnical imaginaries we can find here? Do they reproduce existing divides and inequalities? What challenges AV multiplicities pose to existing practices and images of mobilities, urbanity, governance, digitalization, energy use?

We invite papers from STS as well as neighboring fields (mobilities, human geography, user anthropology, etc.). We particularly welcome scholars who study AV projects beyond Euro-American world.

Contact: nckrd@mail.ru

Keywords: automated vehicles, sociotechnical imageries, technical designs, visibility, centre and periphery

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

78. Histories And Ecologies of Therapeutic Places

Markus Rudolfi, Institute for Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt; Franz Kather, Bielefeld University

A study by Japanese toxicologists reveals the healthy effect of a practice called “forest bathing”. People walk through forests and “shower” in aerosols such as Terpenes that are supposed to reduce stress, to name but one beneficial effect. Framing ecosystems like forests, sea shores or mountains as places that possess therapeutic capacities, medical knowledge rediscovers exogenous factors of human recovery, mirroring the beginnings of clinical therapeutic practices since the 18th century. Early clinical medicine began as a technology marked by concern about the regulation and manipulation of environmental impact.

Conversely, minding the ongoing loss of biodiversity and increase of environmental pollution, the possibility of therapeutic environments such as forest or sea shores is now cast in different lights — where technologically altered environments used to harbour promises of perfection, they now convey much more dire connotations. How does ecosystem change affect the concept of, for example, “forest bathing” if forests are threatened by a changing climate and species diversity?

We propose, therefore, to engage on the history and genealogy of therapeutic places and the technical translation of medical knowledge into technologies and architectures of therapy as a conceptual and epistemological starting point to current rediscoveries of environmental therapy — while minding the transformations and shifts that offset them.

The panel invites historical, empirical and speculative papers that discuss how “therapy” is related to “healthy ecosystems”, therapeutic technologies and infrastructures, and/or the challenge of defining such therapeutic places given the possibly troubling underlying assumptions of what “therapy”, “forest”, or “health” may be.

Contact: m.rudolfi@posteo.de

Keywords: therapy, ecologies, sanatorium, medical history, ecosystem service, naturopathy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

79. Holding It Together?  Data And Disasters

Louise Elstow, Lancaster University; Ben Epstein, UCL

We propose to convene a panel on the theme of data in disasters which includes the audience as active participants on a moving stage, engaging them in moving data collection. In this time of seemingly constant crisis and increasing numbers of disasters, people and things move around. Data gathering is often only a snapshot in time and location, accurate only in specific situated instances; an attempt to pin down a moveable feast.  A myriad of types of data is collected and deployed by different actors seeking to find their new normal, respond to the needs of the community, demonstrate that the incident is under control.  We’d like to explore some of the ways in which it is held together by the practices, politics and policies involved in data construction and use. 

Panel members might want to discuss topics such as: the performativity, commensur-ation/ability or [re]inscription of disaster research data, translation and interpretation of data into representations of disaster, and disaster data ontologies and epistemologies. We welcome presentations based on: the politics and ethics of data collection and management (e.g disaster data in a post GDPR, big data world), or how the quantitative and qualitative approaches to disaster data gathering might affect framings of these events.

This is important because researching the social life of data and how it lives in disasters, should move us towards reflecting on our own data choices.

We encourage panel members who will to incorporate ‘active’ data gathering in their presentations in unusual or engaging ways.

Contact: l.elstow@lancaster.ac.uk

Keywords: Disasters, data, crisis, performativity, movement

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Big Data

Knowledge, Theory and Method

80. Hormonal paradoxes: circulations, access, exposures

Mariana Rios Sandoval, Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale et Société (cermes3), Paris; Olivia (Roger) Fiorilli, IFRIS, Cermes3

Synthetic hormones, as well as hormone-like chemicals, impregnate our everyday lives. “Sex” hormones are among the most sold molecules on the pharma market, while endocrine disruptors can be found in virtually every other household and industrial product. These chemicals do not stay put, but circulate, react, transform, bind, break, agglomerate, accumulate, dislodge, and endure, and in doing so they transform tissues, bodies, relations, lives and ecosystems. They travel from labs, through human and non-human bodies, through membranes, sewage systems and bodies of water, and often back again into bodies through environmental exposures. Hormones and hormone-like chemicals circulate and accumulate, but they do so unevenly and following patterns of race, class and gender-based inequalities and oppressions defined by capitalism, binary and cis-normative gender orders, and the coloniality of power. Therefore, paradoxically, often the same molecules that are promoted or even imposed to some, are denied to others.

In this panel we ask: what can be learned by following synthetic hormones and hormone-like chemicals across material, social and epistemic boundaries? How do access, exposure, pollution, and hormonal balance and disruption look like if we choose such an approach? In order to attend to these questions we seek presentations exploring the uneven circulation of synthetic hormones and hormone-like chemicals, through contrasting places, organisms, social worlds, theoretical and disciplinary fields. We welcome presentations in the form of text, video, performance, and experimental formats.

Contact: mariana.riossandoval@cnrs.fr

Keywords: Synthetic hormones, hormone-like chemicals, inequality, power, multispecies

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

81. How can STS support a multiplicity of practices in Citizen Science?

Christian Nold, University College London; Alexandra Albert, UCL

Citizen Science is a field of growing interest for governments and social science researchers. The current situation of increased EU funding means Citizen Science is being put under pressure to professionalise, add quality and evaluation criteria. Furthermore, there is an increasing pressure to define what is Citizen Science and what it is not. One effect of this might be the exclusion of practices based around activism, art and situated knowledge that have previously been the core of citizen-led practices, and yet are being pushed to the fringes in this move to professionalisation.

STS has often uncritically supported this technocratic logic of utility and empowerment via Citizen Science. The logic of utility aims to make science cheaper by outsourcing scientific labour to the public, while at the same time claiming scientific involvement creates empowered citizens. Yet there are few actual empirical studies of impacts of this utilitarian logic on participants or what empowerment might mean in practice.

This panel asks:

What activism, art and situated knowledge practices should be seen as citizen science and how can they benefit from being framed as Citizen Science?

How can STS researchers actively support a multiplicity of Citizen Science practices?

What STS approaches can be used to expand the scope of citizen science?

This session is looking for papers that combine empirical and theoretical engagements with Citizen Science.

Contact: christian@softhook.com

Keywords: Citizen Science, Public Engagement, Art, Activism, Situated Knowledge

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

82. Human-(itarian) technologies: How to “make a better world” for humans with technologies?

Martin Andrés Perez Comisso, SFIS – Arizona State University

From at least the WWII ideas such as technological fixes, humanitarian technologies, and tech4dev, PIT, etc. has been transnationally framed, promoted, and funded, to solve or to assist human communities with their “basic needs” based in technical solutions. In particular, during emergency context, like natural disasters or a massive migration, or in the case of “resourceless” communities (due to physical, economic or political imbalances), humanitarian technologies are a path of action to “make a better world”

At the same time, local responses have been emerging (like appropriated technologies, PLACTED or Civic tech), to contest colonial assumptions and practices around these projects. Shortcomings related to technological adoption, implementation or deploy performed by universities, international agencies, governments, and other privileged people are particularly relevant for those critiques.

Imbalance and inequities of power, agency, and control has been largely discussed in study cases by STS and beyond. Nevertheless, there is an opportunity for propose alternatives, ways to engage and understand in those projects when which enact “techno-humanitarian systems”

This panel welcomes contributions and experiences from researchers, practitioners and communities making and thinking questions “above and beyond” human-itarian technologies: What it means “make a better world” with using technology? Which values and paradigms share technologies to “make the world better”? Which good practices must replicate, and misconceptions must eradicate? Whose and how humans are benefited by these projects around the world?

Note: The format proposed for this open panel will not be based in 10 min presentations. Instead, will encourage conversation, and sharing materials before the event from selected contributors. It is expected to dedicate larger amount of time in this panel to work-together around common topics, to be discussed via mail after acceptation.

Contact: mapc.088@gmail.com

Keywords: Development, Humantiarian tech, Appropriation of technologies, engieneering, public interest technologies

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Engineering and Infrastructure

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

83. Identification, Datafication, Citizenship

Richard Rottenburg, University of the Witwatersrand; Alena Thiel, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

The proliferation of (biometric) identification technologies across the globe – especially in Africa, South Asia and Latin America – is nested in profoundly new aspirations for the rationalization and even automation of political decision making in public-private governance. Building on interoperability-based data infrastructures, states and financial institutions, among many other organisations concerned with the surveillance of individual behaviour, subscribe to the idea that digital “data doubles” (Bouk 2017) circulate between previously disconnected registers, allowing thus the “datafication” (von Oertzen 2017) of new, previously unobserved areas of life, and thus ultimately the creation of new “human kinds” (Hacking 1995). The panel explores continuities and discontinuities of socio-technical configurations that have led to connecting recent innovations in identification technologies with the production of quantitative knowledge for decision making. While this happens in conventional state administrations and “global administrative apparatuses” (Eriksen 2012), the panel pays particular attention to the merging and blurring of these realms in largely privatized epistemic centres where tech giants radically transform quantitative data collection and the production of statistics through the development of learning algorithms. The by now classical analysis of statistical knowledge production as in “governance by numbers” (Rottenburg 2015) and the implications for “digital citizenship” (Isin and Ruppert 2015) needs to be revisited in the light this transformations. The panel seeks empirical contributions that examine how these developments play out in concrete settings in the Global South.

Contact: alena.thiel@ethnologie.uni-halle.de

Keywords: Biometrics, identification, quantification, digital citizenship

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Big Data

84. Inclusion in scientific communities

Jochen Glaser, TU Berlin; Nelius Boshoff, Stellenbosch University

The original conception of scientific communities by Robert Merton, Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi implied the idea that all members of scientific communities equally participate in the production of scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, science studies have uncovered many constraints that limit the participation of researchers in the knowledge production processes and decision processes of their scientific communities. Examples include constraints based on gender, ethnicity, access to means for research, or non-mainstream approaches in research. At the international level, several scientific communities have begun a discussion about a North-Western dominance in the selection of topics and approaches. In addition to these constraints, which could be considered endogenous to scientific communities, political decision produce constraints by limiting access to resource, imposing secrecy, or restricting travel and other forms of communication and collaboration.

The purpose of this open session is to explore the potential of studying these phenomena from a perspective of researchers limited inclusion in (or exclusion from) their scientific communities. We suggest considering inclusion as the way in which researchers participate in knowledge production and decision processes of their scientific communities, and to look at mechanisms that constrain inclusion from a comparative perspective. How are opportunities to participate in knowledge production and decision-making distributed in international scientific communities? Whose participation is restricted, and in which ways? What mechanisms restrict inclusion? How does the inclusion of researchers, national scientific communities, and world regions in the international production of scientific knowledge change historically?

Contact: Jochen.Glaeser@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: Inequality in knowledge production, resource distribution, international mobility, gender, North-Western Dominance

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

85. In-formed Architecture: Futures, projects and practices of digital architecture and construction

Kathrin Braun, University of Stuttgart; Cordula Kropp, University of Stuttgart

A paradigm shift is emerging in architecture and construction. Cyber-physical approaches such as build¬ing information modelling (BIM), robotic pre-fabrication and assembly or additive manufacturing are being explored or already employed in the planning and constructing of buildings or even city districts and urban landscapes. Yet, the future of in-formed architecture is still under (co-)construction, with different visions competing with each other: a vision of increased productivity, efficiency and speed, a vision of reduced waste production and resource and energy consumption, a darker vision of excessive standardization, architectural monotony and a loss of autonomy and creativity to software systems, technology platforms and multinationals, and a more sanguine vision of unbounded creativity and inspiration and a new reconciliation between in-formation and materiality, and between technoscientific rationality and respect for the non-human environment.

The panel seeks to explore the past(s) and future(s) of in-formed architecture, its historical lineages, present practices and manifestations, its aesthetic and political projects, and the relations of power and control they are embedded it.

We welcome contributions from all disciplinary perspectives on questions including but not restricted to:

What is new and distinct about digital architecture and construction today? What are the driving forces behind it? How does it reconfigure human-machine interactions, stakeholder relations, relations between mind and matter, standardization and singularization? What implicit or explicit political projects are at stake? How is digital architecture and construction shaped by relations of power, property and control? And how are these contested through struggles on social and environmental justice?

Contact: kathrin.braun@sowi.uni-stuttgart.de

Keywords: digital architecture and construction, computerization, futures, social and environmental justice

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

Other

86. Infrastructures of Care: Disability, Autonomy, Inter/Dependencies

Laura Mauldin, University of Connecticut; Helena Moura Fietz, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS; Emily Rogers, New York University

Engaging with recent STS and feminist technoscience scholars interested in “thinking with care” (Puig de la Bella Casa, 2011;2015;2017; Murphy, 2015), this open panel invites scholars working across disability studies and STS to critically interrogate care and autonomy. Across disability activism and the sociology of science, technology, and medicine is a critique of institutions and institutionalization. Implicit in this research is the virtue of autonomy: one should have agency to direct one’s life, live according to one’s preference, and be held accountable for one’s decisions. Care, however, is often associated with facets of dependency and stigmatized. Nonetheless, recent work in feminist disability studies beckons us to critically examine care (e.g., Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018), and STS scholars have noted that the notion of “patient autonomy” is itself determined by upstream decision-making and care infrastructures (Mol 2008). The goal of this panel is to consider what STS and disability studies might gain from taking up care as an infrastructure that does not render “autonomy” as a static virtue, but instead suggests a shifting and dynamic sociotechnical terrain. What emerging worlds flourish within such socitechnical systems of care? We invite case studies on how infrastructures transform care relations, altering configurations of autonomy and/or inter/dependency in the process, in a variety of cultural contexts. What do we mean when we talk about autonomy in the context of sociotechnical systems of care?  How does an STS perspective trouble notions of care taken up in feminist scholarship and/or disability studies?

Contact: laura.mauldin@gmail.com

Keywords: disability, care, interdependence, autonomy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Other

87. Infrastructuring Outer Space

A.R.E. Taylor, University of Cambridge; Nina Klimburg-Witjes, University of Vienna; James Lawrence Merron, University of Basel

Infrastructures play critical roles connecting and mediating planet Earth and outer space in multiple ways. Space infrastructures are often loaded with cultural meaning, national significance and corporate anticipation. They demand public investments and require expert knowledge. Ground stations and observatories are sites where time and distance collapse, enabling new conceptualisations of space, temporality and scale. It is in outer space that the vulnerability of infrastructure becomes readily apparent. Satellites and space stations now circulate in debris-ridden orbits. As well as being vulnerable to wear and damage, they are prone to failure and abandonment. As such, orbital infrastructures are objects of risk and disaster.

This panel seeks to merge Infrastructure Studies with the rapidly growing field of social studies now exploring outer space. How might Infrastructure Studies’ attention to material relations and process of (dis)connection help shape STS understandings of outer space? Conversely, what might an off-Earth perspective bring to STS analyses of infrastructure? We invite papers that ethnographically and theoretically explore the intersection between infrastructure and outer space. An STS and infrastructure-orientated approach to space infrastructure promises to open valuable horizons for building understandings of emerging extra-terrestrial worlds, reshaping understandings of existing worlds and addressing questions such as: What pasts, futures, imaginaries, power relations, promises and failures haunt or circulate around terrestrial and non-terrestrial space infrastructure? In what ways do space infrastructures complicate concepts of nation, space, place and placelessness? How might an infrastructure-orientated approach open up STS analyses of outer space to countries and actors outside of Euro-American contexts?

Contact: aret2@cam.ac.uk

Keywords: Infrastructure, Outer Space, off-Earth, de-terrestrialising STS

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Other

88. Inhabiting Warming Worlds – Transforming Climate Knowledge

Celine Granjou, University Grenoble Alps; Séverine Durand, University Grenoble Alpes; Coralie Mounet, University Grenoble Alps

Climate change understandings and narratives have mostly relied so far on highly sophisticated expert knowledge measuring and assessing a ‘global’ climate, thus excluding lay knowledge and experiences of shifting patterns in local weather and environments (Jasanoff, 2010; Turnhout et al. 2016). This panel aims to unsettle this ‘de-terrestrialized’ and globalized view of climate change and to focus instead on locally embedded knowledge and ‘ordinary’ experiences of how the climate is changing in specific places, and how it impacts the local environments and everyday life of inhabitants.

Following recent attempts to redefine environmental knowledge and politics away from regimes of official expertise, international negotiations, and public, front-of-stage controversies, and to look instead into the forms of ‘slow, intimate activism’ that take place in everyday, ordinary practices of knowing and inhabiting warming worlds (Liboiron et al. 2018), we aim to address the capacity of lived experiences for ‘re-terrestrializing’ climate knowledge and politics (Latour, 2019) and fostering new practices of attentiveness, care and local adaptation in a time of climate disturbance.

The panel will gather together empirical investigations and theoretical reflections focusing on peoples’ experiences of warming environments (including, for instance, heat waves, warmer winters, retreating glaciers, changing seasons, as well as of changing patterns regarding plant growth, soil, animal behaviors or sea levels) in order to examine the epistemological, political and ethical work at play in the ordinary, situated practices of noticing, story-ing and living in warming worlds.

Contact: celine.granjou@irstea.fr

Keywords: climate change, climate expertise, situated knowledge, lived experience, environment

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

89. Innovating and regenerating the migrant-technology boundary

Olga Usachova

With a current trend in technological development and contemporary migration context the conceptual innovation in STS in order to address the needs of all actors involved need to have a sustained discussion. Technology can be seen as a useful instrument through which to examine the practices imposed by the state and accountability. However, it also can be used to justify certain way of treatment based on the criteria of citizenship. While emerging research is beginning to highlight how new technologies are used in the management of migration, the cutting-edge research is needed on the impact of technological experimentation on migrants. In this regard following session welcomes interdisciplinary research from STS perspective that critically concentrated and involved in studies of embedded technologies in a domain of migration research. In a wider perspective the contributions regarding the societal effects of various technologies, for example sensors, communication, robots, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, applied in a field of migration studies with focus on refugee/ asylum seekers well-being and integration practices are encouraged. This session will explore the ways how embedded technology are shaping the way of refugee/ asylum seekers behaviour compare with non-technological environment. What is a role of technology in construction of social bonds and social organizations among refugee/ asylum seekers community in host societies? What are the privacy and security implications of the use of technology by refugees/ asylum seekers? We endorse critical perspectives of the relationship between migrants (refugees/ asylum seekers) and technology at the persistence of contemporary forms of orders.

Contact: olga.usachova@phd.unipd.it

Keywords: Migrant, technology, assemblage, actors, social organization

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

Information, Computing and Media Technology

90. Inquiries into the Global

Nassima Abdelghafour, Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation; Felix BOILEVE, CSI MinesParisTech; Evan Fisher, CSI, Mines-ParisTech; Vololona Rabeharisoa, CSI Mines ParisTech

As STS scholars increasingly focus on “global” objects (the climate, the economy, health, poverty, migrations…), we invite contributions reflecting on the construction of such objects. Since the early contention that no object of study can be confined within nation-states (Braudel, Wallerstein), authors have argued that there are global flows, assemblages, scapes, that can only be captured with a wide-angle lense. While this move has curbed “methodological nationalism” (Glick-Schiller, Wimmer, Sassen), it has also taken for granted that the “global” is bigger than the “local” – prompting Latour’s response that  “no place can be said to be bigger than any other.” Another concern is that scholars might superimpose their own constructions over the actors’ actual concerns, better captured through extended single-sited fieldwork. As a possible answer, Marcus suggests that the global is an emergent phenomenon, resulting from the ethnographer’s circulation from one site to another. However, in such multi-sited ethnography, the only relevant inquiry is that undertaken by the ethnographer.

In this track, we are interested in those inquiries and epistemic infrastructures embedded in the activities of NGOs, supranational agencies, philanthrocapitalist foundations, political ecology movements, multinational corporations, extractive industries, global health actors… – that order global spaces. If “global” is used as an indigenous category, then, how do the informants define and perform the “global” dimension to their practice? How do they measure and qualify the extension of the global? How do we, STS scholars, articulate the actors’ inquiries on the global with concepts from the literature (technological zones, networks, assemblages, friction…)?

Contact: nassima.abdelghafour@mines-paristech.fr

Keywords: global, epistemic infrastructure, globalization, ethnography, topology

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

91. Institutionalization and social appropriation of RRI: A remaining challenge?

Raúl Tabarés, Fundación TECNALIA RESEARCH & INNOVATION; Vincent Blok, Wageningen University & Research; Mika Nieminen, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland; Robert Braun, Institut für Höhere Studien Vienna

Since 2013, the EC has pushed a devoted strategy to foster the embracement of RRI across the whole Horizon 2020 FP. This effort has allowed to develop a generous body of knowledge, experiences and networks around the concept with the determination to promote a significant change in European R&D. However, with the   conclusion of FP8 and the beginning of FP9 at the forefront, it´s time to reflect about how RRI has effectively permeated different institutions across the EU and outside of it. On the one hand, New HoRRIzon project has shown that the institutionalization of RRI in research organizations is still a challenge. On the other hand, other projects (e.g. RRI practice, RIconfigure) have indicated ways forward to mainstream RRI. That duality demands to explore what are the remaining challenges towards its full implementation.

In this panel we would like to explore how RRI has been diffused all over the last 7 years in Europe with the help of questions such as: Which challenges face RRI throughout the EU territory   ? What characteristics have shaped RRI diffusion? What drivers can lead the RRI paradigm towards its institutionalization? Which best practices can be shared and transferred across the continent?  

We welcome submissions from different fields of academia (political science, philosophy, sociology, social psychology, anthropology and STS of course) that want to share their findings  about this timely policy episode. We also welcome papers from different stakeholders engaged in this topic such as research funders, policy makers, science communicators and citizen associations.

Contact: FARAONDEMETAL@GMAIL.COM

Keywords: open science, stakeholder engagement, ethics, STI policy, innovation ecosystems

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

92. Integrating Stakeholders From the Beginning – But (How) is that possible?

Andreas Bischof, University of Technology Chemnitz; Arne Maibaum, TU Berlin

A central mean of STS is to integrate diverging perspectives on science and technology within scientific discourses, as well as integrating non-academic actors in such projects and processes. In recent years, this mission has been adopted by funding agencies and further scientifc communities. The aim to intensify interdisciplinary cooperation with other academics and transdisciplinary cooperation with stakeholders from practice has come to the fore, such as in the EU funding governance concept „Responsible Research and Innovation“ and other modes of „Post-ELSI interdisciplinary collaboration“ (Balmer et al. 2016).

The questions what does it take to intervene, and whom a specific research constellation wants to speak to and act with, are normative, dynamic and often cannot be answered in a single solution that remains the same throughout the process. The session acknowledges this difficulty and focusses therefore on the very beginnings of (academic and non-academic) stakeholder integration. How do we, can we and should we (re)organize our methods and practices to integrate different stakeholders in the very beginning? How do we rethink and remake ways of integrating and recognizing the needs and inputs of others in early stages of research processes?

The session seeks to discuss past and ongoing efforts of user-centered design or participative research, as well as other forms of outreach activity that aimed at integrating stakeholders in academic contexts. Furthermore we welcome reflections on practices and methods of interdisciplinary cooperation focussing the very beginnings of such projects.

Contact: andreas.bischof@phil.tu-chemnitz.de

Keywords: integration, stakeholders, participation, methods, beginning

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Governance and Public Policy

93. International Scientific Collaboration: Knowledge Infrastructures and the Role of STS Scholars

Simcha Jong, Leiden University; Richelle Boone, Leiden University

International scientific collaborations play an increasingly important role in efforts to address global challenges. This gives rise to numerous questions about the structures of international scientific collaborations, and about how these are changing scientific work.

Which forms of international scientific collaboration can we for instance identify? And how are these collaborations situated within the broader context of scientific endeavour? What do we know about the social, organizational and political dynamics of international scientific collaborations? What kind of stakeholders are for example involved in these collaborations? And which organisational frameworks do they for instance employ to deal with specific coordination challenges tied to international scientific collaboration? What are scientists’ practical experiences with international scientific collaboration? And how do these relate to the way their work is organized?

How could the social, organizational and political dynamics of international scientific collaboration be studied best? Which methods should be employed? Last but not least: what might be ideas to improve knowledge infrastructures and international scientific collaboration? And what could and/or should be the role of STS scholars in a process of designing knowledge infrastructures and/or facilitating international scientific collaboration?

Contact: rboone470@gmail.com

Keywords: International Scientific Collaboration, Knowledge Infrastructures, Global Challenges, Science Organization, Role of STS Scholars

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

94. Interrogating institutional strategies that aim facilitating knowledge coproduction and co-innovation of agri-food systems.

OSCAR A. FORERO, AGROSAVIA; SOAS-UK; Juan Carlos Martinez Medrano, AGROSAVIA, Colombia; Erika Vanessa Wagner-Medina, AGROSAVIA, Colombia

During the last decade of the 20th century STS of agri-food sector interrogated the wisdom of focusing in technological solutions as the way to solve the problem of unsustainable agri-food systems. Twenty years later the problem continues unabated: “The food production and supply chain consumes about 30 percent of total end-use energy globally, and contributes to over 20 percent of total annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions” (sic.) (FAO 2017).   The STS critique of inadequacy of research institutional settings to confront such problem has contributed to socio-political mobilisations calling for institutional reforms. For instance, STS research has revealed how the most promissory technologies such as GMO felt short of expectations, whilst allowing research institution to capture financial resources that could have been used more effectively, particularly in developing countries where GCC negatively affects agri-food systems more severely. Following such critique, public and private research institutions began reforms aimed to facilitate knowledge coproduction and co-innovation. Have such political reforms, and changes in institutional changes made any difference in terms of developing territorial innovation systems (TIS) that incorporate local knowledge and agency of territorial actors? This panel welcomes presentation of research that interrogates effectiveness of political reforms and/or changes of institutional settings that aim to lead research for knowledge co-production and co-innovation of agricultural systems as a main adaptation strategy to GCC.

Contributors of this session will present research that discusses how policy and/or institutional reforms consider issues of ‘ethics of innovation’, ‘whose agency?’, ‘which knowledge counts? ´ ‘responsible agricultural innovation’ and related.

Contact: of1@soas.ac.uk

Keywords: Agri-food, territorial innovation systems, institutional reforms, knowledge coproduction

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

95. Interventions with, through and in ethnography

Kathrin Eitel, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany; Laura Otto; Martina Klausner, Goethe-University Frankfurt

In recent years, ethnography has not only become an export hit as a method in Science and Technology Studies, but the fields of ethnographic research and thus the actors are currently increasing both in terms of diversity and numbers . While conducting fieldwork, ethnographers – and the results they discover and generate – interact with a broader non-academic public. The methodological toolkit has thus expanded in creative ways over the past few years.. Thus, not only “experimental collaborations” in the sense of innovative epistemic research practices emerge, but also qualitative-sensory “citizen science” approaches, which are part of more recent, experimental interventions on highly relevant topics such as eating habits, consumer behaviour, climate change or digitilasations of everyday life and artificial intelligence. And, further, collaboration between various disciplines and methods emerge.

The aim of the open panel is to bring together STS scholars who understand and practice ethnographic research in innovative and experimental ways. We are interested in contributions that reflect on how ethnography can interact with diverse audiences, how innovative collaborations (co-laborations) can be designed, how collaboration takes ‘place’ differently, and how researchers and the ‘researched’ can reflect and dismantle inequality structures, intersectional categories and cultural differences. In this context, for example, political participation and activism in research settings as well as the ethnographic handling of humanoid robots or chatboots are of interest. How do we conduct co-llaborative and innovative research with ‘new’ materialisms, interact with various existing realities, and how do we encounter artificial intelligences that can no longer be materially limited? We also welcome contributions that reflect and evaluate to what extent the developed approach and experimental collaboration have (not) worked.

Contact: eitel@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Keywords: ethnography, intervention, collaboration

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

96. Living In The Laboratory: Experimental Zones And The Labification Of Everything

Arzu Sedef, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna; Thomas Buocz, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna; Brice Laurent, Ecole Des Mines De Paris; Mathieu Baudrin, CSI-Ecole Des Mines De Paris; Sebastian Michael Pfote

Notions of “laboratories,” “experimentation,” and “zones of exception” are presently gaining wider currency, far beyond the traditional confines of S&T and the narrow focus on lab science. From evidence-based policy-making using controlled trials, to living labs, test beds and regulatory sandboxes, all the way to design labs, urban labs, policy labs, social innovation labs, and legal labs – experimental approaches are being deployed across countless social and political settings. These labs promise to tackle social problems more inclusively, playfully, innovatively, and effectively, while at the same time invoking elements of scientific rigor, controlled experimentation, and the promise of scalability. They frequently lower regulatory burdens and overtly enrol populations into the making and testing of immature technologies, suggesting that business as usual will not produce the right solutions and that the effects of these experiments can be contained and tested before releasing them onto society at large.

This track aims to scrutinize the ongoing “labification of everything” in processes of social, political, and technological change. Building on STS traditions in lab studies, technical democracy, public engagement, and the politics of innovation, we especially invite papers asking:

– How are lab-like settings deployed across diverse settings?

– What does it mean to live in, or be exposed to, experimental settings?

– How are livelihoods, rights, and responsibilities affected by it?

– How do localized zones of exceptions challenge/reconfigure/test the state and the law?

– Which/whose problems are labs supposed to solve? Which problems do they create?

– How do labs contest/reconfigure/stabilize socio-technical orders, redistribute power and affect (in)equality?

Contact: sebastian.pfotenhauer@tum.de

Keywords: Experimentation, Living labs, Laboratory, Technical democracy, Policy

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Science Communication/Public Engagement

97. Locating & Timing Governance in STS and Universities

Knut H Sørensen, NTNU, Dept. of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture; Sharon Traweek, UCLA

For generations universities have been institutions of higher education and research. Now they are expected to contribute to local and global economies by commercializing research and spurring innovation, while addressing grand social challenges like climate mitigation and social disparities. They also must engage successfully in mass higher education and outreach with a variety of publics. This means that universities now occupy a strategic place in re/shaping society by circulating research and knowledge through teaching and professional expertise. Meanwhile universities have become subject to increased auditing practices and austerity policies, locally and globally. Universities turn to experts in branding and commodification for strategies in defining and representing their work as successful.

STS provides resources for understanding such dis/continuities in the making and circulation of knowledge while the study of universities in dynamic ecologies is vital to addressing unexamined assumptions in STS about the relationship between research, teaching, and society, as well as the governance of that relationship. We invite papers that address how universities engage with the changing:

– fragility and resilience of university cultures.

– demands for rapid intellectual, social, and economic contributions to society;

– work life and agency of academics

– relationship between teaching, research, innovation, and outreach;

– intersectional issues in knowledge making, teaching, outreach, funding, and society;

– political economies of research, teaching, funding, and outreach;

– campus infrastructures from software and budgets to buildings and transportation;

– and increasingly complex web of relationships among universities glocally through rankings, MOUs, satellite campuses, academic mobilities, etc.

Contact: knut.sorensen@ntnu.no

Keywords: Universities, Higher education, Auditing, Neoliberalism, Resilience

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

98. Locating Psychoanalysis in STS Terrains

Aftab Mirzaei, York University STS; Misria Shaik Ali, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – STS; Jamie Steele, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

STS has long been entangled with the disciplinary field of psychoanalysis, its concepts and theories:  from philosophers of science Gaston Bachelard [1987; 2011], Thomas Kuhn (Forrester, 2007), and Donna Haraway [Haraway and Gane, 2006] to social theorists and feminist thinkers such as Michel Foucault [2005] and Judith Butler [1990], Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and Elizabeth Wilson (2015).  Psychoanalytic theory and modes of attention to knowledge about subjectivity, lived experiences, emotions, unconscious, sensoria, fantasy, desire, and the uncanny inform STS works on scientific observation (Daston and Lunbeck, 2011), objectivity (Keller, 1985), techno-scientific imaginaries (McNeil et al. 2017), human-technology relationships and emergent intersubjectivities in relation to interfaces (Turkle, 1984; Clough, 2018), space (Thrift, 2004), artificial intelligence, code, and robotics (Anderson, 2006; Hayles, 2006; Stacey and Suchman, 2012). 

This panel intends to locate psychoanalytic theory in relation to the current moment in STS, and open up the possibility to explore generative interfaces between the two disciplines.  Specifically, the panel invites works that engage with psychoanalytic theories and approaches in exploring the nuances and novel dynamics taking shape in the changing relationships of humans, technologies, infrastructures, and anthropogenic environments. Provocations may, but need not, include:

-Object/subject relations;

-Shifting/novel intersubjectivities;

-Climate and environmental affects;

-The limits and boundaries of psychoanalytic theory and behavioural sciences;

-Ecriture feminine  as worlding and challenge to phallo[go]centric technoscientific systems;

-Interiority/exteriority;

-Embodiment, sexuality and gender;

-Epistemological plurality, ontological multiplicities;

-Attachment, desire and fantasy in living, existing and emerging more-than-human worlds;

-Scientific and legal positivism;

Contact: aftabmirzaei@gmail.com

Keywords: psychoanalysis, subjectivity, technoscience, theory, methods

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Other

99. Locating South Asia in Social Studies of Science and Technology

Ranjit Pal Singh, Cornell University; Misria Shaik Ali, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – STS

The STS scholarship on South Asia, produced by researchers living in these sites and including those who focus on these sites but live outside South Asia, contributes to the intellectual trajectory of the discipline on topics such as technoscientific building of nation states, global development, legal and social justice theory, public understanding of science, Anthropocene, and postcolonialism. Researchers contributing to STS studies of South Asia however remain diffused across different topical 4S panels. Thus, while researchers engaging with the region, often as a research site, advance various STS commitments, concerns, and its conceptual vocabulary, the empirical richness of South Asia and the unique community of South Asian researchers remain scattered, underarticulated, and invisible. This panel seeks to highlight and investigate what makes South Asia a unique site to research emergent forms and consequences of technoscientific developments collating the sustained critiques of scientific knowledge and technoscientific state-building from the region. Simultaneously, it is also an effort to carve a space in 4S for a community of South Asian STS researchers to discuss how their personal commitments, concerns, and experiences in South Asia co-constitute their engagement with STS. The panel asks how STS informs South Asian studies when technoscientific developments become primary subjects and objects of research. How do South Asian studies inform STS on questions of epistemological pluralism, technoscientific practices, intersectionality, scientific hegemony, and democracy? It is a call to (re)engage the pasts of South Asian STS scholarship to critically intervene in its presents and reinvent its possible futures.

Contact: rps244@cornell.edu

Keywords: South Asian Studies, STS, Postcolonialism, Global Development, Nation building

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

100. Lost in the Dreamscapes of Modernity? Theorizing Agency, Multiplicity, and Scale in Sociotechnical Imaginaries

Alexander Wentland, Technical University of Munich

Over the past decade, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries has emerged as one of the leading frameworks in STS to explain the co-production of societal futures vis-à-vis science and technology (S&T). This perspective has aided the analysis of persistent patterns and problems of the modern technoscientific world, while avoiding grand narratives and theories of society. It has provided helpful insights into why great changes might happen rapidly or attempts to remake the world fail despite great effort. Much of the current literature has employed the framework to compare technological development across nations, regions, and cultures beyond obvious natural, economic, or social disparities. Despite widespread and productive use, a number of questions have come to the fore that complicate the further theorizing and empirical application of this framework. For example, how can we explain not only the emergence but also the shifting and changing of imagined futures? How do we deal with the coexistence of concurrent sociotechnical imaginaries and, furthermore, the overlapping of imagined communities at scales such as the nation-state along with transnational zones and specific places? How can entrepreneurial agents resonate with diverse cultural currents and possibly create entanglements between seemingly unrelated discourse arenas and disparate life worlds? This panel invites contributions that tackle these challenges in generative ways, including theoretical papers, conceptually rich case studies, and comparative analyses, but also presentations that expand this discussion towards the realm of activism, design, and artistic work.

Contact: alexander.wentland@tum.de

Keywords: sociotechnical imaginaries, co-production, multiplicity, agency, scale

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

101. Maintenance and its knowledges

Jérôme Denis, CSI – MINES ParisTech; Fernando Dominguez, UC San Diego; Daniel Florentin, Mines ParisTech; David Pontille, CNRS

In recent years, a series of maintenance studies have uncovered a world of sociotechnical practices that had remained unexplored by traditional STS such as research around innovation, breakdowns or disasters. Mostly repetitive and unheroic, these practices are dedicated to making things last rather than creating novelty or simply putting damaged objects ‘back in order’. In these approaches, maintenance has been described in terms of an ethics of care, in which material entanglements, thoughtful improvisations and embodied adjustments are essential features.

This panel aims at complementing these investigations by focusing on the different forms of knowledge—e.g. theories, standards, ‘best practices’, oral stories, tacit skills—, that emerge for, around, and as maintenance. These knowledges are plural and sometimes antagonistic in how they shape the means and rules to take care of objects, and how they define the ‘whatness’ of the things that are maintained. We would like to explore and analyze their relationships, and understand the conditions of their articulation, separation, or confrontation.

Beyond a generic use of the notion of ‘knowledge’, submissions are invited to pay particular attention to the specific forms of knowledge that emerge at various empirical settings. Furthermore, if different forms of knowledge may work as resources or constraints during interventions, maintenance situations can also be investigated as sites and moments of knowledge generation. We expect that documenting and understanding the dynamics of these processes will be central to some of the proposals.

Contact: jerome.denis@mines-paristech.fr

Keywords: maintenance, care, knowledge

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

102. Making chemical kin

Emma Garnett, King’s College London; Angeliki Balayannis, University of Exeter

This panel aims to generate space to plot, evoke, and tell stories about chemicals. Research with chemicals is often approached through late industrial landscapes of exposure, however this often results in negating the new relations, material attachments, and shared pleasures which emerge through chemical encounters. As an entangled method and form of representation, stories offer ways to think and act with chemicals differently. By focussing on ‘making’ we will collectively imagine what different relationships with chemicals could entail. Inspired by efforts in STS to resist the all-encompassing concept of the anthropocene that beckons total and permanent exposure, we seek to capture the instability of ‘the chemical’ in ways that activate efforts to find better ways of governing, managing, and living with these materials.

Attending to relations that matter for the stories we tell, reorients chemical concerns from toxic politics to chemical kinships (Agard-Jones 2016; Murphy 2018). Stories of chemical kin are not necessarily affirmative, kin after all can be both enabling and harmful. We encourage papers to consider the full spectrum of chemical encounters; moving beyond pollution and toxicants, while at the same time maintaining a commitment to the violent legacies which shape how chemicals are distributed – even if their material connections are difficult to conjure. By thinking with and beyond the ‘villainous object’, we invite contributions that expand understandings of chemical entanglements, particularly those engaged in artistic, experimental, and ethnographic work.

Contact: emmargarnett@gmail.com

Keywords: chemical, kin, making-doing, experiment, stories

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

103. Making Futures by Freezing Life: Ambivalent Temporalities of Cryopreservation Practices

Thomas Lemke; Sara Lafuente-Funes, Institute for Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt; Ruzana Liburkina, Goethe-University Frankfurt; Veit Moritz Braun, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main

The preservation of biological matter at extremely low temperatures has gained increasing prominence in medicine, plant breeding, and wildlife conservation over the last decades. Stored at temperatures of down to -196°C, cells and tissues are frozen in time. Oocytes, stem cells, germplasm, and sperm endure while the world keeps on changing. However, cryobanks are not simply stockpile facilities or archives. The (possibility of) storing organic materials creates potentialities and contingencies. Frozen cells become vital deposits, valuable backups, options to be considered.

Contrary to the prevalent idea of freezing as stabilizing, fixing, and containing bio-objects, this panel seeks to explore the generative dimensions of cryopreservation as a way of modifying relations and turning biological matter into things-to-become (Stephens et al. 2018). Putting organic materials ‘on ice’ shapes and redefines present socialities, politics, moral economies, and infrastructures. By the same token, it changes the ways in which futures are anticipated and enacted. Frozen matter alters existing and creates new temporalities.

We are looking for contributions that trace notions such as “anticipation”, “suspension”, “spaces of as-if”, “hope”, or “expectation” in the realm of cryopreservation. Participants are invited to ground these concepts in empirical insights into practices of cryo-banking and the materialities of frozen tissue.

More at https://cryosocieties.uni-frankfurt.de/work/cfp-easst/

Contact: braun@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Keywords: cryopreservation, time, biobanks, future, biology

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

104. Making Home, With Care

Bernike Pasveer, Maastricht University; Ingunn Moser, Diakonhjemmet Oslo, Norway; Oddgeir Synnes, VID Specialized University Oslo, Norway

This panel focuses on analyzing and theorizing practices of making home understood as places/spaces/situations/processes that afford a sense of being cared for, protected, belonging. We wish to further new (and careful) conceptualizations of home as well as care, in a time where the availability of both is at once taken for granted and highly contested.

The context to the topic is twofold, and we would invite papers from both of these folds as well as on their intersections.

The first is the queste for ‘home’ and ‘homeliness’ in the organisation of care for later life: in the Global North, the elderly and the frail are encouraged and desire to be cared for at home or in situations as homely as possible. Where work has been done to theorize and unpack the notion of ‘care’ in this context, ‘home’ has largely remained a taken for granted concept, a blackbox, a given, and the ‘Northern-ness’ of the policies and desires to grow old ‘at home’ have hardly been situated and localized. We invite papers that unpack and situate home conceptually as well as empirically, technologically as well as materially: what does it take to make (and unmake) home in light of fragility? when is home? who cares?

The second ‘fold’ unpacks care more profoundly: it concerns the informal and often also invisible qualities of the work mobilized into making home with care, as well as the modes and politics of rendering informality and invisibility. We invite papers that look into the entangled calibrations of doing care (with home), and about articulating the many migrations undertaken to provide homely care or to seek a careful home.

Contact: b.pasveer@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Keywords: Home, Care, Doing, Materialities, (In)visibility, Entanglements

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

105. Making science in public: Studying science communication and public engagement

Sarah Davies, University of Copenhagen; Noriko Hara, Indiana University; Maja Horst, University of Copenhagen

Science communication and public engagement with science are key mechanisms by which scientific knowledge is mediated, negotiated, and transformed. Over the past decades, STS research has outlined the ways in which science and society are co-produced through public communication activities and catalysed a shift towards dialogue and engagement in science communication practice. More recently, issues of representation, exclusion, and contestation have risen to the fore in discussions of science in public, as well as concerns about public (dis)trust in expertise, the dizzying impacts of social media, and debates about science’s role in political activism and resistance.

This open panel invites paper proposals that analyse such ways that science is represented, transformed, contested or negotiated in public venues. Papers may explore, for instance, citizen science; science and technology-related activism; science in social media; science in museums; deliberative experiments; popular science writing; science blogging; sci­art activities; news media; or science comedy – as well as the myriad other sites and mechanisms by which science is done in public. We invite critical analysis of these sites and mechanisms. For example, papers might analyse the constitution of publics and knowledges within particular science communication activities; discuss affective or temporal regimes of public engagement with science; or give accounts of experimental practice that show how STS might contribute to doing science in public in just, generous, and collaborative ways. In particular, any analysis that showcases the significance and agency of STS in examining diverse public engagements with science is welcomed.

Contact: sarahrachaeldavies@gmail.com

Keywords: public engagement with science, science communication, STS, democratisation of science

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

106. Making, Having, Thinking: Sex, Technology and Science

David Andrew Griffiths; Benjamin Joseph Fleminger Weil, University College London; Natalie Hammond, Manchester Metropolitan University

Sex has distinct yet co-constitutive meanings in science and society. These include: physical characteristics that comprise ‘biological sex’; identity categories; erotic practices and relations. This panel will investigate science and technology’s roles in the construction of these meanings of “sex” and will act as an incitement for STS to take sex both seriously and playfully and get its hands dirty (or downright filthy).

Submissions might consider, but need not be limited to:

Making Sex

• How have scientific/biomedical technologies made and remade sex in the past? How might we make sex otherwise in the future?
• How do we make sex happen? What is the role of science and technology in the facilitation and regulation of sexual practices, pleasures and possibilities?

Having Sex

• How does a multiplicity and variation of biological sex characteristics produce the notion of two biological sexes that one can “have”?
• How do science and technology intervene in the dynamics of sexual play or practice? Conversely, in what ways are erotic practices embedded within science and technology?

Thinking Sex

• How can the tools of STS help us to think sex beyond limited and often biomedical binary imaginaries?
• In the four decades since Rubin’s ‘Thinking Sex’, what has STS scholarship done to “think sex”? Where do we need to go from here?

We welcome submissions that engage with the rich history of scholarship in this field (including gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist science studies) as well as those concerned with the futures of sex, technology and science.

Contact: d.a.griffiths@surrey.ac.uk

Keywords: sex, gender, sexuality, queer, feminism

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

107. Marxist STS

Johan Söderberg (Göteborg University), Maxigas (Lancaster University), and Davide Orsini (Mississippi State University)

The historical roots of STS go back to Marxism. Many of the issues currently being debated in relation to technology and science begun as debates in-between Marxist intellectuals, notably concerning the status of science and ideology critique. By returning to this history and to Marxist theoretical resources, new insights can be gained when addressing STS questions. This panel invites presentations exploring the Marxist roots of STS as well as new, theoretical work broadly inspired by Marxism.

Contact: johan.soderberg@sts.gu.se

Keywords: Capitalism, Ideology, Critique, Marxism, Class

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

108. Materiality, Knowledges, Inequalities: Multiplicity and Sovereignty in a Post_Colonial World

Katharina Schramm, University of Bayreuth; Uli Beisel, University of Bayreuth

The concept of multiplicity has gained traction in STS over the last decade. This has allowed for analyses of contingent relations rather than discrete objects. It has also brought topological inquiries of knowledge-making practices and infrastructures to the fore. The repeated emphasis on complexities beyond plurality has focused our analytical attention on multi-directional processes of relating, such as co-existence, ambivalence, but also rejection and failure. However, regulatory and epistemic practices are bound to institutions and infrastructures, i.e. they are materially grounded, highly contested and unequally distributed. Inequalities are not only spatially inscribed on a global scale, but also temporally layered through past injustice and lasting legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Recognizing this, the panel asks how we can conceptualize the tensions between multiplicity and sovereignty as they emerge in recent debates around scientific specimens and technological infrastructures. Instead of dissolving the tension, we seek to take it as a starting point for a critical analysis of global knowledge circulations. We are interested in papers that trace the historical and spatial circulation and political traction of epistemic and material objects – from colonial human remains to blood, tissue and DNA-samples; from global waste to ethnographic collections. What is at stake and how can we move from here?

Contact: uli.beisel@uni-bayreuth.de

Keywords: multiplicity, materiality, knowledge, inequality, circulation

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

Knowledge, Theory and Method

109. Materials, Symbols, and Power in Science and Technology

June Jeon, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Based on the enduring questions on materiality and symbolic interactions in the construction of scientific knowledge, this panel invites presenters to engage with the question of social powers. How material-semiotic theories of STS can shed light on the aspect of social power, permeated into science and technology, that reproduces existing social inequalities and injustice? Scholars have highlighted how technoscientific knowledge and artifacts contribute to racial dynamics, gender categories, environmental injustice, and unequal health outcomes in society. Emerging literature further questions how innovative tools (such as artificial intelligence, automation system, and big data methods) might exacerbate techno-scientifically mediated social inequalities and injustice. By engaging with both core theories of STS and emerging social problems, we aim to create space for thinking about how theoretical and practical achievements in STS can be made in context of rapidly changing society. We invite various cases, methods, and theories in this discussion to narrow discrepancies within STS and to open up future discussions on varieties of assemblage of material and symbolic orders that result in distinctive social outcomes.

Contact: jjeon24@wisc.edu

Keywords: Social power, materiality, semiotics, social problems, theory

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

110. Modes of Futuring between Care and Control: Engaging with the Conservation of Endangered More-Than-Human Life

Franziska Dahlmeier, Hamburg University; Franziska von Verschuer, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main; Markus Rudolfi, Institute for Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt

The accelerating loss of biodiversity is one of the central contemporary ecological crises that challenge the foundations and conditions of current forms of life on Earth. In the wake of this development and the associated threats, projects of environmental conservation that seek to care for the ongoingness of life have gained momentum. Exploring these from an STS perspective, we contribute to an important discourse about and intervention in the technoscientific politics of life and death in times of ecological crises.

We want to discuss how practices and technologies of conservation engage with endangered more-than-human life and what future worlds they bring to matter; how they account for the entanglement of fatal ecological developments with extractive naturalcultural forms of (human) life. In this context, we are interested in the notion of care: Who are the recipients of conservational care? What is the relation between care and control? How are conservation practices directed at the sustainability of more-than-human life embedded in power relations? We specifically want to discuss dis/continuities to humanist forms of controlling nature in conservational practices of care. Finally, we want to explore modes of futuring in conservational care. How does the temporality of urgency of ecological crises affect practices and politics of conservation and more-than-human forms of life? What could it mean for practices of conservation to (re)think ecological vulnerability and precarity, maybe even extinction, as part of (techno)ecological processes of worlding? How can a notion of living and dying well together help us craft new modes of caring?

Contact: franziska.dahlmeier@uni-hamburg.de

Keywords: conservation; care; more-than-human life; ecological crises; futures

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

111. Money for nothing?  Science between Markets and Politics

Paolo Parra Saiani, Università degli Studi di Genova

Many factors influence a scientist’s choice of research problem: past interests and training, serendipitous yet consequential encounters with new collaborators, expertise, or information, institutional context or disciplinary culture; commercial opportunities, pressures, and commercially related policies can change the composition of scientific research and the choices that guide it. As stated by Agger, “research agendas reflect what gets funded”, so it is no surprise that searching for external funding is having an impact on the research agendas of individual faculty members, as research is being pursued based on donors’ interests. Bourdieu stated that “There is no scientific choice – choice of area of research, choice of methods, choice of a publication outlet, or the choice […] of quick publication of partially verified results (as over later publication of results that are thoroughly checked) – that does not constitute, in one or other of its aspects, a social strategy of investment aimed at maximizing the specific profit, inseparably political and scientific, provided by the field, and that could not be understood as a product of the relation between a position in the field and the dispositions (habitus) of its occupant” (1991: 9-10).

This session wants to contribute to the STS discussion on freedom in science, but also to its accountability. In times of “neo-liberal scientism” (Daza: 2012) or ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Rhoades: 2004), what are the trends in science? Priority will be given to empirical works, based on qualitative or quantitative techniques, that analyze the development of science (in the broad sense: biology, economics, political science, sociology, etc.).

Contact: paolo.parra.saiani@gmail.com

Keywords: science and politics, marketization of universities

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Engineering and Infrastructure

112. Moralizing the data economy

Thomas Beauvisage, Orange Labs; Mary Ebeling, Drexel University; Marion Fourcade, University of California, Berkeley Dept. of Sociology; Kevin Mellet, Orange Labs

The new economy of data operates digital traces and tracking tools at scale, combined with the use of big data and AI technologies. Data are turned into valuable assets and tradable products, and injected into market and organizational infrastructures and practices in various industries, such as marketing, health, finance or transportation.

The industrialization of data has raised a series of concerns about its legitimacy or its morality. Data practices are disputed from a wide variety of grounds: privacy concerns; the emergence of a surveillance society; discrimination and filter bubbles; consumer manipulation; rise of new monopolies. As a reaction to these critics, new regulations (such as the GDPR in Europe) are put in place, and the players of the data economy themselves have come to incorporate moral considerations and discourses in their practices. All these views on how data should or should not be used for business and market purposes draw the boundaries of a new moral economy of data.

This panel aims to bring together empirical or theoretical contributions that explore the various facets of the moral economy of data. We particularly – though not exclusively – welcome contributions on the following topics: protest movements and civil resistance to the emerging data economy; new regulatory regimes around personal data that are held by public administrations or by corporations; the rise of market intermediaries dedicated to the moralization of the data economy; changes inside organizations and justifications surrounding the economization of data.

Contact: kevin.mellet@orange.com

Keywords: data, privacy, assetization, economization, moral economy

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Big Data

113. More-than-Human Ethnographies of Global Health

Luisa Reis Castro, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Jose A. Cañada, University of Helsinki

Global Health initiatives are a productive site to reflect on the role of non-humans as driving research and technology on health around the world. Non-human creatures are often framed as a (future) threat causing pandemics and pestilence. Movement of pathogens, insects, and pollutants that defy national borders are but some examples of non-humans that animate much of the Global Health research and policy today. STS scholars have examined the role of non-human entities in biomedicine as either functional assets (e.g. mice in labs), or outright detrimental to public health, a target to be controlled (as vectors of disease). Instead, this panel invites scholars to reflect on the role of non-human entities as analytically central to the ways in which Global Health collaborations are organized, where the non-human entities are at times symbiotic, at times commensal, and even parasitic.

In this panel, we invite papers to reflect on how universalist Global Health is problematized by non-humans in the particular policy and scientific spaces where global health programmes are implemented. This highlights the differentiated multi-species entanglements that make visible infrastructural divergences, unequal power dynamics, and different rationales of global health projects. How are non-humans considered to be limiting or enabling these kinds of projects? How are different ways to know and live with non-humans rearranged or erased in the implementation of these initiatives? The discussions will allow us to investigate: how might an analysis attentive and attuned to the more-than-human entanglements offer a new perspective on global health collaborations?

Contact: luisarc@mit.edu

Keywords: health; global STS; non-human; multispecies; postcolonial

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

114. Multispecies Rhetorics in Microbial Worlds: How do Microbes and Humans Affect Each Other?

Erika Amethyst Szymanski, Colorado State University; Anna Krzywoszynska, University of Sheffield

Microbial identities are shifting, aggregating, and becoming more complex. Microorganisms have become social, as foregrounded in microbiome studies, and engineerable, understood as modular machines. Recognizing essential functions for microbes in nearly every environment, microbe-human relations become important not only in terms of bodily health, but in terms of co-working, ecological, and other “productive” relationships. Simultaneously, microbes are being “harnessed” to do more and different work.

In this context, we ask: how do humans and microbes communicate? How do microbes affect humans, how do humans become capable of being affected, and vice-versa? We invite critical exploration of how microbes and macrobes become attuned to affect and be affected in productive multispecies environments. We particularly invite attention to microbial agency at scales other than the individual cell—indeed, how the communicative agency of “the individual” as a material legacy of modernity may be challenged through microbe-human interactions.

We look for this conversation to connect theory and practice around how humans and microbes (may) work together and, more broadly, open up possibilities for multisensory communication across species bounds. We offer that in these times, “we” must consider who we are, who speaks, who intervenes, and who listens broadly to include even the smallest creatures involved in sustaining the environments “we” all share.

Krzywoszynska, A. (forthcoming May 2020) Nonhuman labor and the making of resources: Making soils a resource through microbial labor, Environmental Humanities

Szymanski, E, & Calvert C. 2018. Designing with living systems in the synthetic yeast project. Nature Communications 9 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05332-z.

Contact: szymanskiea@hotmail.com

Keywords: multispecies studies, multispecies rhetorics, microbes, microbiomes, co-production

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Knowledge, Theory and Method

115. Mutagenic Legacies and Future Living

Paul Wenzel Geissler, University of Oslo; Noemi Tousignant, University College London; Miriam Hanna Ancilla Waltz, Aarhus University

Modernist projects – e.g., ‘green revolutions’, disease eradication campaigns or power generation – have been rearranging molecular relations in the name of “better living,” as a chemical firm famously advertised. Lives improved by technology are and were imagined as a source of private comfort, security and profit. But abundant food, cheap energy, lucrative resources and controlled pathogens have also been hinged to societal ambitions for collective prosperity and protection.

Molecular rearrangements are mutagenic in a broad sense: vast volumes of substances have been synthesised or released by sociotechnical interventions, accumulating in bodies and environments, where they might alter genetic processes, foster cancerous cell proliferation or resistant microbes, and engender broader ecological reordering and novel interspecies relations. Yet past modernist projects can also be politically mutating and mutagenic. They exert durably transformative effects on and across changes in the values of life and the conditions of living, for variously positioned humans as well as nonhumans (defined as food, parasites, wildlife, etc.).     

This panel invites participants to examine modernist legacies through the lens of their biological and social mutagenicity. We welcome contributions that attend to past futures of better living, as imagined and embedded in modernist projects, and seek to discern their enduring presence, mutations and mutagenic effects in current possibilities for future living. We seek in particular to reflect on how mutagenic effects are exerted across changes in political regime and ideology (post-colonial, post-socialist, post-welfare, post-developmental) and the unequal relations of production and consumption they foster and seek to moderate.

Contact: miriamwaltz@cas.au.dk

Keywords: Modernity, Toxicity, Residuals, Environment

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Medicine and Healthcare

116. Negotiating independence in academic careers

Grit Laudel, TU Berlin; Ed Hackett, Brandeis University

Scientific communities expect their members to act as intellectually independent peers who autonomously formulate problems and contribute solutions to the community’s knowledge. The realities of knowledge production often deviate widely from this fiction. Intellectual independence is gained and maintained by negotiating multiple interdependencies, and is unevenly distributed among collaborators and over the course of an academic career. Early career academics must gain independence from those who supervised them as doctoral students and postdocs, a process that often includes negotiations about ideas and research objects taken from one laboratory to the next. Researchers in many fields must negotiate their aims and later contributions with collaborators. Technicians and other collaborators in essential supporting roles may never gain the same independence as researchers.

The negotiation of independence takes place in organisational settings that guarantee varying degrees of formal autonomy to researchers at different career stages and in different roles, which do not always translate into actual independence. Actual independence is also shaped by national science policies and modes of resource distribution as well as authority relations in international scientific communities.

The independence academics want, need, and can achieve thus varies between researchers with different career goals and aspirations, between organisational environments, between national science systems, and between fields of research. Independence also varies strongly by gender and minority status, over time and by career stage. We invite colleagues addressing any aspect of negotiating independence during the academic career to speak in these sessions.

Contact: grit.laudel@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: academic careers, independence, collaborations, supporting roles in research

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

117. Negotiating knowledge of harm through affects, embodiment and trust

Anna Durnova, Institute of Sociological Studies/ Faculty of Social Sciences; Venla Oikkonen, Tampere University

The value of self-orientation – a central component of modern social orders especially in the global North – maintains that individuals may shape collective action through autonomy, plurality and protest. Yet, debates on health-related phenomena such as vaccine hesitancy or refusal of cancer screenings suggest that these widely accepted ideas are linked to institutionalized models of knowledge production. When individuals or communities question recommended medical procedures through other kinds of epistemic frameworks, such as embodied experiences or non-institutional knowledge production, the right to autonomy and protest is often questioned. The panel addresses health or technology-related debates in order to understand how ideas of harm, trust and legitimate knowledge are established and challenged. While, in general, patient participation in decisions on health measures is increasingly accepted, experiences and conceptualizations of harm impacting these decisions have not been given enough attention. Yet they open questions of what constitutes ‘knowledge’ and ‘trust’. We are interested in situated negotiations of knowledge, through which harm gets framed and possibly legitimized, and we pay special attention to affects, embodiment and trust. We welcome both theoretical papers contributing to STS conceptualizations of harm and empirical papers analyzing current negotiations of harm in health, technology or security. Possible questions include: How are knowledges of harm regulated, debated and contested in health, technology or security? What happens to knowledge, if we approach harm through affects and embodied experiences? In what ways is knowledge of harm a gendered and intersectional issue? How do STS scholars engage in these debates?

Contact: anna.durnova@univie.ac.at

Keywords: affect, body, harm, health, knowledge, trust

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Governance and Public Policy

118. Networks, platforms and the form of the socio-technical

Lizzie Richardson; James Ash, Newcastle University

The relationship between society and technology has long been approached through networks. Networks have been used variously as a method, as a rhetorical device for understanding the form of social relations and as an analytic of social form. In STS, the study of the materialisations of networks has been a key focus, where the network functions as a metaphor that enables the tracing of material socio-technical relations. As the metaphor of the network has grown in popularity, particularly with the rise of digitalised ICTs, network language and representation have been increasingly used by people to articulate their relationships with one another, such that analysis and phenomenon of networks can become indistinguishable.

How do platforms and their social relations sit with this complex history of networks? To date, platforms have mainly been approached as a phenomenon, rather than as a metaphor or an analytic for social form. Yet, formally platforms build upon but also are, in important ways, distinct from networks, most notably through their “programmable space” that can be made to perform differently according to how external networks engage. So just as networks indicate the importance of form for understanding the socio-technical, the platform must also be approached as a device that describes social forms or heuristic for understanding the form of social relations. How can platforms be approached as material and social organisational arrangements beyond the platform as a company? This might incorporate empirical investigation of named platforms, but also includes broader materialisations of the social forms of platforms.

Contact: e.richardson@sheffield.ac.uk

Keywords: Networks, platforms, social form, ICTs

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Information, Computing and Media Technology

119. New Multiples in STI policy? Understanding the entanglement of concepts, practices and identities

Tim Flink, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Martin Reinhart, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Barbara Hendriks, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies; Cornelia Schendzielorz, Deutsches Insitut für

In the wake of incessant reforms pertaining to the role and function of science, technology and innovation (STI) in society, the 21st century has seen a multiplication of new STI concepts, some of which are challenging the seemingly stable understandings, practices and conceptions of scientific knowledge production and their technological utilization. How do these new concepts, e.g. responsible research and innovation, grand/societal challenges, frontier research, translational research, science diplomacy, mission-oriented research and innovation, emerge? (How) do they relate to each other, and what narratives are they embedded in? What and who are their drivers? How and by whom does their articulation take place, rather top-down or bottom-up? Whom do they include and exclude and when? Do they just legitimize policymakers or (when and why) do they translate into practices and identities of actors from the science system. How are they different from ‘old’ concepts that bridged or delineated science and non-science? This panel invites contributions that assess the role and interrelation of new STI concepts and is open to single case studies, comparative conceptual works, longitudinal analyses that put new concepts in historical perspective as well as studies that investigate into practice and habitus formations in relation to new concepts.

Contact: timotheus.flink@googlemail.com

Keywords: Concepts, semantics, rhetorical studies, discourse analysis, grand challenges, RRI, translational medical research, science diplomacy

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

120. New Technologies of Risk:  Bioeconomies of Prediction and Therapeutic Prevention

Emily Elizabeth Vasquez, Columbia University; Amaya Perez-Brumer, University of Toronto

Health is now elusive.  According to biomedical standards, we instead likely living at risk for disease.  Further, we may be diagnosed with a “pre-disease” or labeled among the “most at risk,” be it for HIV, diabetes, heart disease, or types of cancer. To avoid disease itself, we submit to medical interventions at the advice of not just doctors, but now also public health officials who sometimes not so jokingly joke about putting the first-line diabetes drug Metformin or statins to reduce cholesterol into our water supply.  People of diverse genders and sexualities, labeled “at high risk,” are prescribed HIV medicines to minimize their risk of contracting disease. Risk reducing mastectomies are recommended for carriers of the BRCA1/2 gene mutations. Indeed, new biomedical technologies, including screening algorithms and risk scores, genetic tests for predisposition, and an array of “drugs for life” are shifting understandings of population-level prevention and the right to health globally.  These technologies not only animate new subjectivities and inequalities among the “almost ill,” but also index growing economies centered on research, development, marketing, and intellectual property that increasingly extend to low- and middle-income country contexts.  This panel seeks to bring together papers that explore the political economy driving new technologies of risk and their implications for publics across contexts, for health governance, equity and activism, and for how we understand health and prevent disease.  To encourage comparative perspectives and an analysis of these technologies with global reach, contributions from non-Western countries and the Global South are particularly welcome.

Contact: eev2105@columbia.edu

Keywords: Bioeconomy; Risk; Biotechnology; Global Health; Inequality

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Medicine and Healthcare

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

121. No Time to Not Know. Bottom-up Expertise, Grass-root Authorities, and Agency in the Age of Digital Knowledge

Magdalena Halina Góralska, Koźmiński University in Warsaw; Ane Kathrine Gammelby, Aarhus University

Recent developments and the widespread adoption of various ICTs across societies, predominantly the Internet, have significantly contributed to both sustaining and augmenting the visibility of various forms of knowledge as well as various forms of knowledge production practices. The Web engages millions of users world-wide every day, and they all take part in its co-creation, making the Internet a bricolage of their agency and creativity. Whatever their social and cultural capital, everyone contributes, even just “by sharing anything to anyone” – to paraphrase Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. As a result, the Web is polyphonic, ever-changing, and extremely diverse, offering contemporary information consumers (seemingly) fast and easy access to a somewhat infinite number of information coming from countless sources. The Internet caries a promise of empowerment, presupposing that more information means more (situated) agency, that can challenge and reconfigure traditional areas and historically hegemonic knowledge hierarchies.
This panel aims to inquire into how the Internet influences the status quo. We ask, how do users navigate the Web for knowledge in various contexts? Does the Internet make them feel more empowered? How do they “do their research”, self-educate, become bottom-up “experts” or “authorities”? With an aim to answer the above questions, we invite papers that provide empirical insights into knowledge-related practices in relation to ICTs, touching upon the relationship between knowledge and agency, focusing on issues such as:
– knowledge seeking, production, and exchange,
– bottom-up expertise,
– collaboration, knowledge activism,
– online truth-making and trust-building.

Contact: maniagoralska@gmail.com

Keywords: knowledge, expertise, authority, internet, information and communication technologies

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Information, Computing and Media Technology

122. Nocebos, Nocebo Studies, and STS: Meaning-Making and Recalcitrance

Ada Jaarsma, Mount Royal University; Suze Berkhout, University of Toronto; Khadija Coxon, McGill-Queen’s University Press

Nocebos, described by some as placebo’s evil twin, are unwelcome yet inextricable elements of medical treatment. In the mid-twentieth century, practices of informed consent were eliciting such pervasive adverse effects that researchers coined the term “Nocebo Effect” to render such impacts recognizable. Rather than anticipations of healing, the nocebo effect expresses expectations of harm—like side effects that emerge even when patients or trial participants receive placebos. While they are rarely familiar to the broader public, nocebo effects are intimately part of the array of interactions with which individuals relate to biomedicine. Nocebos point to the porous lines between bodies and epistemologies and between clinics and daily lives; as experiments in the burgeoning field of Nocebo Studies suggest, learning one’s genetic predispositions for disease or encountering media coverage of a generic drug’s ineffectiveness contribute to negative outcomes. Nocebos dramatize a liveliness that Isabelle Stengers and Vincianne Despret describe as “recalcitrance.” At odds with bifurcating logics that keep “matter” and “meaning” apart, nocebos animate a kind of meaning-making that is palpable, involuntary, and unwanted. This panel seeks to contribute to STS by exploring how nocebos and Nocebo Studies draw attention to the ontological choreography of biomedicine, such as the assemblages, practices or relations that constitute medical treatment and research. We welcome papers that examine the import of nocebos—broadly construed—for resistance to the norms and curative ambitions of medical treatment. And we invite presenters to make use of creative or new methodologies for identifying, interpreting and making sense of nocebo effects.

Contact: adajaarsma@gmail.com

Keywords: Placebos, nocebos, biomedicine, disability studies, materiality

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

123. Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense

Adam Fish, University of New South Wales; Michael Richardson; Edgar Gomez Cruz, University of New South Wales

Seeing—and the sense making that follows—is usually conceived as something humans alone do. Anthropocentric vision has been radically decentered by both computer vision and by multispecies ontologies, even if all-too-human biases stain the former and the latter is anything but surprising to indigenous people. And yet nonhuman vision remains under-examined and under-theorised in disciplines cognate to STS, where image and sense-making often remain the privilege of the human. This panel offers a corrective by advancing vivid case studies in non-human vision that center technologies and animals as agents of meaning-making.

From analogue photography to computer vision, technologies of vision see in nonhuman ways (Mackenzie and Munster 2019, Zylinska 2017). Photons are processed into computer readable code, filtered by algorithms, and correlated by machine learning to build so-called artificial intelligence. Animals, too, can see beyond, differently, and better than RGB, the human visual light spectrum (Barad 2007). While the chasm separating human vision from other animal vision is vast, efforts towards remembering and forging inter-species companionship are essential to responding to the species extinction and climate crisis (Haraway 2016). Seeing as non-human–technological or animal–uniquely challenges key concepts in media studies: who or what makes sense of symbols.

Across the assembled papers, this panel explores some of the crucial technical, affective, multi-species and multi-modal ways in which nonhuman vision figures in the contemporary moment. In doing so, it brings expertise in STS, new materialism, visual culture, media arts, and cultural studies to the study of communication and technology. Collectively, we question the politics of vision: who or what sees who? What, how, and when? What or who can avoid being seen, provide consent, and avoid the gaze? Awareness of how vision technologies and non-human animals see and sense–or avoid such efforts–in uncanny and alien ways not only challenges but should transform human relationships to others, both technical and animal.

Contact: mediacultures@protonmail.ch

Keywords: vision, animal, drone, visual, seeing, gaze

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

124. ‘Not doing’ in times of crisis: agency and the urgency of pause and restraint

Simon Cohn, LSHTM; Annelieke Driessen, London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine

Agency and action are considered to be inherently interlinked. And, by definition, they are commonly used in combination to define what an actor is. But the problem is, through narratives that stage action as positive, urgent and productive, forms of non-doing and absences (of people, actions, matter, ideas) tend to be conceived, by default, as negative, unimportant or simply as failings. As a consequence, at a time of ecological and political crises, important calls to “act now”, non-action (e.g. to consume less, reduce our use of resources, or not participate) can often emerge as paradoxical imperatives.

This panel invites ethnographic engagements that not only describe but think with such delays, pauses, restraints, hesitations, inactions, and silences. The papers will collectively explore their traces and effects, and how they might contribute to theoretical discussions on agency, ontology and methodology.

We welcome contributors to address questions concerning the making and unmaking of absences, about alternative enactments, and the role they can have constituting change and shaping the otherwise. We thereby hope to generate a conversation that will enrich the STS vocabulary of  ‘agent’, ‘action’ and ‘practice’, and question any fixed binary between absence and presence by extending existing conceptualisations such as ‘absent-presence’ and ‘active-passive’.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

* deliberate ways of not doing (something)

* absences (of people, actions, matter, ideas)

* acts that make non-acts possible

Contact: annelieke.driessen@lshtm.ac.uk

Keywords: agency, absences, method, action, practice

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

125. Old Academies and Emerging Worlds: Feminist Encounters in Changing STS Contexts

Gabriele Griffin, Uppsala University; Marja Vehviläinen, Tampere University

The notion of emerging worlds is frequently associated with the global South, so-called ‘third world’ countries, and dys- or utopian imaginaries. This – at times conveniently – ignores the fact that academies in the global North harbour within them emerging worlds in the form of emerging disciplines, through the impact of technologization on data and knowledge production, and through the changing socio-political and economic contexts in which these academies operate. STS itself constitutes an emerging world in that its methods and objects of study have changed significantly over time and continue to do so.

In this panel we explore the gendered dis/continuities arising from academies engaging with the emerging worlds within them in the form of new disciplines such as Digital Humanities, eHealth, and new forms of research and innovation, which in turn challenge conventional STS through their claims in relation to both science and technology.

 We invite contributions on topics such as:

• How does gender play out in the emerging worlds of new disciplines in old academies?
• How do emerging disciplines challenge gendered STS epistemologies?
• How does the meeting of academies from different parts of the world challenge gendered notions of STS knowledge production?
• What is the impact of the technologization of academic disciplines on the disciplines’ genderization?
• What is the relation between emerging disciplines, gender, and STS?
• How are notions of gender in the academy impacted by emerging disciplines?
• How does STS relate to the issue of gender relative to feminism?

Contact: gabriele.griffin@gender.uu.se

Keywords: emerging disciplines, gendered innovations, feminist interventions, technologization

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

126. On the Interplay of Images, Imaginaries and Imagination in Science Communication

Andreas Metzner-Szigeth, Free University of Bolzano; Andreas Böhn, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; Luca Toschi, University of Florence

Tables, graphics and IMAGES – e.g. representations of small but complex macro-molecules in ‘gestalt’ of the Watson-Crick Double Helix or of even more immaterial objects like bits and bytes sliding down a curtain of strings as green drops – play an important role in science communication. This applies to processes of communication between sciences and the public as well as to those between or within scientific disciplines.

The function of IMAGINARIES as associative complexes is to simultaneously shape and limit our understanding of scientific findings. The idea of gene expression within the relationship of DNA and entire organisms is an example here. Another is that of data mining with regard to the retrieval of information from networks of signal transmission.

IMAGINATION, finally, points to some generative activity of creative minds figuring out how to recognize unknown phenomena or such not yet conceived nor determined in distinct structures. Albert Einstein who wrote about a dream in which he was riding on top of a sun beam during the time he was struggling to elaborate his theory of relativity, is an example here.

How to detect and observe, analyze and understand the constructive dynamics unfolding within the interplay of IMAGES, IMAGINARIES and IMAGINATION in science communication? We invite all kind of papers that can contribute to the challenging task of making progress with regard to the question of that interplay of visual, aesthetic, semantic and epistemic forms and practices. Those relevant to technology assessment, health research, informatics and studies of interdisciplinarity are particularly welcome.

Contact: andreas.metzner-szigeth@unibz.it

Keywords: science communication, knowledge construction, visualization & framing, aesthetics & heuristics, generative interdisciplinarity

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

127. Online Campaigns and Digital Personhood in the Age of Datafication

Christian Ritter, Tallinn University; Rajesh Sharma, Senior Researcher, Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu

This panel examines how influencers construct their identities on digital platforms. By posting selfies, memes, vlogs, emojis, and textual messages on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, influencers create complex online personas. For instance, diaspora activists, gamers, lifestyle vloggers, gender activists, leaders of religious communities, minority representatives, and political populists engage in large-scale campaigns on platforms to grow their following. Such campaign strategies are increasingly based on comprehensive expertise in platform metrics and exploit data analytics. Drawing on recent STS scholarship on technologies of the self, new materialist approaches, and intersectionality theory, this panel reassesses the rise of datafication in contemporary society. In the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, access to the APIs of popular platforms has been increasingly restricted for academic researchers, requiring new research methodologies.

The overall aim of the panel is to bring together STS scholars who explore the multiple entanglements of influencers with big data in their everyday lives. The panel thus invites papers assessing the datafication of online activities through the lenses of data ethnography or data analytics solutions, such as social network analysis and natural language processing (text analytics, sentiment analysis, topic modeling). Contributions to this panel could address the following questions: What strategies do influencers pursue for platform campaigns? How is agency distributed in the platform worlds of influencers? What understandings of algorithmic mediation do influencers cultivate? What epistemological practices do influencers develop to understand platform metrics?

Contact: christian.ritter@tlu.ee

Keywords: big data, campaign, identity, influencer, platform

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

128. ‘Openness’ In Software, Hardware And Wetware: Materialities, Collectives, Values

Luis Felipe Murillo, University of Virginia; Morgan Meyer

A wide array of forms and sites of collaborative development has emerged in the past two decades with the goal of promoting “openness” as a technoscientific practice, including, but not limited to maker and hackerspaces, digital fabrication labs, citizen and community science projects of variable scope. In this panel, we propose the examination of their genealogies and material work for the purpose of rendering science and technology “open.” Questions we ask include: how is “openness” enacted across projects and technical affordances? What are the differences and disputes with respect to political projects and modes of ethical problematization they engage? How are existing moral economies in “Free and Open Source” technology development or “Open Innovation” mobilized, extended, problematized, and transformed with new projects? How is open source enacted in fields like ecology, architecture, agriculture, medicine, or biology? How are values such as openness and decentralisation translated into technical objects, codes, and blueprints? We welcome papers that propose an engagement and extension of existing theoretical and methodological frameworks in STS to examine the debate regarding “openness” in science and technology across ethical, material, political, and legal practices and expert domains with a focus on how technical objects materialize technopolitical alignments. The goal is to respond to the research agenda set by Madeleine Akrich at the 2016 4S/EASST conference to study the practices of science and technology done otherwise, as well as to engage the challenges and possibilities set forth by Isabelle Stengers of experimenting with alternative technosciences.

Contact: morgan.meyer@mines-paristech.fr

Keywords: openness, open source, values, materiality, collaboration/collectivity

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Information, Computing and Media Technology

129. Ordering knowledge in uncertain times: STS perspectives on the reinvention of the literature review

Bluemel Clemens, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies; Arno Simons, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies; Alexander Schniedermann, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies

In the age of post-truth and declining trust in scientific institutions, we witness novel ways of constructing, aggregating and presenting evidence in the sciences. New instruments for ordering and presenting knowledge, such as guidelines and novel databases are established aiming at substituting existing forms of knowledge – not always without friction.  The literature review appears to be one of the arenas where legitimate ways of knowing and presenting evidence are negotiated. Practices of reviewing the scientific literature are manifold; they vary historically and across disciplines.

Recent trends in some disciplines towards “systematic reviewing” (SR) and its positioning in discourses of “evidence-based practice”, “knowledge transfer” or “reproduction crisis”, have sparked a transforming debate about the epistemic role of the literature review. Systematic Reviews entered various scholarly realms and reordered promises and fears about what counts as a legitimate way of generating evidence.

What can STS contribute to current debates about the role of reviewing? The panel invites contributions that address questions, such as these:

What different forms of reviewing can be found, how have they changed, and how do they relate to each other? How do new forms reposition or replace established ones?

To which goals, values and problematizations are these forms linked? How do they relate to broader discourses?

How do they impact scientific practices and the relation of science to society? How does reviewing change the production of scientific knowledge and how does it relate to broader configurations of power-knowledge, such as the science-policy nexus?

Contact: bluemel@dzhw.eu

Keywords: reviewing practices, systematic review, evidence-based practice, knowledge-power relations

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

130. Organizing Technoscientific Capitalism: Assets, Rents, and Values

Jane Bjørn Vedel, Copenhagen Business School; John Grant Gardner, Monash University, Australia; Kean Birch, York University

Technoscientific capitalism is organized through the configuration of technological products, platforms, and data, as well as the configuration of capitalist practices like accounting, corporate governance, and valuation logics. As a result, technoscientific capitalism entails organizational dynamics and inter-organizational relationships that often get obscured within STS debates about the supposed ‘neoliberalization’ of society and science. In this panel, we want to explore how assets, rents, and values are made through this configuration of technoscience and capitalism. There are many possible analytical and empirical avenues and questions to explore here: How do managerial practices and collaborations underpin the transformation of things into assets? How do organizational epistemologies and resources manifest as different forms of rentiership? And how do public-private logics and frameworks produce specific forms of socio-economic values? Overall, we are concerned with examining how diverse processes of assetization, rentiership, and valuation open up and/or close down alternative futures and political possibilities.

Contact: jbv.ioa@cbs.dk

Keywords: assets, organizational dynamics, rents, technoscientific capitalism, values

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

131. Other Indigenous “Knowledge Engineering” Systems: Designing and operating knowledge technologies at scale in emerging worlds

Yoehan Oh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Some scholars in digital humanities and critical internet and digital technologies studies have asked for bringing critical concerns about race, gender, postcoloniality, and other inequal power structures to their field (Nakamura 2013; Noble et al. 2016; McPherson 2013; Posner 2016; Risam 2018; Benjamin 2019). One way to address those concerns is illuminating technically-inventive subjectivities, by appreciating and thus empowering them through conceptualizations they deserve. STSers have conceptualized them and their artifacts as “Black vernacular technological creativity,” “techno-vernacular creativity,” (Fouché 2006; Gaskins 2019), “innovation from below” (Williams 2018), “ethnocomputing,” (Petrillo 1994; Tedre et-al. 2006; Eglash 1999), “postcolonial computing,” (Irani et-al. 2010; cf. Burrell 2012), and “black software” (McIlwain 2019); historians of computing have studied information architectures, hardware, and software in the Middle East, Latin America, East Asia, Midwestern U.S., and (post-)communist contexts (Bowker 1994; Medina 2011; Tinn 2018; Rankin 2018; Švelch 2018; Biagioli et-al. 2019). To further these conceptualizations, this panel will focus on less resourceful worlds’ captures of knowledge technologies, predominated by a few resourceful countries’ R&D communities like U.S., Canada, some Western Europe countries, China, and Japan: Knowledge discovery by data, Data engineering, Semantic technologies, and Search engines, etc (Collins 1987; Forsythe 1993). Questions to be addressed are: How indigenous, aboriginal, vernacular, decolonial, de-ColdWar, or less capitalistically/settler-colonially exploitative the knowledge engineering practices at scales by technical actors in the underrecognized/emerging worlds can be? Which speculative, experimental, or empirical cases can we dig into as the Indigenous “Knowledge engineering” Systems (Watson-Verran et al. 1995; Brereton et-al. 2015; Chamunorwa et-al. 2018)?

REFERENCES

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* Aouragh, Miriyam, and Paula Chakravartty. 2016. “Infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies.” Media, Culture & Society 38(4): 559-575.

* Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons.

* Biagioli, Mario, and Vincent Antonin Lépinay, eds. 2019. From Russia with Code: Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

* Bowker, Geoffrey C. 1994. Science on the Run: Information management and industrial geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940. MIT press.

* Brereton, Margot, Paul Roe, Ronald Schroeter, and A. Lee Hong. 2015. “Indigenous knowledge technologies: Moving from knowledge capture to engagement, reciprocity and use.” In At the Intersection of Indigenous and Traditional Knowledge and Technology Design, edited by Nicola Bidwell and Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, 239-258. Informing Science.

* Burrell, Jenna. 2012. Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet cafés of urban Ghana. MIT Press.

* Chamunorwa, Michael Bosomefi, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, and Tariq Zaman. 2018. “An Intermediary Database Node in the Namibian Communities Indigenous Knowledge Management System.” In Digitisation of Culture: Namibian and International Perspectives, edited by Dharm Singh Jat, Jürgen Sieck, Hippolyte N’Sung-Nza Muyingi, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, Anicia Peters, and Shawulu Nggada, 99-117. Singapore: Springer,

* Collins, Harry M. 1987. “Expert systems and the science of knowledge.” In The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, Trevor Pinch, 329-348. MIT Press.

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* Fouché, Rayvon. 2006. “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud: African Americans, American artifactual culture, and black vernacular technological creativity.” American Quarterly 58(3): 639-661.

* Gaskins, Nettrice R. 2019. “Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation across the African Diaspora and Global South.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, 252-274. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

* Irani, Lilly, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish, Kavita Philip, and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2010. “Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, ACM. 1311-1320.

* Kita, Chigusa, and Hyungsub Choi. 2016. “History of computing in East Asia.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38(2): 8-10.

* McIlwain, Charlton. 2019. Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. Oxford University Press, USA.

* McPherson, Tara. 2013. “US operating systems at mid-century: The intertwining of race and UNIX.” In Race after the Internet, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, 27-43. Routledge.

* Medina, Eden. 2011. Cybernetic revolutionaries: Technology and politics in Allende’s Chile. MIT Press.

* Nakamura, Lisa, and Peter Chow-White, eds. 2013. Race after the Internet. Routledge.

* Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press.

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* Stevens, Hallam. 2019. “Digital Infrastructure in the Chinese Register.” Made in China Journal. 4(2):  84-89.

* Švelch, Jaroslav. 2018. Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. MIT Press.

* Tedre, Matti, Erkki Sutinen, Esko Kähkönen, and Piet Kommers. 2006. “Ethnocomputing: ICT in cultural and social context.” Communications of the ACM 49(1): 126-130.

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* Williams, Logan D. A. 2018. Eradicating Blindness: Global Health Innovation from South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan.

Contact: ohy@rpi.edu

Keywords: knowledge engineering, knowledge technologies, technological agency, indigenous knowledge systems, emerging worlds

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

132. Performative Futures: Fighting Reification Inertias through Open Anticipations

Sergio Urueña, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU; Hannot Rodríguez, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU; Andoni Ibarra, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU

Science and technology practices are crucially shaped by representations of the future. Expectations, socio-technical imaginaries and techno-visions are constitutive elements in the de facto epistemic-political governance of research and innovation. Some science and technology scholars (e.g., van Lente, 2006; Jasanoff and Kim, 2015; Konrad and Palavicino, 2017; Lösch, 2017) as well as certain research policy frameworks (e.g., technology assessment, anticipatory governance, RRI) have emphasized this performative character of futures by approaching it as an object of responsibility. This intellectual endeavor has been especially fruitful in relation to the visualization and critique of existing reification inertias. That is to say, the frames, regulations, commitments, feelings and so on, orienting and constraining (i.e., reifying, or closing-down) the processes, outcomes and ends of research and innovation practices.

This panel aims to explore the theoretical and practical possibilities of developing interventive, anticipatory resources that are capable of instrumentalizing the future in more open, inclusive and reflexive ways.

Some potential questions include:

• To what extent are anticipatory narratives and practices within research and innovation policy systems open, inclusive and reflexive?
• What constraining/enabling roles do socio-technical expectations, imaginaries and techno-visions of the future play in research and innovation practices?
• What potentials and limits do anticipatory methods (e.g., scenario-building, science-fiction prototyping, technology roadmapping, etc.) display with regard to reflexivity and de-reifying dynamics?
• How is/ should the epistemic-political quality of open anticipatory practices be enacted and/or assessed?
• What role and relevance does anticipatory governance display in relation to more recent policy frameworks such as RRI and “Open Science”?

Contact: sergio.uruena@ehu.eus

Keywords: Futures, Anticipation, RRI, Scenarios, “Open Science”

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

133. Peripheral States: Public Uses and Misuses of Big Data Technologies

María Belén Albornoz, FLACSO Latin American Social Studies Faculty; Henry Chavez, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador

In September 2019, an 18-gigabit database was found stored in an unsecured server in Miami containing about fifty data points of private and some very sensitive information on every Ecuadorian citizen. As the growing list of private data leaks (Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, etc.), the Ecuadorian episode launch the alarms, but nothing indicates real changes in the near future.

Though, there is a feature in the Ecuadorian case that opens a new range of questions on the problems and risk of the rise of the big data technologies. Unlike other similar massive leaks of information, the data exposed in this case was collected by different public agencies whose objectives and technological capacities are now in doubt.

For the last ten years, governments, especially in peripheral states have followed the technological path imposed by the giants of the new digital economy without having the time of reflecting and regulate the side effects of the production and accumulation of such amount of private and sensitive information. Moreover, many of them has fallen in the temptation of building (buying) mass surveillance systems to better control their citizens without having a real control over the technology they are using.

This open panel aims to bring together scholars from different parts of the world to discuss the paths and approach governments from south and north are following in the adoption of big data technologies, their uses and misuses.

Contact: balbornoz@flacso.edu.ec

Keywords: big data, peripheral states, data leaks, surveillance systems, privacy

Categories: Big Data

Governance and Public Policy

Engineering and Infrastructure

134. Pharmaceutical and diagnostic futures: innovation, governance and practice

Paul Martin, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield; Stuart Hogarth, University of Cambridge; Fred Steward, Policy Studies Institute

The development, marketing and use of new pharmaceutical and diagnostic products is playing an increasing role in shaping healthcare across the globe. Major changes are underway that may represent a fundamental transition in the sector, driven by the search for new sources of value, emerging technologies and systemic shifts in healthcare provision. Novel targeted and biological products are increasingly tied to new diagnostic tests facilitating the development of personalised medicine. A wave of ultra-expensive speciality and orphan medicines are posing major challenges for both access and existing regulatory frameworks and reconfiguring relations between patients and industry. The dynamics of pharmaceuticalisation and diagnostic innovation are extending the reach of Western medicine and international bioscience companies into new markets and the Global South, raising important social and ethical questions. This Open Panel invites papers related to pharmaceutical and diagnostic studies. We welcome papers on: the political economy of the global bio/pharma and diagnostics industry, new and alternative forms of knowledge production, the development of novel biological and speciality products, the changing role of patients in innovation and regulation, the challenge to existing forms of governance and Health Technology Assessment,  medicines for neglected and rare conditions, and situating pharmaceutical and diagnostic innovation within broader health system transitions. In particular, we are keen to encourage submissions from critical, feminist, post-colonial and Global South perspectives. The Panel aims to help build a global network of STS scholars working in this area and develop collaborative research on the major changes underway in this key sector.

Contact: paul.martin@sheffield.ac.uk

Keywords: Pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, political economy, knowledge production, governance

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

135. Politicization of Sociotechnical Futures: Prerequisites and Limits

Paulina Dobroc, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; Andreas Lösch, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)/ ITAS; Maximilian Roßmann, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)/ ITAS

STS-research on expectations, imaginaries and visions has shown that imaginaries of sociotechnical futures, the promises and fears associated with them, increasingly influence processes of sociotechnical innovations and transformations. In various societal contexts — e.g., research politics, scientific collaborations, parliamentary debates, social movements — these imaginaries serve as visionary resources and capacities to legitimate decisions, coordinate practices, steer developments, raise awareness for specific problem-solutions etc. For this purpose, futures are getting politicized. The objects of politicization materialize in a variety of forms (e.g., terms, symbols, metaphors, narratives, artifacts, traditions, organizations). We assume that both, the specific characteristics of the societal context (e.g. power constellations) and of the forms (e.g., discursive narratives or prototypes) are conditions for the politicization. For example, it makes a difference, if promises of openness are part of hacker practices or part of parliamentary debates about Open Government. At the same time, an in-vitro-burger may serve as an object of politicization differently in the context of 3D printing development compared to public controversies on nutrition transition.

We invite theoretical and empirical papers from the broad spectrum of STS-scholars to discuss and to elaborate questions such as:

• How the interplay of contextual constellations and forms shape the processes of politicization?
• What are prerequisites and limits for the politicization of futures (e.g., for the success of visioneers) related to different contexts and forms?
• How processes emerge from specific contexts and forms of futures that change the sociotechnical futures and how context- and form-specific politicizations of futures result in processes?

Contact: paulina.dobroc@kit.edu

Keywords: Sociotechnical Futures, politicization of futures, power constellations, analysis of visionary dynamics, context and matter

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Other

136. Politics and practices in the ethnographies of legitimate knowledge

Fatima Elfitouri, King’s College London; Cinzia Greco, University of Manchester

The political epistemology of ethnography has underwent significant revision since at least the 1970s, exploring the asymmetries of power between the ethnographers and the other participants, the positionality of the ethnographer, and the ways in which ethnographic knowledge is produced. Given ethnography’s roots in anthropology, however, most of the reflection has focused on cases in which the ethnographers hold more power and legitimacy in the global production of knowledge than the other participants.

In this panel we aim to explore the politics and practices of ethnography in fields characterised by highly legitimate knowledge, cases in which the ethnographers often hold less symbolic power, including but not limited to scientific, technological and medical knowledge.

We aim to analyse the asymmetries of power arising both between the actors and between them and ethnographers and the situated, contextual and political nature of knowledge. Such analysis will be applied to different strata, including the divide between expert and lay, local and global/universal, “objective” and militant knowledge, and the hierarchies between disciplines based on prestige and “scientificity”. We will also explore how official roles, formal qualifications, as well as class, gender and race/nationality/ethnicity, structure the production of knowledge.

Ethnographers bring their own positionality to the field, and this panel will also explore the conditions of the production of the ethnographers’ gaze. Further, it will explore how STS researchers can deal with asymmetries of power between “hard” and “soft” sciences and produce knowledge that is relevant for policymakers and the society at large.

Contact: cinzia.greco@manchester.ac.uk

Keywords: Ethnography, Knowledge, Asymmetries of power, Methodology, Positionality

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

137. Proliferation, dispersal and (in)security: towards new vocabularies for the debate between STS and critical security studies

Annalisa Pelizza, University of Bologna and University of Twente; Claudia Aradau, King’s College London

In recent years, an emerging debate between the social studies of technology and critical security studies has interrogated the materiality of security artefacts, questioned identification techniques for (in)security production, investigated how data systems shape legal expertise and regulatory dynamics. This debate has focused attention on the entanglements between the performativity of infrastructures – especially infrastructures for data production and body tracking – and the alleged obduracy of institutionalized agency.

Yet the debate seems to have reached a halt in questioning the material and institutional legacies of modernity. We suggest that such halt is due to the need to revisit our analytical vocabularies. On the one hand, the interplay between data infrastructures and institutionalized actors has received ambivalent consideration in STS. However, the current crisis of socio-technical infrastructures for population management, alterity processing and border controlling highlight the need to engage with long-term continuities and discontinuities. On the other hand, critical security studies have limited their conceptualization to security devices and paid less attention to infrastructural entanglements and the ontological boundaries of security actors.

In order to overcome these limits, we propose to introduce two terms in the debate: proliferation and dispersal. “Proliferation” is here conceived specifically in relation to the chains of action and mediators that intervene in the security relationship. “Dispersal” captures the spatio-temporal distribution of things and people and the partial connections and dis-connections that reproduce (in)security. These two terms prompt us to re-engage questions of multiplicity, heterogeneity and performativity at the intersection of STS and critical security studies.

Contact: annalisa.pelizza2@unibo.it

Keywords: security studies, population management, alterity processing, proliferation, dispersal

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

Governance and Public Policy

138. Prototyping Urban Futures

Sascha Dickel, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Antonia Garbe, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Andrea Schikowitz, MCTS; Paula Schuster, FH Potsdam; Jordi Tost, FH Potsdam; Marcel Woznica, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz | Institut für Sozi

“The future cannot begin” (Luhmann 1976) – yet, prototyping can be regarded as a mode of materializing potential futures in the present. Prototyping enables the testing of technical functions and social interactions. Moreover, prototyping might be a source of potential irritation that can shape design processes and modify the course of action by functioning as an epistemic object. Practices of prototyping take place in diverse settings such as engineering labs, planning and R&D departments, design studios, makerspaces, digital platforms, or living labs.

In this session, focusing on urban life, we ask how prototypes are developed, tested, and redesigned – together with imaginaries of futures. For instance, how does prototyping of autonomous vehicles, digital solutions or infrastructures open and close innovation pathways and stimulates visions of tomorrow’s urban life? How have the methods and functions of prototypes and prototyping changed over time? How might prototyping be related to public engagement with science and technology? Can prototypical design be regarded as a model for contemporary societal learning?

We invite contributions that reflect upon prototyping as a situated practice, critically deal with concepts and methods of prototyping and explore prototyping as a societal mode of future making and innovation. We welcome diverse perspectives, such as STS, critical and speculative design, history, urban planning and architecture, etc.

Contact: dickel@uni-mainz.de

Keywords: Prototyping, Futures, Urban, Innovation, Design

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

139. Public data repositories in the global health data economy

Ilpo Helén, University of Eastern Finland; Aaro Tupasela, University of Helsinki

During the past decade, digital health data has been highlighted as an asset with multiple values. This is due to many developments that have facilitated the emergence of global health data economy. Biomedical research has been impregnated by datafication; precision medicine has engendered great expectations and widespread activities; and corporations dominating the cyberspace like Google, Apple, Facebook and IBM have become increasingly interested in health-related digital data. At the same time, masses of health-related personal and population data exist and are continuously sourced in data reservoirs maintained by public authorities in different countries, especially in Europe. Now, national governments have shown an increased interest for wider and more intense utilization of health data reservoirs to facilitate biomedical research and personalized medicine, to improve clinical practices, and to boost innovative business in biomedicine and ICT. In addition, a number of projects to improve cross-border interoperability of these databases are under way in the EU and elsewhere, and transnational pharmaceutical and ICT corporations appear eager to engage in ‘collaboration’ for sourcing public health data. Discussion of this track will concentrate on the prospects, roles, purposes, and actual management of data sourcing by public authorities in the context of evolving global health data economy. We call for papers, first, about policy and technical rationales and practices that attempt to integrate collection, storage, circulation and uses public data with global health data economy, and, second, about problems and contestations related with such efforts of integration and collaboration.

Contact: ilpo.helen@uef.fi

Keywords: Health data sourcing, public databases, health data economy, data-driven health care

Categories: Big Data

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

140. Race and Biomedicine Beyond the Lab: 21st Century Mobilizations

Melissa Creary, University of Michigan, School of Public Health; Nadine Ehlers, University of Sydney; Zimitri Erasmus, University of the Witwatersrand; Vivette Garcia Deister, UNAM; Amade M’charek, University of Amsterdam – AISSR; Anne Pollock, King’s Col

This open panel invites analyses of the ways that race and biomedicine are mobilized beyond the lab in the 21st century. There is already rich STS scholarship that accounts for the construction of race in scientific practices and the epistemological problems that entails. In this open panel we seek to shift the focus beyond the lab: how is the science understood, constructed, contested, and diversely deployed in public arenas, to what ends, and with what effects?

We seek to foreground how non-scientists are at the forefront of novel, plural, generative deployments of biomedical ideas of race. On the one hand, these ideas are being used by broader stakeholders to maintain or revive historically entrenched ideas about race, to reinforce difference and inequality. On the other hand, biomedical ideas of race are also strategically mobilized in alternative directions, to stake claims and resist race-based injustice. We hope that the papers will span wide-ranging geographies and domains. Papers might explore race as mobilized by (1) inhabitants of environments, e.g, epigenetic impacts of toxicity and medical hot-spotting; (2) consumers within markets, e.g, genetic ancestry testing and race-based pharmaceuticals; (3) citizens and professionals, e.g. deploying forensic genetics in genocide claims or nation-state-specific framings of group rights. 

The panel will build on and expand the work of the emerging international network gathering around the theme of Race and Biomedicine Beyond the Lab (RaBBL), exploring how individuals and groups in wide-ranging contexts reimagine and seek to reconfigure racial futures.

Contact: anne.pollock@kcl.ac.uk

Keywords: race, biomedicine, health disparities, medical consumers, human rights

Categories: Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

141. Radical and Radicalizing Workers In The Scientific Enterprise

Yarden Katz, Harvard University; Kelly Holloway, University of Toronto

As the scientific enterprise grows amid broader political and social inequality, there is considerable potential for the exploitation of science workers – the scientists, technicians and other labourers who make research possible. While many are involved in scientific labor, only an elite minority reap the benefits. These conditions are characteristic of the prevailing neoliberal science regime that sees scientists as “entrepreneurs” competing in a “marketplace of ideas” (Lave et al. 2010, Mirowski 2011). Like other workers subjected to competition and precarity, university scientists report feeling anxious and having limited freedom to chart their own path (Sigl 2012, Müller and Rijcke 2017, Muller 2017). Outside of universities, science is undertaken in private laboratories and contract research organizations, where very little is known about the labour conditions. In recent years, there have been efforts to resist neoliberal trends in higher education. On university campuses, unions of research assistants and postdoctoral researchers are forming, and the academy’s least privileged workers have staged important protests for better conditions and wages (Leonard and Rojer 2017). Some have recently hailed “the return of radical science” in light of the relaunch of the group Science for the People. How do science workers relate to and engage these movements and forms of resistance? How do these efforts compare to past “radical science” efforts? What are the potential avenues today for a “radical science”? We invite papers that explore the conditions of science workers, and forms of resistance related to science work.

Contact: yarden.katz@gmail.com

Keywords: radical science, science workers, neoliberalism, entrepreneurial science, neoliberal academy

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

142. Rare Disease Policies: From Exceptionalism Towards a ‘New Normal’?

Conor Douglas, York Univeristy

The emergence and consolidation of rare diseases as a distinct area of public health policy since the 1980s has been extensively studied. STS researchers have documented the establishment of this distinct policy domain and the associated orphan drug policies as the result of negotiations, struggles and collaborations between patient organizations, biomedical communities, public authorities, and the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. Yet, interpretations differ as of the transformative effects of these partnerships. Some stress the role of patient organizations as a decisive driver for R&D policies in domains that had long been neglected. Critics argue that it is a form of exceptionalism which is being “gamed” by the pharmaceutical and biotech industry by “slicing” common diseases into multiple rare diseases in order to occupy highly profitable niche markets.

This debate is still highly relevant against the backdrop of high drug prices. What is more, the advent of personalized medicine, digital medicine and ‘advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs)’ potentially means an increasing ‘orphanization’ of common diseases. This leads to questions about new business models in pharmaceutical commercial and non-commercial innovation, about (un)affordability for citizens, about regulatory policies and about inclusive health care insurance systems. Where rare disease and orphan drug policies -once considered “exceptional”- stand in this landscape is worth further exploration.

These outstanding questions make expanded and deepened STS analysis of rare disease policies necessary. The panel invites contributions from different national and regional contexts and varying intellectual perspectives.

Contact: cd512@yorku.ca

Keywords: rare diseases, rare disease policy, pharmaceutical innovation

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

143. Recruitment and Evaluation Practices in Academia. Global Changes and National Traditions

Marie Sautier, University of Lausanne/Sciences Po Paris; Julian Hamann, Leibniz Center for Science and Society

This panel aims to bring together scholars whose work studies the transformations of academic recruitment practices, against a backdrop of globalisation dynamics and national traditions.

Major contemporary shifts, such as the casualization of academic work (Courtois and O’Keefe 2019), the changing governance of universities (Whitley and Gläser 2007), and the internationalisation of research (Geuna 2015) have reshaped the ways academic communities and actors produce research, and flow across national academic systems. While such questions have been addressed in STS perspective (Laudel 2006; Gläser and Laudel 2016), little is known about how academic recruitment and evaluation are affected by such shifts and increasingly transformed across time and space in such contexts (Hamann 2019; Musselin 2005). We deem scholarship on academic recruitment to be of particular importance because of the relevance hiring has for academic recognition and visibility as well as for the allocation of resources and power.

Building on the 2019 4S panel on the transformation of academic trajectories, we offer to extend the discussion by focusing more specifically on evaluative practices of recruitment across a variety of national, disciplinary, and institutional contexts.

We welcome original contributions addressing the following questions:

–              How are evaluative practices of recruitment and promotion configured and transformed across national, institutional and disciplinary environments?

–              How do these practices circulate across spaces at a time of growing individual mobility, increased international collaboration but also increased competition for resources and reputation?

–              What are the implications of recruitment policies and evaluation practices in shaping disciplinary labour markets, both nationally and internationally?

–              How may individuals applying for a position abroad navigate across national characteristics and international convergences in academic recruitment?

We invite contributions that address these questions either in specific countries and historical contexts or in a comparative perspective. In addition, we welcome papers that theoretically or empirically question the implications of global changes and convergences in shaping the production of research and the building of academia as a more diverse and inclusive landscape.

—-


Courtois, Aline, and Theresa O’Keefe
 2019     ‘Not One of the Family’: Gender and Precarious Work in the Neoliberal University. Gender Work and Organization 26(4): 463–479.


Geuna, Aldo, ed.
 2015              Global Mobility of Research Scientists: The Economics of Who Goes Where and Why. In Global Mobility of Research Scientists. The Economics of Who Goes Where and Why. Academic Press. Oxford: Elsevier.


Gläser, Jochen, and Grit Laudel
 2016  Governing Science: How Science Policy Shapes Research Content. European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 57(1): 117–168.


Hamann, Julian
 2019  The Making of Professors: Assessment and Recognition in Academic Recruitment. Social Studies of Science.


Laudel, Grit
 2006         The Art of Getting Funded: How Scientists Adapt to Their Funding Conditions. Science and Public Policy 33(7): 489–504.


Musselin, Christine
 2005          Le Marché Des Universitaires, France, Allemagne, Etats-Unis. Presses de Sciences Po. Paris.


Whitley, Richard, and Jochen Gläser, eds.
 2007             Changing Governance of the Public Sciences. In The Changing Governance of the Sciences: The Advent of Research Evaluation Systems Pp. 3–27. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Contact: marie.sautier@unil.ch

Keywords: Academia, search committees, recruitment, evaluation practices, globalisation

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

144. Re-emerging Psychedelic Worlds: Altered States, Altered Subjects, Altered STS?

Claudia Schwarz-Plaschg, University of Vienna; Tehseen Noorani, The New School for Social Research

After decades of repression by governmental and intergovernmental bodies, psychedelic substances such as psilocybin, LSD and MDMA are being studied scientifically for their potential to tackle widespread mental health issues including depression and anxiety disorders. Psychedelic science, the mainstreaming of psychedelics (in Anglo-American contexts in particular), and the globalization of (indigenous) plant medicines – most notably with the Amazonian psychedelic plant brew ayahuasca – can all be seen as responses to a variety of crises, including the opiate crisis, mental health crisis, and environmental crisis. Simultaneously, the psychedelic movement is encountering its own crises, seeing its core values threatened by capitalist interests, the tension between science-led medicalization and grassroots-driven decriminalization, and identity politics forcing a confrontation with power inequalities within the movement itself.

STS analyses are essential in aiding and complicating the responsible (re)integration of psychedelics into society. This panel seeks to bring together STS psychedelic researchers in order to address the following:

• Which ways of being, seeing, and doing STS can contribute to psychedelic worlds that are emerging and continue to flourish in indigenous, scientific, underground and therapeutic contexts;
• How the cultural and socio-political dimensions of altered states of consciousness can be studied from STS and related perspectives;
• How non-ordinary states could inform STS sensibilities, alter researchers’ subjectivities and theories, and potentially re-shape the field of STS.

We particularly invite people, presentations and performances that reflexively attend to their form, style and content as necessarily entangled with, rather than apart from, questions of consciousness-changing practices and substances in society.

Contact: claudia.g.schwarz@univie.ac.at

Keywords: psychedelics, drugs, mental health, subjectivity, medicalization

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

145. Re-evaluating the high-tech and the low-tech: ideals and ideologies of the material

Hannah Cowan, King’s College London; Charlotte Kühlbrandt, King’s College London; Natassia Brenman, The University of Cambridge

This panel invites participants to question how values of high- and low-tech become attached to and emerge from particular kinds of materialities. There is growing concern in STS research around topics that get labelled ‘technoscience’, such as CRISPR genetically-engineered babies and cyborg-esque uses of artificial intelligence. But here we want to trouble scholarly focus on the materialities that get labelled high-tech, by thinking about the “lowness” of low-tech (such as water supply, housing infrastructures etc). We question taken-for-granted urgencies created by the politics and ethics of the high-tech and point to stagnated material relations that perpetuate economic inequality. Building on new materialism’s attention to the mundane as well as its often-neglected roots in historical materialism, this panel invites participants to think about how different kinds of materialities matter in particular spatiotemporal milieus. We encourage papers from different theoretical or ideological perspectives to ask: When and how should STS studies follow the biomedical endeavour to chase emerging worlds, and when should we pay more attention to the present, or even dare to imagine our own worlds? How should we as STS scholars collaborate or align ourselves with different kinds of materialities? And what are the effects of how medical practitioners, highly funded organisations, and STS scholars themselves, care for these different types of materialities?

Contact: Hannah.Cowan@kcl.ac.uk

Keywords: New materialism, Historical materialism, high-tech, low-tech, inequality

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

146. Reexamining Narratives within Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)

Wouter Van de Klippe; Ingeborg Meijer, Leiden University; Ralf Lindner, Fraunhofer ISI; Roger Strand, University of Bergen; Erich Griessler, Institute for Advanced Studies; Anne Loeber, University of Amsterdam

Reexamining narratives within Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)

Keywords: Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), Societal responsibilities of researchers, social inequality, Policy, Governance.

While Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is ostensibly an orientation point for efforts to make research and innovation more societally responsive, there exist contentious narratives framing RRI which both open and close forms of scholarly work.

These narratives include envisioning RRI as…

1. an intervention to command and control researchers and innovators to become more responsive to their negative societal impacts;
2. a tool to coerce citizens into becoming more acquiescent in their support for research and innovation;
3. an intervention to facilitate the development of novel forms of collaboration between representatives from diverse sectoral, disciplinary, and societal perspectives to align research and innovation with broader societal needs;
4. a policy concept which is self-serving and aims develop its own network of practitioners and supporters to sustain itself.

We invite contributions to this panel to explore questions such as: 

• What scholarly work do these narratives either open or close?
• What other narratives are present within RRI?
• Which actors are ultimately served by these narratives and how can or should this be changed?
• How are these narratives reflected in funding schemes / science policy documents?
• What does knowledge production with the aim of addressing societal concerns resemble through each of these narratives?
• What forms of knowledge production have been systematically excluded within these narratives?
• How do these narratives either encourage or discourage engagement with social movements and/or social justice struggles?

Contact: w.van.de.klippe@cwts.leidenuniv.nl

Keywords: Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), Social Responsibilities, Policy, Governance, Narratives

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

147. Reproduction in the Post-genomic Age

Jaya Keaney, Deakin University; Sonja Van Wichelen, University of Sydney

This panel will bring together scholars working on the intersection of reproduction and post-genomic science, also called the new biologies. Encompassing fields such as epigenetics, microbiome research and immunology, post-genomic science offers new biological theorisations that complicate the agency of the gene in determining human individuality. Reproduction—and pregnancy in particular—is a privileged site in this research, with transmissions between foetus and gestator offering biological models that challenge dominant ideas of personhood as gene-centred and separate from gestational and non-human environments. The reproductive body is so central to these fields that, as Mansfield and Guthman (2015, 3) write of epigenetics, we can conceptualise them as a ‘reproductive science’.

The collision of post-genomic research and constructions of reproduction contains both substantial potential and risk. In foregrounding how reproductive and nonhuman environments shape the distribution of life outcomes, the new biologies can validate through scientific discourse a concept of reproduction as a more-than-human milieu. Such a conceptualisation has long animated reproductive justice approaches, and is at the heart of a recent social sciences turn to ‘environmental reproductive justice’ (Lappé, Hein and Landecker 2019). At the same time, in practice post-genomic studies often construct pregnancy and motherhood as coherent, natural processes that translate easily across cultural and species boundaries, naturalising maternal care and longstanding discourses of responsibility that stratify reproduction across raced, classed and geographic axes (Martin 2010; Warin et al 2012). Seizing these rich tensions, this panel welcomes papers invested in questions of reproductive experience and justice in changing post-genomic times.

Contact: jaya.keaney@sydney.edu.au

Keywords: reproduction; post-genomic science; biology; pregnancy; environment

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

148. Re-scaling outer-space(s)

James Lawrence Merron, University of Basel; Davide Chinigò, Stellenbosch University; Siri Lamoureaux, Max Plank Institute, Halle

The gaze into outer-space is mediated from a position on (or near) earth, one that is emplaced within specific social, technological, economic and historical conditions (Seth 2009). Locations near observatories and satellite launch sites are often represented as ‘empty spaces’ (Walker & Chinigò 2018) with no history and no people, but full of promises for future developments – a normative frame about the role of scientific progress to shape the future of humanity that recalls an earlier colonial imagination. Space science infrastructures are thus intentionally isolated from the ambient noise of modern life (Agar 1994) and potentially explosive events (Redfield 2002). When people from the outside do come close, they are constructed by management as interference, collateral danger, or recipients of development.

Enmeshed within Euro-American imaginations of space and place (Messeri 2016), we juxtapose cosmic imaginaries of outer-space with outer-spaces. By ‘rescaling’ these imaginations we open up a discussion about the histories and lives of people who occupy places on the periphery of ground-based space science infrastructures. This panel therefore reassesses cosmic imaginations from the perspective of the margins, intended in geo-political terms, bringing into sharp focus the role of localities in non-western contexts that re-calibrate the scale of outer-space and the possibilities of becoming in ‘outer-spaces’. We invite papers that integrate a social science approach to outer-space within the growing discussions inspired by postcolonial STS (Harding 2011) that must address the problem of universal models and regional realities, but do so without resorting to explanations of “local culture”.

Contact: james.merron@unibas.ch

Keywords: outer-space, Africa, postcolonial STS, colonialism, periphery

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

149. Robotics Innovation in Care: Ethical Considerations

Núria Vallès-Peris, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Ludovica Lorusso, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Cecilio Angulo, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya; Miquel Domenech, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Robots designed to accompany our elderly or to help people with Alzheimer; robots used in therapies with children with autism or to help them learn medication guidelines; robots to reduce the anxiety or pain of patients or to facilitate virtual assistance of hospitalized people; robots to feed or bathe people with limited mobility; robots designed to have affective and/or sexual relationships… Robotics innovation for care in daily live. We are living in an innovation framework in which development and technological application seem to have been previous or separated to the discussion on the moral, social, economic or political model that these innovations entail. Beyond usual debates regarding its alleged incorporation in daily life, and the utopian or dystopian scenarios that accompany its progressive introduction, the interaction with robots enacts controversies that require alternative forms of ethical reflection. In the same way, the ideation, design or commercialization strategies that are mobilized around this type of robots, suppose certain ways to conceptualize human-machine interactions, as well as certain ways to understand care and the role of care in our world. In these landscapes and dreamscapes, this panel has as main aim to discuss about ethical controversies that emerge (and disappear) with the development of robotics in care relations. We propose a multidisciplinary approach to this issue, from multiple and different perspectives: technological mediation, imaginaries, public controversies, risk identification…

Contact: nuria.valles@uab.cat

Keywords: robots, care, ethics, health, daily life

Categories: Other

150. Science and Technology Studies on Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (TCAM)

Jenny-Ann Brodin Danell, Umeå university, Department of Sociology; Pia Vuolanto, University of Tampere Research Centre for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies; Caragh Brosnan, University of Newcastle, Australia

Biomedicine has been very successful in lengthening lives, curing diseases and enhancing the quality of life in numerous ways in contemporary societies. Yet, countless people across the globe choose to complement biomedicine with different non-evidence-based therapies, healing practices and technologies. Some people even use these as alternatives to biomedicine to go “back to nature”, to resist medicalization and technologization by refusing vaccines and medications, or to simply express different lifestyles, worldviews and perceptions about good health. For STS scholars and sociologists of science, these practices and expressions do not only boil down to resistance or ignorance of medicine, but offer fruitful sites to analyse public understanding of science and biomedicine, to interpret relations between expert and  lay knowledge(s), and to understand hidden and suppressed knowledges of subordinate groups such as women, migrants, Asian, South American and African traditional healers and practitioners in the postcolonial sense. The integration of traditional and complementary medicine into biomedical spheres, as therapies and objects of scientific study, also increasingly blurs boundaries between these domains and has led to new concerns around knowledge colonisation.

This panel seeks contributions that explore traditional, complementary and alternative medicines (TCAM) and practices from STS perspectives. In particular we invite papers that target the role of STS theories and methods in studying TCAM. For example, how can we understand aspects of TCAM use, knowledge production, professionalization, standardization, ethics, globalization, and integration of TCAM – if focusing on material practices, hybridity, actor networks, or boundary work?

Contact: jenny-ann.danell@soc.umu.se

Keywords: complementary medicine; traditional knowledge; CAM; knowledge production; biomedicine

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

151. Science as a site of inequality: theoretical, empirical and reflexive insights from STS

Susanne Koch, Technical University of Munich; Nelius Boshoff, Stellenbosch University

According to the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, reducing inequality (Sustainable Development Goal 10) is an essential prerequisite for a world of justice and non-discrimination, and of equal opportunity permitting the full realization of human potential. Science is expected to play a key part in achieving this vision – although being as well structured by multiple forms of inequality and divides within its own system. Epistemic hierarchies not only put certain disciplines before others, but also marginalize knowledge not conforming to dominant paradigms and/or produced outside scientific centers. Aside from researchers’ position in the global research landscape, socially constructed categories such as social class, gender, ethnicity and race affect the degree of scientific credibility ascribed to them.

This panel shifts the spotlight on inequality in science as a subject of scholarly debate. Going beyond (though not excluding) structural perspectives, it particularly focuses on research concerned with agency in this regard: How do scientific practices, ranging from citing and ‘conferencing’ to peer-reviewing and publishing, reproduce unequal relations in science, with which epistemic effects? The panel invites theoretical and empirical papers dealing with manifestations, causes and impacts of inequality in science, but also encourages reflective contributions based on own experiences and observations. The aim of the session is to bring together scholars concerned with inequality in science from different perspectives, such as feminist and post-colonial STS, and explore linkages: how do different dimensions of inequality intersect? How do structural conditions and actors mutually reinforce prevailing patterns? How could relations be transformed?

Contact: susanne.koch@tum.de

Keywords: Inequality, scientific practice, North-South asymmetry, gender, ethnicity/race;

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

152. Science Technology & Innovation (STI) Roadmaps and the SDGs

Emmanuel Ejim-Eze, Institute of Engineering, technology and innovation Management; Caleb Muyiwa Adelowo, National Centre for Technology Management, Nigeria

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) progress reports, index and dashboards are open to the public after four years of sustainable development (SD) programme. Some countries (especially those in sub-Saharan Africa) remained backwards. With 17 goals and 169 targets; SDGs are multidimensional and ambitious. It’s hard to achieve by 2030 without development of science, technology and innovation (STI). Despite challenges new technological innovations widen gaps for STI laggards. This panel intends to throw lights on impacts of rapid technological changes on attainment of SD? Rapid technological change disrupts markets, exacerbate social divides and raise normative questions.  However, big data; machine learning; artificial intelligence; robotics; block-chain; 3D printing; nanotechnology; satellite & drone technologies, e.t.c can bring transformation of economies. We also need to know how developing nations can build STI capacities to deploy these transformative technological innovations. How can we use these disruptive technologies (as indicators) to monitor progress or lack of local actions in poor-performing countries? STI Roadmaps for SDGs are meant to speed up process of developing new or adapting existing solutions to meet SDGs and targets by 2030. What kinds of STI policies or roadmaps will help countries lagging behind without appropriate socio-technological systems or transitions? How can nations use regional and global partnership to develop STI capabilities? What are the roles of global STI communities? Can there be co-production of STI roadmaps for SDGs and how can we harness grassroots innovations to achieve SDGs? This panel contributes knowledge to STS on how sustainability science is shaping the emerging world.

Contact: ejim_kings@yahoo.com

Keywords: Sustainable development, Science, technology and innovation, sustainable development goals, disruptive technologies, technological change

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

153. Science, Technology and Sport

Jennifer Sterling, University of Iowa; Mary McDonald, Georgia Institute of Technology; Gian Marco Campagnolo, University of Edinburgh

While sport studies scholars have established sport as a key site of cultural meanings and social relations, fewer scholars have engaged these issues within technology and science studies frameworks. This intersection of critical sport, science, and technology studies is key to understanding current and future collisions and impacts, particularly in this moment of increasing technological proliferation. This panel invites papers broadly concerned with social and cultural inquiry into the intersection of science, technology and sport. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: sport analytics, data science, algorithmic culture and the quantified self; issues related to medicine, risk and sport; performance enhancement and bioethics; sporting labs and scientific practices; elite, professional and commercial sporting practices in relation to digital objectivity, player performance, injury prevention, player valuation, etc.; public understandings, consumption and perceptions of sport technology (e.g. decision-aids); professional gaming and eSports;(new) media and other representations of science, technology and sport; science, technology and sport in relation to (dis)ability, gender, race, class, and sexuality; infrastructure, sustainability and sport; and (digital) sporting futures.

Contact: jennifer-sterling@uiowa.edu

Keywords: sport, science, technology, data, interdisciplinary

Categories: Big Data

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

154. Scientific fields and communities in (re-)formation

Michael Penkler, Technical University of Munich; Sarah Maria Schönbauer, University of Vienna

Scientific fields and communities undergo social and epistemic changes, are formed and re-formed, and relate to transformations in the academic sector and beyond. Such changes have been prominently captured in studies on emerging fields and communities, e.g. systems biology or particle physics, or on fields and communities that connect multiple disciplines and thereby create novel inter/transdisciplinary relationships. In order to build on these discussions, we invite contributions that investigate how scientific fields and research communities are formed and change over time. Specifically, we are interested in scientific fields and communities that are novel or contested. Contributions to the panel may address questions such as: How do epistemic, institutional and social factors interact in the formation and development of scientific fields and communities? What are the politics of this formation? How does this formation relate to researchers’ identities? How do actors (strategically) draw on different forms of evidence and (e)valuation practices in order to bolster, transform, or contest scientific fields and communities? We aim at bringing together case studies from different scientific areas,  such as from the natural sciences, social sciences and engineering, in order to foster a conversation about common patterns and differences in how scientific fields and communities develop and change over time.

Contact: michael.penkler@tum.de

Keywords: scientific fields; epistemic changes; research communities; contested fields; emerging fields

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

155. Scientists, citizen scientists, and naturalists in the “Anthropocene”

Brendon Larson, University of Waterloo, Canada

In a period of rapid human-wrought changes to socio-ecological systems, an important question for STS concerns the form and purpose of scientific monitoring of environmental change. On the one hand, this data has been critical in showing the extent of change and has thereby motivated policy action; on the other hand, this data has motivated insufficient action to date – and arguably what we require is not more data but political leadership. Given this context, this panel explores the changing role of different forms of knowledge production that document nature, ranging from naturalists and citizen scientists through to environmental scientists themselves. Their roles are shifting dramatically due to trends that include the following: i) a shifting baseline, whereby declining states of nature become normalized for subsequent generations; ii) increasing technological mediation of nature; iii) rapid growth of citizen science projects that rely on naturalist contributors; and iv) ongoing shifts in how scientific ‘facts’ are considered in the public domain. This panel explores questions such as the following: What does it mean to be a naturalist in the Anthropocene and is there a role for naturalists outside of centralized big data collection? How is the border between science and non-science shifting in this context? What are the implications of nature being increasingly seen as unstable? How does the hopefulness implicit in data collection endure in the face of mounting evidence of reason to despair?

Contact: blarson@uwaterloo.ca

Keywords: environmental change, citizen science, Anthropocene

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Science Communication/Public Engagement

156. Situating antimicrobial resistance (AMR): locations, spaces and borders

Catherine Marijke Will, University of Sussex; Alena Kamenshchikova, Maastricht University; Cristina Moreno Lozano, University of Edinburgh; Iona Walker, University of Edinburgh

‘Antimicrobial resistance’ (AMR) is increasingly figured as an international priority through activities by the World Health Organisation and European Union among others. A prominent slogan ‘bacteria do not respect borders’ also draws attention to the apparently global nature of the issue. In response, this panel calls for papers that situate the policies and practices of AMR – exploring how the issue and responses are framed in different institutions and locations; in different national contexts though stewardship or infection control policies and regulations; and in border regions and spaces like airports. Papers might address emerging practices for screening, surveillance, quarantine and antibiotic use in different contexts and cultures, or experiences of groups including ethnic minorities, immigrants and those with different infections.

In ethical terms it is suggested that AMR is often understood as a site of tension between the individual needing treatment in the short term and a collective interest in preserving antibiotic efficacy in the longer term, but this does not hold for all situations. In clinical medicine as in other social practices people do not have equal abilities to claim and receive treatment. Others become the focus of additional surveillance and control through the notion of potential risk. When and how are people’s vulnerabilities acknowledged or ignored in relation to antibiotic use or stewardships, and which groups are more affected by interventions? We invite scholars to discuss how AMR is shaping actions in specific locations, and how multiple framings co-exist or relate below the appeal to international standards or solutions.

Contact: cristina.moreno@ed.ac.uk

Keywords: Antimicrobial resistance, national policy, biomedical standards

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

157. Situating Co-creation: Innovation between Local Specificity and Scalable Standardization

Anja Kathrin Ruess, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich; Federica Pepponi, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich; Kyriaki Papageorgiou, ESADE Business & Law School; Ruth Müller, MCTS TU

Co-creative practices, bringing together diverse actors in the innovation process to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes, seem to be flourishing across academia, industry and society. Prospective users are increasingly engaged upstream, invoking the fundamental value-proposition of co-creation, namely to tailor innovation processes to the needs, values, and political cultures of user-communities with the hope that these will lead to more legitimate and sustainable outcomes. However, co-creation faces challenges such as the scalability of context-specific solutions as well as the definition of the user-community problems to address or the imagined user-communities as such.

In this panel, we are interested in exploring the situated nature of co-creation by looking at the particular shape it takes in specific social, cultural and institutional contexts. We invite contributions that address questions such as:

– How do conceptualizations of ‘the local’ shape innovation processes and outcomes?

– How can situatedness be theorized in the context of co-creative innovation practice?

– If effective and desirable innovations are context-specific, how can we harness their benefits for other settings without losing their socio-cultural embeddedness?

– When and how could co-creation be standardized and scaled-up? Are there specific domains or fields where context matters less than in others and where co-creation can be homogenized and deployed at scale?

– How are co-creation practices stabilized in specific contexts and when are these exercises deemed fit to travel towards other socio-cultural contexts and/or technological domains?

Contact: anja.ruess@tum.de

Keywords: co-creation, innovation, situatedness, scaling

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Engineering and Infrastructure

Science Communication/Public Engagement

158. Situating the STS language(s) in time and space

Kaya Akyuz, University of Vienna, Department of Science and Technology Studies; Adil Aygun, University of Vienna; Selen Eren, University of Groningen; Cansu Güner, Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS); Özgür Isik, Technical University of Munich

Translating STS involves diverse angles, from voicing policy aspects to engaging in grassroots activism, fighting alternative facts to re-thinking public engagements with science and technology. However, in this panel, we will return to the original meaning of the word, translation.

Translating has been a vital technology of STS to create a bridge between the non-English speaking part of the world and the English dominated STS. The recent efforts to translate themes of the annual STS conferences are only an addition to years of experience in translating STS in form of articles, readers and introductory textbooks into numerous languages, including Italian, German, and Dutch. Besides, postcolonial and transnational approaches not only move Euro-America and English-dominated STS to new territories and languages, but also extend STS theory and methods to alternative modes of knowing, though the primacy of English as the boundary language prevails.  Accordingly, through this panel, we will focus on the technopolitics of language embedded in doing and making STS.

The panel considers language as its focus and invites papers that tackle the issue of “opening up STS while translating it”. Imagining translations to be political and semiotic interventions, but at the same time, considering them as opportunities for reflection of our own ordering practices, we aim to critically situate evolving STS language(s) in time and space/place. Unpacking the multiplicity of STS through the lens of languages, we ask how STS can be more inclusive and thus better at contributing to local as well as global problems.

Contact: kayaakyuz@gmail.com

Keywords: translation, languages, semiotic intervention, postcolonial STS

Categories: Other

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

159. Social justice in Climate Adaptation Policies

Udo Pesch, Delft University of Technology; Neelke Doorn, Professor; Lieke Brackel, Delft University of Technology

As the effects of climate change become increasingly manifest, policies to cope with these effects are being developed at different territorial scales. These climate adaptation policies establish a role division in terms of who has to do what, with that settling questions about which parties are included and excluded, which parties are beneficiaries, victimized and forgotten are all embedded in such policies.

As such, climate adaptation policies confront us with strong queries about social justice, necessitating critical reflection. However, while there is a lot of scholarly attention for climate mitigation policies, the justice impacts of climate adaptation policies are hardly subject of study.

In this, two deeply interconnected issues are of major importance. First, as effective climate adaptation policies will have to cross territorial scales and concomitant jurisdictions, a plurality of partly overlapping communities is involved giving rise to contrastive justice claims.

Second, climate adaptation policies demand new kinds of solutions, which to a large extent are informed by scientific expertise. The way these science-based activities affect matters of social justice has not been addressed yet, as these seem to focus mainly on the effectiveness of policies instead of their legitimacy.

In its strong tradition of critical research, covering the interwoven character of scientific knowledge development, policy-making and societal impacts, STS provides a major platform to engage in discussions on social justice as they are instigated by climate adaptation policies. As such, this panel aims at authors presenting papers that relate to impacts of climate adaptation policies on social justice.

Contact: u.pesch@tudelft.nl

Keywords: Climate adaptation policies, social justice, resilience, responsibility, science-based expertise

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

160. Social practices perspectives on (un)sustainable urban transformations

Marc Dijk, Maastricht University

This session sheds light on urban socio-technical transformations, its key actors and main drivers. It invites papers that draw on or combine insights from studies of sociotechnical transitions, models of urban obduracy and path dependency, actor network theory, and social practice-based perspectives on technology use and experience. We seek to contribute to understanding why and how cities may transform towards ‘less’ or ‘more’ sustainable places, due to or despite all ‘saying and doings’ around urban development.

In the past two decades, a few distinct analytical frameworks to understand socio-technical sustainability transitions have been developed, most notably the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP). However, the idea of hierarchical (micro, meso, macro) ‘levels’ has led to a neglect of the place-specific characteristics of regimes, and the dichotomy of niche and regime has been found questionable in practice (Bulkeley et al 2014). Some have noted a disregard for the role of users, a slight bias towards technology, and an over-emphasis on simple shifts from one regime to another, whereas in practice fragmentation and plural regimes seem more likely (ibid.)

This session invites papers on urban transformation (drawing on or combing insights of the studies mentioned above) and looks at ways to overcome various criticisms to the MLP.

Papers may address historical, contemporary or future transformations. They may focus on particular practices in cities, such as urban mobility. We encourage papers based on empirical research in cities.

Contact: m.dijk@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Keywords: urban, transformations, transition, practices

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

161. Socializing the automation of flexible residential energy use

Sophie Adams, University of New South Wales; Declan Liam Kuch, UNSW; Sophie Nyborg, Technical University of Denmark – DTU; Marianne Ryghaug, Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU); Roger Andre Søraa, NTNU

As renewable energy generation becomes more integrated and embedded in communities, users are increasingly called upon to participate in the active planning, ownership and management of smart energy systems. A key vector of this participation is the automation of home batteries and of significant loads such as air conditioners, heat pumps, water boilers and electric vehicles, which is seen as essential to relieve pressure on the grid during high-demand events such as evening peaks and particularly hot or cold weather. Automation and digitalisation are also facilitating the emergence of new ‘energy communities’ and peer-to-peer trading of energy generated by prosumers at distributed sites. In this session we ask: How are residential energy users and prosumers imagined by incumbent energy providers, policy makers and regulators as agents of automation? What new valuations of the forms of energy use that inhibit or support load flexibility are being created through markets, regulations, technology and policy? How is automation invoking new collectives, as well as reconfiguring and diminishing current ones? What does automation mean for the increasing focus on empowering citizens and ‘energy communities’ in Europe and other parts of the world? In posing these questions we seek to move energy planning discourses beyond the terrain of atomistic economic actors operating within markets by insisting on the socio-technical character of energy systems and mapping indiscernible actors in these automated systems.

Contact: s.m.adams@unsw.edu.au

Keywords: Energy, automation, public engagement, transitions

Categories: Energy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

162. Speculative Futures and the Biopolitics of Populations: Exploring Continuities and Discontinuities Across and Beyond Crisis Discourses

Mianna Meskus, Tampere University; Ayo Wahlberg, University of Copenhagen

Falling fertility rates, ageing populations, and the resulting strains on national economies and welfare systems engender headlines of national and international crises on a daily basis across the world. Simultaneously, the human population size has been problematized in terms of the ongoing climate crisis. Taking stock of these complex material legacies of modernity, this panel aims to bring together scholars whose work examines reproduction and/or ageing and how these broad yet intertwined phenomena figure as challenges for current governance in multiple ways. We are interested in how practices of science, technology and policy become enrolled in our demographically, economically and ecologically uncertain futures.

Imagining the future is increasingly speculative, meaning that there is an increase in the circulation of uncertainty-, risk-, and crisis-based models in attempts to make sense of where the world is heading. While visions of reproductive justice, successful ageing, care for the chronically and acutely ill, and ecological sustainability are in a state of flux, historical continuities are apparent as well. Biopolitical discussions revolve around questions such as, how should the vitality of populations be governed? Who should be allowed to reproduce? Is ageing an opportunity or a loss? What role does ‘nature’ play in furthering human wellbeing? We invite papers that examine how knowledge about demographic, ecological and economic futures are shaped by and/or escape notions of crisis. We especially welcome contributions from different parts of the world that examine concerns around falling fertility rates, ageing populations and the earth’s declining biocapacity.

Contact: mianna.meskus@tuni.fi

Keywords: reproduction, ageing, population, ecology, futures

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

163. States of Planetary Environmental Knowledge

Jenny Elaine Goldstein, Cornell University; Leah Aronowsky, University of Illinois

This panel explores the politics of planetary-scale environmental knowledge production. In convening scholars from across the methodological spectrum, we seek to ask: what, and whose, politics come into play when local knowledge is scaled up or planetary/global knowledge is localized? How is difference maintained or collapsed in the making and governance of global environmental knowledge? What forms of governance and/or infrastructure emerge out of planetary/global knowledge? Possible themes may include:

Geographies/spatialities of planetary environmental knowledge

How localized environmental knowledge is scaled up, aggregated, and/or made relevant at planetary and global scales

How models about the global environment are assembled

Questions of the planetary commons and climate governance

Experiments, simulations, and models for producing planetary knowledge

The limits of knowability, certainty, and quantification

Contact: goldstein@cornell.edu

Keywords: global, environment, knowledge, planet

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

164. STS and Political Ecology: Exploring socially just and ecologically sustainable emerging worlds

Marx Jose Gomez Liendo, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas; Maria Victoria Canino, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas

Our current global ecological crisis has ontological and epistemic roots. Therefore, sustainability transitions are also the design of transformative pathways to other modes of being and knowing. Living otherwise is a huge challenge, but an unavoidable one. This panel calls for proposals that explore socially just and ecologically sustainable emerging worlds through links between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Political Ecology (PE). We invite submissions focused but no limited to some of the following aspects for a STS-PE joint analysis:

– Multi-actor asymmetries and controversies related to hegemonic (capital-centered) and counter-hegemonic (eco-centered) understandings of sustainability in socio-technical changes.

– Contested temporalities (economic, ecological, political, existential, etc.) in innovation processes, farming practices, health systems, industrial production, and extractive activities.

– Intercultural dialogues and experiences in sustainability policies.

– Situated strategies and knowledges to manage a wide range of commons (water, seeds, forest, traditional practices, etc.) through different spatial scales (local, regional, global).

– Theoretical and empirical contributions to think alternative understandings (non-modern, posmodern and/or transmodern) about energy and to develop different kinds of energy transitions.

Contact: mjgl1189@gmail.com

Keywords: STS, Political Ecology, Sustainability Transitions, Ecological Crisis, Knowledge Crisis

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

165. STS Approaches to Social Epigenetics and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease

Charles Dupras, McGill University; Martine Lappe, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Megan Warin, University of Adelaide

Over the past decade, social epigenetics and the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) have been enthusiastically mobilised to argue for more equitable and just environmental and social policies. At the same time, science studies scholars and others have raised concerns about these fields. These include the human rights impacts of using individual epigenetic information in insurance, forensics and immigration decisions, and the technical, ethical and policy challenges of protecting epigenetic data and privacy in multi-omic research. Further, feminist scholars have documented how DOHaD-based approaches to research, health prevention and policymaking often blame women and perpetuate marginalisation, stigmatisation and discrimination despite their promise. These concerns call for ongoing attention given the continued focus on individual responsibilities for health, expansion of personalised medicine, and growing availability of direct-to-consumer epigenetic tests globally.

This open panel invites scholars working across various disciplines to engage with questions about the social and ethical dimensions of social epigenetics and DOHaD research, including its practices, promises, and potential futures. We welcome papers that explore how STS scholars can intervene in and counter the reductionist power of social epigenetics and DOHaD, ethnographic studies that develop innovative methods to rethink classic criticisms and imagine how things might be otherwise, and scholarship addressing the biologisation of environments and social structures. Discussions may touch on expectations of postgenomic research, promissory and cautionary discourses, epistemological and empirical implications of the new ‘biosocial’ genome, the unequal embodiment of location and time, and lived experiences of epigenetic and DOHaD research across different communities.

Contact: charles.dupras2@mcgill.ca

Keywords: Social Epigenetics, DOHaD, Biologisation, Reductionism, Human Rights

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

166. STS for a post-truth age: comparative dialogues on reflexivity

Emine Onculer Yayalar, Bilkent University; Melike Sahinol, Orient-Institut Istanbul

The linear model of knowledge creation and diffusion has frequently been criticized by STS scholars through an emphasis on social contexts of knowledge. Based on this critique, reflexivity plays an important role in pushing the academic boundaries of STS. True to the conference focus “locating and timing matters”, it is important to take into account various accelerated ways of knowledge circulation, as STS scholars are faced with challenges of the post-truth age.

The panel calls for laying the groundwork for a reflexive dialogue on how to practice STS in the post truth age by emphasizing the importance of reciprocal sharing across a diverse group of participants. We are interested in contributions that engage empirically and theoretically with the concepts of truth, evidence and objectivity from a comparative perspective. We are particularly seeking contributions that highlight the digital and infrastructural materiality of the post-truth age. We also welcome studies of STS practices in different cultural settings, shedding light on heterogeneous ways of practicing and doing STS for a post-truth age. We invite papers dealing with but not limited to following questions:

What does sustainable STS look like? What kinds of practices and output should we be aiming for without necessarily swinging back to the ideal of objectivity?

How can STS continue to critically engage with the hegemonic narratives of S&T and find meaningful ways to address the promotion of alternative facts?

How can we conceptualize expertise in an age of networked advocacy, citizen journalism, participatory science and new demands on verification?

Contact: melike.sahinol@googlemail.com

Keywords: post-truth age, dialogues on reflexivity, academic boundaries of STS

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Other

167. STS Perspectives on Innovation: Significance and Agency in Emerging Worlds

Alan Irwin, Copenhagen Business School; Jane Bjørn Vedel, Copenhagen Business School

There is now a well-established story of STS and innovation studies working at some distance from one another, with innovation scholars sometimes calling for a closer relationship with STS in order to repair this division. However, there have always been good examples of STS scholars working across both fields – and contributing to each. At the same time, there is a growing strand of STS research which addresses innovation in terms (for example) of imaginaries, co-production, responsibilities, transformations and incumbencies. Very often, such research challenges the universalistic claims made for innovation and instead stresses the contingencies, multiple possibilities, interruptions, emergences and contexts within which specific innovations are enacted. Themes of innovation cultures, futures, regenerations and democratic engagement are also important here.

This open panel invites contributions from STS scholars whose work addresses the broad topic of ‘innovation in emerging worlds’. We welcome empirical studies exploring innovation in specific contexts but also those which seek new conceptual possibilities regarding the relationship between STS and innovation. What place can – and should – the study of innovation play within STS?

Contact: ai.ioa@cbs.dk

Keywords: Innovation, co-production, democracy, futures, emerging worlds

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

168. STS Underground: Locating Matter and Agency in emerging subterranean Worlds

Alena Bleicher, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, GmbH; Abby Kinchy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Roopali Phadke, Macalester College; Jessica Mary Smith, Colorado School of Mines

This panel aims to bring together international scholars whose work addresses technologies, practices, and forms of knowledge related to the Earth’s subsurface. We seek submissions on three main themes: 1) the renewable energy-mineral nexus, 2) geoethics, and 3) emerging uses of underground space.

The renewable energy-mineral nexus. Technologies for renewable energy—such as wind and solar electricity, storage systems, and electric vehicles—require a diversity of minerals, raising questions for STS scholars about ongoing and potentially intensified dependence on extractive industries.

Geoethics. Concepts such as geoethics or responsible mining have been suggested to improve relations between mining businesses and (local) societies. Papers are invited that critically discuss these concepts, their use, impacts and effects in sectors related to underground uses.

Emerging uses of underground space. The underground has a growing number of uses – capture of drinking water, urban infrastructures, waste storage, mining, geothermal energy use, energy storage, climate technologies such as carbon capture and storage, and more. These call for integrated and comprehensive planning and monitoring. Papers that address one or several of these uses and shed light on related conflicts, policies, processes of knowledge production (e.g. in underground laboratories), and that reflect on the role of STS researchers are invited to this session.

The topics of the panel link in manifold ways to the conference theme, notably to questions of continuities and discontinuities and material legacies that built into sociotechnical infrastructures and those of processes of localizing geopolitical, economic and epistemic globalization.

Contact: alena.bleicher@ufz.de

Keywords: renewable energy-mineral nexus, geoethics, undergrund space, infrastructures

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Energy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

169. STS, Technoscience and How Discontinuation Matters

Peter Stegmaier, University of Twente; Pierre-Benoit Joly, Lisis; phil johnstone, SPRU, University of Sussex

Abandonment of technologies and socio-technical systems occur not infrequently. The social construction of technology, everyday use, innovation management, technical maintenance and governance of technologies and socio-technical systems have preferentially been associated with advancement and innovation. Discontinuation is, at most, discussed as regime change, innovation setback or failure—as if advancement and innovation was the only direction in which socio-technical development and its governance would go. In STS there important studies addressing the issue of ending directly, like Aramis in France (Latour 1992), or studies that can, in retrospect, be seen as descriptions of technologies that were, after all, abandoned, like the “male pill” (Oudshoorn 2003). Script analysis may offer another lead, e.g., when Akrich and Latour (1992) are referring to ‘de-inscription’, Geels and Schot (2007) to ‘de-alignment’, Kuhn (1962) to ‘paradigm shift’, or Utterback (2003) to ‘product and manufacturing discontinuities’. The empirical cases are legion, though. However, it is crucial to see how socio-technical systems, technological regimes, or technologies are (or have been) disappearing or are being brought to an end.

For the purpose of focusing more specifically on discontinuities, we invite the following angles:

1. To re-read relevant STS publications and reconstruct their insights on technology abandonment, as abrupt or incremental processes, by purposeful action or inaction (neglect), as well as rather system- or actor-network-level destabilisation.
2. It would be welcome if the more theoretical considerations were also informed by recent or historical empirical case examples.
3. Equally welcome are empirical studies showing the broad spectrum of STS scholarship that can tackle discontinuation in specific case studies.
4. The intertwining of discontinuation and operating discontinuation from a governance, public policy, corporate management, NGO, and citizenship point of view would complete the picture.

This empirical research based on the discourse analysis of policy documents, aiming at building a grounded theory of discontinuation.

Contact: p.stegmaier@utwente.nl

Keywords: Discontinuation, divestment, socio-technical systems, governance

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Energy

Food and Agriculture

170. Studying data/natures: between arts, academia and administration

Ingmar Lippert, IT University of Copenhagen; Tahani Nadim, Museum fuer Naturkunde; Filippo Bertoni, Aarhus University

Recently, nature’s increasing datafication and the politics of the resulting data/natures’ emergent sociotechnical orderings have received much attention in STS (Bowker, Edwards, Lippert, Nadim, Sullivan, Turnhout, Waterton). But, how do we engage with data/natures? And how does the answer to this question inform our understanding of these politics of nature? While all agree that the formation of data/natures clearly relies on specific kinds of digital infrastructures, different approaches have variously engaged with those involved (from natural, environmental, or data scientists, to policy makers, from technocrats, to artists, and capitalist actors) – often in implicit ways.

This panel invites papers that reflexively and critically take these different approaches as their explicit focus. What can we learn from different ways of engaging various publics, audiences, or communities that produce, handle, and populate data/natures? In attempting to respond to this question, our panel considers what kinds of politics STS analytics afford, and – in turn – suggests alternative ways to not only study, but also actively transform, repurpose, prototype, and sabotage data/natures.

Contact:

Keywords: datafication, data/natures, environmental STS, engagement

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Science Communication/Public Engagement

171. Sustainable mobility in urban cities in Africa

Emmanuel Ejim-Eze, Institute of Engineering, technology and innovation Management; Deborah Ogochukwu Ejim-Eze, Foundation for Sustainability Science in Africa/ Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) cities face unprecedented crisis of passenger and freight movement. African cities seem to have the least mobility when compared with cities in other climes. Several studies indicate that low mobility leads to low productivity, widens inequality gaps; affecting the poor, women, children and the elderly disproportionately.  Lack of public mass transits exerts pressure with damages on Africa’s road infrastructure. This raises road maintenance budgets. Consequently high freight cost also increases cost of goods and affects competitiveness.  Informal motorized transport in SSA remains the resilient mobility mode for residents, providing employment and serving local political interests. This para-transits in SSA are now crowded with commercial motorcyclists. This chaotic form of mobility have thrived under urban sprawl challenges with congested streets, big pot-holes restricting traffic flows, reckless driving, extortion and violence from security officers and street touts. Consequently the vehicles easily wear out contributing to high emission of dangerous gases (health hazards), and deaths of passengers due to accidents.

How can cities in SSA improve living conditions of its populations by meeting mobility needs in a sustainable manner? Secondly, what kind of institutional arrangements and governance systems can integrate land-use and transport planning?  How does urban mobility strategy affect decisions pertaining to residential, employment and service locations?  How can cities integrate other non-motorized transport modes (walking & cycling) into sustainable mobility plans? This panel hopes to contribute knowledge on how sustainable mobility can help to lower poverty, inequality, and reduce climate change impacts &improve standard of living in SSA

Contact: ejim_kings@yahoo.com

Keywords: Sustainable mobility, transportation, cities, sub-Saharan Africa, inequality

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Engineering and Infrastructure

172. Taking Data Into Account

Burcu Baykurt, University Of Massachusetts Amherst

As ubiquitous data technologies seep into public services, news feeds, schools, workplaces, political campaigns, and urban living around the world, the effort to hold them accountable has become a topic of public concern. From computational audits to citizen activism, from public shaming of companies to policy proposals, activists, academics, journalists, technologists, and lawmakers have been trying to account for these emergent systems that appear to be inscrutable. Using the analytical tools of STS, this panel seeks to unpack how these automated, data-driven technologies become “accountabilia – objects mobilized to enact relations of accountability” (Sugden 2010; Ziewitz 2011). How does computational legibility inform the politics of government accountability? What work does the concept of accountability perform in popular and expert conversations? What are the new devices that mobilize, shift, and maintain existing processes of accounting and accountability? What would creative methods of mapping the distribution of accountability look like in emergent data-driven organizations? This panel invites both theoretical and empirical papers that examine the ways in which accountability is forged and put in practice through automated, data-driven systems. Of particular interest are practices and perceptions from the global south; those that attend to the racialized, gendered, and socioeconomic consequences of accountability regimes; and explorations of new possibilities that are invested in critical race theory, queer-feminist, postcolonial and social-justice based perspectives.

Contact: bbaykurt@umass.edu

Keywords: accountability, governance, algorithms, big data, policy

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Governance and Public Policy

Big Data

173. Teaching interdependent agency: Feminist STS approaches to STEM pedagogy

Kalindi Vora, University of California Davis; Maya Cruz, University of California – Davis; Anita Say Chan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This panel discussion of STEM graduate training brings together insights from feminist theory with social studies of science to address deep bias in scientific research to suggest methods and frameworks that produce more accountable, accurate and responsible scientific research. This panel is interested in talking about how feminist STS (fSTS) scholars are using, or exploring the use of, the critique of objectivity to address biases in science. How are we engaging with STEM graduate education to teach a more nuanced “situatedness” (Haraway 1988) in culture and history to produce more responsible and accountable science?

Research in STEM education suggests that integrating socio-cultural context and communal values into STEM education can increase recruitment and retention of women, under-represented minorities (URMs), and first-generation students in STEM. Building on the contributions of Jenny Reardon, Karen Barad, and Banu Subramaniam to feminist approaches to STEM pedagogy, this panel invites papers addressing how feminist STS can move STEM graduates toward greater engagement with social justice, as well as deep collaboration with social sciences and humanities. What sort of curricular changes could lead to a transformation of STEM research and the diversity of researchers conducting it? How can STS scholars use pedagogy to empower STEM researchers to be agents of social transformation even in the face of anti-science discourse, and anti-women, racist, anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ cultural politics?

Contact: kavora@ucdavis.edu

Keywords: feminist, curriculum, objectivity, situated knowledge, social justice

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

174. Techniques of Resilience. Coping with the Vulnerabilities of Hybrid Bodies

Nelly Oudshoorn, Mw.

In recent years we have seen the introduction of more and more technologies that operate under the surface of the body. These ‘body companion technologies’ (Oudshoorn 2020) not only do what they are supposed to do, but simultaneously transform the fragility of bodies by introducing new vulnerabilities. Living with a technologically reconfigured body therefore requires a life-long trajectory of building resilience. Adopting the perspective that vulnerability and resilience is constituted and achieved in a complex interplay with the materiality of bodies, technologies, and the socio-technical environment, this panel invites papers that critically explore and conceptualize how ‘everyday cyborgs’ (Haddow et al 2015) learn to live with the vulnerabilities of their hybrid bodies. Understanding techniques of resilience is important because it enables us to account for vulnerabilities without turning cyborgs into passive victims of their implants or prostheses. How do people living with implants and prostheses sense and make sense of their hybrid  bodies? What techniques do they use to keep their bodies alive? What social and material resources are available to them that can assist them  to adapt positively to the new vulnerabilities they face? How do gender, age, ethnicity, and global differences in access to these high-tech devices affect which bodies materialize as everyday cyborgs? The panel aims to contribute to socio-material approaches to vulnerability by foregrounding technologies inside bodies, which are largely absent in most STS studies on vulnerability.

Contact: n.e.j.oudshoorn@utwente.nl

Keywords: hybrid bodies, cyborgs, vulnerability, resilience, medical implants

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

175. The (In)Visible Labour Of Translation: Creating Value In Translational Medicine

Rachel Faulkner-Gurstein, King’s College London; Clémence Pinel, University of Copenhagen; David Wyatt, King’s College London

Substantial public and private investments have been funnelled into building the infrastructure of translational medicine which, according to proponents, offers huge potential for advances in health and for economic growth. Such potential, however, is predicated on a variety of labour practices. It is performed by many different categories of worker, from research nurses to data scientists, in various settings and locations. This labour is highly uneven, and often unnoticed or unseen by policymakers and the public. In this panel, we focus attention on the labour that facilitates and underpins translational medicine as a key feature of life sciences research and the bioeconomy.

We are keen to explore the ways in which labour is understood, organised, and valued—including interrogating the hierarchical and gendered arrangements within which various stratified forms of labour take place. We want to question how such structures enable some practices to be rendered invisible and devalued, while some are highly privileged, prestigious, and valuable. We are equally interested in exploring if and how variously situated categories of workers contribute to the production of knowledge through their support, administrative, or care practices.

We invite papers from various disciplinary, empirical and theoretical perspectives to question what it takes to produce valuable knowledge in contemporary translational medicine. This panel contributes to the growing body of STS scholarship on the bioeconomy and translational medicine, as well as literature exploring the constitutive role of care in the production of knowledge and value.

Contact: david.wyatt@kcl.ac.uk

Keywords: labour, care, value, translational medicine, bioeconomy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

176. The ‘elsewhere’ of sociotechnical life at night

Casper Laing Ebbensgaard

If our desires to lead certain forms of life on earth that ultimately threaten our ability to do so in socially, politically, and environmentally just ways (Berlant, 2011; Povinelli, 2016), we must, as commentators suggest, rethink, reimagine and rework modes of ‘planetary inhabitation’ (Gabrys, 2018). As an analytical category for exploring intersecting processes of technological innovation, biological change and geological shifts, the night – and in particular the urban night – is claimed to offer alternative, multi-modal ways of conceptualising and imagining life on earth (Crary, 2013; Ekirch, 2005; Melbin, 1987; Shaw, 2018). The techno-fixation that drives a global urban shift towards ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’ lighting infrastructures, simultaneously puts the conditions for life under threat ‘elsewhere.’ This session demands critical attention towards the ‘elsewheres’ of sociotechnical life at night, to address and undo present ways of living in un/desired ways. By turning towards the socio-technological infrastructures of light the session addresses the question: how can configurations of planetary life and ways of being human be rethought, reimagined and reworked through ‘light’? In addressing this question, the session invites papers that engage with historical and contemporary processes of ‘light’ extraction, production, design, consumption, inhabitation, and distribution to address their impacts on social (Ebbensgaard, 2019; Meier, Hasenöhrl, Krause, & Pottharst, 2015), biological (Rich & Longcore, 2006) and geologic (Gandy, 2017) ‘life’-forms. With an interest in developing a more hopeful, contestatory or radical future for ‘planetary inhabitation,’ the session welcomes contributions that develop alternative ways of imagining, representing, practicing and performing sociotechnical life at night.

Contact: c.l.ebbensgaard@qmul.ac.uk

Keywords: night, lighting, environmental justice, inhabitation, planetary life

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Information, Computing and Media Technology

177. The “Contemporary Synthesis” of Race and Biotechnology in Emerging/Developing Worlds

Tien Dung Ha, Cornell University

How are race and racial differences conceptualized, molecularlized and mobilized in emerging and developing worlds? Scientists from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds are pushing for the diverse inclusion of underrepresented groups in biomedical research. Duana Fullwiley (2014) argues that the increasing need for “diversity” produces a “contemporary synthesis” between the conceptualization of race as biological categories and the politically-inclusive call for “diverse” representation in biomedical research. This panel seeks to advance this “contemporary synthesis” argument by exploring ways that science and medicine, a historically-imperial tool of control and colonization, have taken on a new role in building national science, aiding economic development, and constructing national identities among these postcolonial and emerging states.

The panel explores how different forms of biotechnologies are giving rise to new configurations of bioeconomies and biopower that are shaping the governmentality, sovereignty, identity and bodies of the emerging/developing worlds. To this end, the panel is motivated to unpack a series of questions including (but not limited to):

1. What are the specific conditions that shape the knowledge making of race science in developing worlds?
2. How do race and racial differences become co-opted into postcolonial science projects?
3. How do we account for transnational networks of people, funding, capital, data, and infrastructure that refigure national belonging and state politics?
4. How are populations ethnically and racially relabeled inscribed and categorized amid the forces of race science and the global pharmaceutical industry?
5. What does “diversity” mean in biomedical research in these emerging/developing worlds?

Contact: dvh27@cornell.edu

Keywords: genomics and identity, contemporary synthesis, molecularization of race and racial differences, diversity in postcolonial science, politics of inclusion

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

178. The Bio(Techno)logical Politics of Synchrony

Rachel Vaughn, UCLA Institute for Society & Genetics

Michelle Rensel, UCLA Institute for Society & Genetics

We are a behavioral endocrinologist and a feminist food and discard studies scholar exploring the 30+ year history of science behind the search for menstrual synchrony and its extension to modern-day biotechnologies. In our research we suggest that the persistent search for synchrony is exemplary of broader sociopolitical and scientific interest in controlling and making manageable (i.e., predictable and regular), if not marketable, biological processes presumed ‘female.’ We also consider the gendered, classed and racialized assumptions embedded within the design or ‘re-design’ of biotechnologies of health, wellness, and bodily management. This open call for panel participants seeks interdisciplinary inquiries into a host of critical, feminist and anti-colonial interpretations of the technoscientific, including interventions and capitalist consumer objects questing after ‘optimal’ timing, synchrony and bodily management—from biohacks to the rise of sustainable menstrual management products, from nutritional, hormonal and cycle-tracking apps to technological re-design aimed at mediating or reducing toxic exposures, waste and its multiple lifespans and regenerations. As interdisciplinary, contingent faculty striving to maintain creative research programs in spite of precarious employment, we aim to cultivate an inclusive space for research bridging the life sciences and humanities. We seek to learn from other scholars with similar research or design interests, and to create a cross-disciplinary, cross-generational opportunity within which we might support publication outcomes on these themes. To this end, we especially welcome scholars who would consider pre-circulating and workshopping their materials for thoughtful, mutual feedback.

Contact: rvaughn@women.ucla.edu

Keywords: Synchrony,  Discard, Biotechnology, Life Sciences, Feminist Science & Technology Studies

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

179. The changing landscape of genetic databases: Blurring boundaries between collection and practice

Rafaela Granja, Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS); Gabby Samuel, King’s College London /Lancaster University

In recent years, the collection, analysis, processing, and use of genetic data has grown massively, leading to the establishment of large DNA databases in both the health and forensic arena. More recently, and due to the increasing number of companies offering direct-to-consumer genetic tests, there has been a significant increase of recreational genetic databases. Coupled to this expansion, we have been witnessing a blurring of boundaries between previously distinct kinds of genetic collection and genetic practice: some genetic databases are being used beyond the purpose for which they were originally intended, for example, recreational DNA genealogy databases are being used for criminal investigation purposes.

The future may rest not on further building and expanding mass databases, but rather on the collation of existing genetic information and the exploitation of its potential. In a time of data abundance, it is therefore important to understand how such data is being conceived and appropriated by a wide range of actors, including policymakers, researchers, private companies and citizens.

We invite both theoretical and empirical contributions that critically engage with the social, ethical and techno-political dimensions posed by the blurring of boundaries between different types of genetic databases. Specifically, we aim to explore which social actors and epistemic cultures have been playing the leading role in the establishment and regulation of databasing systems, what values and social norms have underpinned this, and/or what ethical and social principles, such as privacy, consent, altruism, solidarity, and reciprocity are taken into account when considering genetic databases.

Contact: r.granja@ics.uminho.pt

Keywords: genetic databases; recreational genealogy databases; health; forensic

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

180. The cyborg is getting older: exploring the body/machine fusion at the intersection of STS and Age Studies

Michela Cozza, Mälardalen University; Helen Manchester, University of Bristol; Alexander Peine, Utrecht University; Monika Urban, University of Bremen

In 1985, Haraway introduced the concept of ‘cyborg’ into social sciences to describe “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of a machine and organism” (p. 65). Thirty-five years later this figuration seems to have still something to offer to technoscience.

In this track, we revisit Joyce and Mamo’s (2006) suggestion to ‘gray the cyborg’ – that “technologies and science are central to definitions and lived experiences of aging and that aging is central to technologies and science (…) In many ways, aging people disproportionately rely on and negotiate technologies inside and outside of their bodies” (p. 100). However, it is noteworthy that heroic stories about the body/machine fusion prevail in cultural studies and medicine, and vulnerability of cyborgs is often overlooked in STS, which also show an almost exclusive interest in technologies external to bodies (Oudshoorn 2016).

This track brings together contributions at the intersection of STS, social gerontology and gerontechnology and invites prospective authors to ‘gray the cyborg’ by sharing theoretical and empirical insights about the entanglement of age, technology, and science.  Presentations are invited (but not limited) to:

• interrogate the applicability of cyborg figuration to the study of aging and technologies;
• tell stories other than the heroic ones, addressing the vulnerabilities related to the intertwinement of technologies and ageing bodies;
• explore new figurations that like the Haraway’s cyborg disrupt ‘boundaries’ and inhabit ‘margins’;
• revise the conceptualisation of an aging body when technologies of various kinds (implants, prostheses, etc) become part of the body itself or an extension of it.

Contact: michela.cozza@mdh.se

Keywords: Aging, Body, Cyborg, Technology, Vulnerability

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

181. The Era of Voice: STS and Emerging Healthcare Activism around Science, Politics and Markets

Ilaria Galasso, University College Dublin; Théo Bourgeron, University College Dublin; Sonja Erikainen, University of Edinburgh

Fostered by social media and the development of transnational social movements, new forms of activism have emerged. People once silenced can now easily find others in similar conditions, build connections and speak up. These movements affect the fields of science, regulation and markets by catalyzing public attention and provoking increased political and commercial engagement.

In the medical domain, publics increasingly coalesce into activist groups and articulate their concerns and interests around all sorts of issues, including clinical practices, research priorities, pricing levels, pharmaceutical regulation, and policies around socio-environmental exposures.

We want to investigate how the healthcare landscape is reshaped by the unprecedented capacities of voice and activism in a reflexive way, by scrutinizing the engagements of STS in this process: we seek submissions that demonstrate the potential roles of STS in analyzing renewed healthcare activism, in engaging with activists, and possibly in doing activism.

We welcome papers from theoretical and empirical perspectives, critically engaging with these and related issues:

–              The transformative power of voice in medical practice, research, markets and policies

–              Voice in the medical domain from a historical and global perspective

–              Extended capacities of voice provided by social media: pros and cons

–              The voices that, for structural or contingent reasons, remain unheard

–              The range of medical issues that fail to catalyze activism

–              Neoliberalism and activism

–              STS in the era of voice and of healthcare activism: from roadmap to research activism

–              STS and activists: forms of reciprocal engagement

Contact: ilaria.galasso@ucd.ie

Keywords: voice, healthcare activism, research activism, healthcare markets, social media

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

182. The Future of Quantifying Humanity: Reflections on Artificial Intelligence

Yu-cheng Liu, Nanhua University

The idea of algorithm constitutes almost every aspect of AI technology. Likewise, the development of AI technology and what goals AI can accomplish also depend on the advancement of algorithm. There are at least two implications when applying algorithm, one is simplification, and the other is quantification. Neither are the two concepts, simplification and quantification, completely equal to each other, nor are they contradictory with each other. As a function of algorithm, the aim of simplification is to know what it simplifies. In doing so, it applies various methods of quantification to assist and to accomplish its function of simplification. Furthermore, the two implications and their related technologies attempt at fixing, enhancing, improving or even replacing some – almost every – aspects of humanity. For example, the feeling of love can be generated through algorithms simulating the operational mechanisms of neocortex of human brain. Other qualities of humanity such like creativity, compassion, or rationality may also be quantified with AI-featured algorithms in the near future. It is possible to think that the boundary between humans and non-humans, or between nature and culture, may have a dramatic change or even will be completely canceled. What if those aspects of humanity, to some extent making humans a unique species, can be quantified, how do we think of ourselves what makes us human? The panel welcomes manuscripts that focus on reflection of quantifying humanity and related researches. It will be a platform for participants to discuss the near future of quantifying humanity.

Contact: ycliu15@gmail.com

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, quantification, humanity, algorithm, simplification

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

183. The In/Visibility of Value and Relevance in the Evaluation Society

Jochem Zuijderwijk, Center for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands; Tjitske Holtrop, Center for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands

In many organizations the evaluation of professionals and their work now relies on specific managerial accounting techniques and technologies of making value and relevance visible. Across companies and institutions people (including academics) express unease and critique over the way they and their work are made visible to the organizations and actors on which they effectively rely for their income, future and careers.

This panel seeks to bring together empirical and theoretical investigations into the way work and workers in various organizational, professional and socio-cultural contexts are made visible to, and consequently valued by, others and themselves. We welcome any contributions pertaining to one or more of the following dimensions of what we call the in/visibility of value and relevance:

1. Organizational (in)visibilities: Which and in what way are values made (in)visible within specific organizations, and with what consequences? How do organizational values relate to policy ambitions or individual merit?
2. Professional (in)visibilities: How is value and relevance made (in)visible in specific professions and specializations, and how might this conflict with or otherwise relate to policy, organizational, or individual values, needs and desires?
3. (In)visibility of diversity: What do age, gender and ethnicity mean for the efforts of actors to be(come) visible and valuable within organizations, and what forms of struggle remain invisible within organizational policy discourses on diversity?

We especially welcome contributions that can connect these dimensions, or seek to bridge the gaps between more policy-oriented studies, critical perspectives, and local empirical investigations into professional cultures, norms and practices.

Contact: j.b.zuijderwijk@cwts.leidenuniv.nl

Keywords: Visibility, worth, evaluation, organizations, diversity

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

184. The Life of Numbers: Models, Projections, Targets and Other Enumerations

Tim Rhodes, Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW; Kari Lancaster, UNSW Sydney

Numbers are afforded life through their entanglements in situated practices. While numbers are often depicted as transcending contexts, this Panel appreciates numbers as relational beings. This orientates us towards exploring how and what numbers become, what they do, and the material effects they make through their implementations, appreciating enumerations as ‘evidence-making interventions’ (Rhodes & Lancaster, Social Science and Medicine, 2019). 

This Panel explores numbering practices as forms of anticipation and governance. Enumerations are afforded a power-of-acting through models, projections and targets which shape the present in relation to imagined futures. This is apparent in the field of global health, where mathematical models and numerical targets are shaping agendas, including as nations strive to achieve futures in which diseases might be eliminated. Enumerations are also key to the making of futures in relation to science, technology, environmental management, and climate. Reflecting on how numbers do their work in different policy, science and implementation sites, this Panel asks how the governing work of numbers – especially through models and modes of projection – is made-up in practices, with particular affects, inviting speculative thinking on the possibilities that enumerations can afford as well as on the futures they might close down.

We invite papers seeking to trace the life of enumerations, in action, in practices, as matters of method, affect and ethicopolitical concern, across different sites of policy, science and implementation. We are especially interested in health, including in relation to disease control, climate, and environment, but also economics, social policy, political science, and technology.

Contact: k.lancaster@unsw.edu.au

Keywords: Numbers, Governance, Futures, Implementation, Models.

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Medicine and Healthcare

Knowledge, Theory and Method

185. The Means And Ends of STS: What Role For STS In The Post-Truth Era?

Rob Evans, Cardiff University; Kjetil Rommetveit, University of Bergen, Norway; Martin Weinel, Cardiff University

One of the biggest changes since the 2016 4S/EASST conference has been the rise of so-called ‘post-truth’ or ‘post-shame’ politics. Exemplified by US President Donald Trump, but by no means limited to the US, politicians across Europe and Latin America appear less and less constrained by the scientific consensus or even their own previous statements. These events matter for STS. Assuming we want to contribute to social, epistemic or environmental justice, what role is there for a field whose methods emphasise the contingent and constructed nature of expertise when those in authority already act as if science is little more than another vested interest?

In this panel we invite papers and presentations that address this challenge in one of two ways. One approach is to focus on explicating the current political crisis and, in particular, the role of science and/or technology in facilitating or resisting it: big data, mainstream and social media, and the work of anti or pro-science groups are all possible ways into this topic. The other approach is to focus on STS itself and its relationship with social movements, expert advisory groups or democratic institutions. Here we are particularly interested in whether, and to what extent, STS can move from an observer to a more active role – to ‘intervene and be relevant’ as the conference theme puts it. In plenary we will take up the reflexive challenge and explore how normative aspirations can mesh with the complexities of contemporary technology and politics.

Contact: evansrj1@cardiff.ac.uk

Keywords: Expertise, Democracy, Post-Truth, Epistemic Injustice, Populism

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

186. The mise-en-scène of science and technology: the role of non-conventional sources

Maria Luísa Veloso, ISCTE-IUL; Telmo Clamote, ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon; Nuno Medeiros, IHC – NOVA FCSH and ESTeSL-IPL, Lisbon

This panel is concerned with exploring the role that unconventional sources – such as film, photography and written works – have played in the scientific framing of the social world and in the social framing of science. Those media were historically used to enact and disseminate certain forms of scientific inquiry and to represent the cultural project of science and scientists in modernity, becoming documents of their own social agency in the shaping of the relation between science and society.

Various social processes and agents can converge in this production of representations: the use of those media as scientific instruments to produce, document and divulge specific forms of expert knowledge of the world (such as the use of film and photography for medical training or diagnosis); their use as means of self-representation by scientists, depicting their own views of scientific work and its role in society (such as autobiographies); their use by non-scientific actors (artists, investors, regulators, etc.) to represent the scientific field from a particular point of view.

The discussion over these seldom explored sources of knowledge can be methodologically and epistemologically challenging, as they not only document the mutual shaping of science and the wider society but are causally consequent, thereby revealing different aspects of its configuration and social agency.

The use of these sources is particularly worth of notice to stress the legacies of modernity, to discuss the heterogeneity of paths to the understanding of science and technology and to question the conventional paths adopted to its social inquiry.

We welcome proposals focusing on the mise-en-scène of science and technology, through different media, of theoretical, methodological or empirical nature, in various formats and with different supports.

Contact: luisa.veloso@iscte-iul.pt

Keywords: MIse-en-Scéne, social representation, science and technology, method, sources

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

187. The Ontological Politics of the Anthropocene

António Carvalho, Centre for Social Studies – University of Coimbra; Ana Raquel Matos, University of Coimbra; Vera Ferreira, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra

The Anthropocene has been described as an event in social theory (Blok and Jensen, 2019). Its manifold conceptual iterations – Capitalocene (Moore, 2016), Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016), Necrocene (McBrien, 2016), Plantationocene (Haraway, 2015) – shed light on various tenets of this proposed geological epoch – extractivism, capitalist accumulation, multispecies engagement, the sixth mass extinction.

Aligned with longstanding concerns within STS, the Anthropocene has led to calls for relational ontologies (Jensen, 2017), collaborative engagements between artists, STSers and climate scientists (Latour, 2017; Saraceno, Engelmann and Szerszynski, 2015) and methodologies that attend to more-than-human agency. Affective and disciplinary “arts of attentiveness” (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster, 2016)  are entwined with an attempt to overcome the “one-world world” (Law, 2015) of dominant cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2005), characterized by modern hubris, paving the way for the emergence of what some authors have described as a pluriverse (Blaser and Cadena, 2018).

Nevertheless, the ontological politics of the Anthropocene are heterogenous, including options such as permaculture and solar radiation management (Martindale, 2015), and attempts to build a “good Anthropocene” (Bennett et al, 2016) – often aligned with relational and symmetrical ontologies – have been criticized as an “immunological biopolitical fantasy” (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018: 3).

We welcome theoretical and empirically grounded contributions that problematize the ontopolitical heterogeneity of the Anthropocene, including (but not limited to) the following topics:

–              Anthropocene, depoliticization and post-politics

–              Technofixes and emerging technologies (such as geoengineering and carbon capture and storage/utilization)

–              More-than-human engagements with the Anthropocene

–              The politics of theory of the Anthropocene

Contact: antoniomanuelcarvalho@gmail.com

Keywords: Anthropocene, Ontology, Cosmopolitics, Climate Change, Emerging Technologies

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

188. The politics of progress

Torsten H Voigt, RWTH Aachen University; Larissa Fischer, RWTH Aachen University; Bettina Paul, Universität Hamburg

Since industrialization, modern societies were defined by progress in various forms, most notably economic and technological growth as well as the idea of scientific progress. Despite Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) seminal work on the myth of scientific progress as a linear process, ideas and concepts about progress are still mostly characterized by incremental change to the better. In other words, progress is considered to introduce novel technologies, ideas, and practices. Progress, however, is not always understood as new, innovative, or scientific. It can come in many different shapes, forms, and practices depending on time and space. Progress and tradition need not be mutually exclusive. It may mean the use of an old technology in a new setting. A practice or technology may also be framed as progress but in fact turn out to be standstill or even regress from a certain perspective, for a particular group of actors or a particular practice.

Borrowing from Law and Joks (2018) as well as Danyi (2016) we invite contributions that trace the politics of who, politics of what and politics of how of progress in today’s society. Who considers certain practices, developments and technologies as progress? What is considered progress? And most importantly, how is progress enacted in practices thus shaping different realities? How do those practices relate to different understandings of progress? How does it gain significance and agency in emerging worlds? We are interested in contributions that address a broad range of understandings and practices of progress.

Contact: thvoigt@soziologie.rwth-aachen.de

Keywords: progress, politics of how, forms of knowing, tradition, technology

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

189. The Politics of Uncertainty; Visualizing, Quantifying, and Fact-Checking Truth Claims in an Era of Polarized Politics

Christopher Anderson, University of Leeds

“The Politics of Uncertainty; Visualizing, Quantifying, and Fact-Checking Truth Claims in an Era of Polarized Politics.”

In various public-facing media genres (such as journalism, scientific blogs, and fact-checking outlets), knowledge claims are more nuanced, robust, and methodologically sophisticated than they have been at any point in modern history. And yet, across social life, “the truth” seems more of a political weapon than ever. Large technology platforms debate the validity of fact-checking political advertisements, while the progressive left has doubled down on “the truth” as a cudgel to wield against populist authoritarians of allstrips. Certainty seems more important and yet further away than ever.

Within Science and Technology Studies, the analysis of how facts are constructed and made robust has been one of the dominant areas of scholarship since the invention of the field. In communication and media studies, research increasingly looks at how journalists visualize and mediate public facts. This panel proposal draws inspiration from the recent disciplinary intersection between these two fields to ask the question: how is uncertainty constructed, both in science and in journalism? How is “a lack of exactitude” made robust and visualized for a public audience? Is uncertainty always politically debilitating? Does it lend itself to being manipulated and exploited by populist politicians? The panel will draw on a range of STS and STS adjacent disciplines in order to understand the politics of the construction of uncertainty in the present moment.

Contact: heychanders@gmail.com

Keywords: certainty, facts, data visualization, public communication

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

190. The regimes of biomedical knowledge production: the changing face of clinical trials

Olga Zvonareva, Maastricht University, Netherlands; Anna Geltzer, University of Notre Dame

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) has long been considered the gold standard for clinical research; carried out to ascertain the safety and efficacy of health interventions. Recently, however, the authority of the RCT has become increasingly contested and is beginning to be substituted by alternative research designs. Concurrently, we can observe the emergence of new, apparently more flexible and pluralistic, standards and regulatory forms and an increasing fascination in biomedical research with the promises of personalized medicine and Big Data. This panel invites papers that explore how STS can interpret these developments and evaluate their implications. How is acceptance of different approaches to medical intervention testing as scientifically reliable and ethically sound enabled? What kinds of technological innovations facilitate new types of clinical trials and to what effect?

We are especially interested in comparative and historical perspectives on the rise and fate of RCTs. The panel speaks directly to the conference’s interest in the fate of “alternative” approaches and futures, and encourages submissions exploring how novel clinical research formats can offer insights on transformations in the culture and the politics of biomedicine.

Contact: o.zvonareva@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Keywords: clinical trials, biomedical knowledge production, evidence, medical research, regulation

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Big Data

191. The Sober Sciences of Intoxicated Subjects: Psychedelics and Their Societies

Nancy D. Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Erika Dyck, University of Saskatchewan

As the sober sciences of intoxication proliferate in the so-called psychedelic renaissance, psychedelics are in the process of surging across the policy-created border between medicine and not-medicine. As a boundary object, psychedelics are useful for interrogating the primacy of western-based, bio-medical sciences of intoxication. Papers in this panel will investigate such questions as, How has history of psychedelics affected our understanding of the culture of drug discovery and regulation? This open panel is particularly interested in the view that place and social location matter for what kind of science is done, who is credited in the process of discovery, and what subjects and objects of knowledge matter. This panel hopes for papers that explicitly engage with the political and epistemological aspects of pharmacology; with the social shaping of societies that engage with psychedelics; and with archivally grounded historical work. Historians have begun to track some of the major figures and events within the history of psychedelics, but the role of women and indigenous people, particularly as investigators and leaders in this science, has often been muted. The participation of these players challenged scientific methodology at the time, but much of the historiography has reinforced these actors as ‘others’, rendering certain figures hypervisible and others invisible in the process of reclaiming psychedelic science as a legitimate feature of psychopharmacological development in the mid-20thcentury.

Contact: campbell@rpi.edu

Keywords: Pharmaceutical drugs, science studies, psychedelic drugs, indigenous knowledges

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Medicine and Healthcare

Knowledge, Theory and Method

192. The tacit governance of decision-making in knowledge production

Ruth Falkenberg, University of Vienna; Maximilian Fochler, University Of Vienna; Ruth Müller, MCTS TU München; Lisa Sigl, Research Platform Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice, University of Vienna

Decisions in knowledge production practices are made on different levels and in different situations: in funding streams, evaluation procedures for proposals and careers, but also in everyday research practices. In the past decades, concerns have been raised that under conditions of hyper-competition for funding and careers, decisions in knowledge production are increasingly dominated by these competitive dynamics and researchers’ focus may shift away from questions of societal relevance. Similarly, it has been questioned which kinds of researcher subjectivities and valuations are privileged within such conditions.

Recent STS research has contributed to understanding how different aspects (such as (e)valuation practices, funding structures, temporalities, subjectification processes) come to matter in such decisions and what kinds of knowledge are made possible or unlikely within specific situated arrangements. This panel wants to foster a debate on how these aspects play together in tacitly governing knowledge production.

In particular, this panel invites papers that discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different analytical dimensions such as valuation, subjectification, or temporality for studying decision-making practices in knowledge production. It also invites contributions that consider the potentially performative character of such analytical dimensions, as well as the added value of combining different analytical dimensions. The panel encourages reflections on questions such as: On which levels should we study decision-making in knowledge production? What decision-making processes are accessible for investigation, and what decisions tend to stay unavailable for scientific studies and public scrutiny? Which methodological approaches allow studying the complex entanglements of aspects involved in decision-making in knowledge production?

Contact: maximilian.fochler@univie.ac.at

Keywords: valuation, subjectification, time, knowledge practices

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Other

193. Theorizing in STS

Sebastian Dahm, TU Berlin; Tim Seitz, Technical University Berlin

The conference call places reflexive engagements within STS at the center of its concern. In our panel, we would like to respond to that invitation with respect to practices of theorizing. In line with its interdisciplinary calling, STS encompasses a multitude of theoretical frameworks that interact with each other in many ways. One of the core preoccupations of STS has always been the analysis of various epistemologies and their consequences. Our panel is going to attempt an exercise in reflexivity by applying this analytical stance to STS themselves. In doing so, we try to engage theories not as static, self-contained entities. Rather, we would like to invite the participants to address practices of theorizing within STS, thereby placing an emphasis on theory-crafting as a fluid and contingent enterprise. Contributions may or may not address some of the following questions:

What characterizes STS theory? How do we as STS scholars pursue the work of theorizing/working with theory? How do practices of theorizing reflect a sense of urgency in face of existential threats? How do we relate theories to our fields and vice versa? What alternative approaches of theory-building could be pursued? What place does theory hold in STS? How could/should its role shift?

In raising those questions, we try to explore the potentials that STS theorizing holds regarding the instable and shifting worlds that we all currently face. We would like to spark a discussion that tries to connect our scholarly practices to the challenges we are entangled in.

Contact: sebastian.dahm@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: Theory, Epistemologies, Performativity, Methodologies, Reflexivity

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

194. They’re Just Guidelines: Operationalizing AI Ethics

Anna Lenhart, University Of Maryland College Park / IBM Public Sector

2018 & 2019  have seen a surge of frameworks or guidelines that lay out principles of how Automated Decision Systems (ADS) can be developed and implemented ethically. The Private Sector, Multistakeholder Groups and Government Agencies have published guidelines covering principles of transparency/explainability, fairness/non-discrimination, accountability, safety/security and privacy (Algorithm Watch, 2019). Occasionally, these guidelines include the demand for AI be socially beneficial and protect human rights. Few include recommendations or examples of how to operationalise these principles.

Today, most major technology companies using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have agreed to comply with these guidelines. But has the development of ADS changed? What challenges still remain? This panel seeks to convene scholars from multiple disciplines who are interested in the operationalization of AI ethics and welcomes submissions exploring themes such as:

*Are AI ethics guidelines changing the way companies and universities educate/train their data scientists and AI developers?

*How are factsheets, fairness toolkits, scenario planning exercises, etc being used within industry? (Stories of success and barriers)

*How does corporate culture influence the oversight and enforcement of AI ethics guidelines?

*What responsibilities fall on executives compared to data scientists?

*How are traditional approaches to risk management being applied to AI & ML?

*How do AI ethics guidelines vary across sectors, domains and cultures? How do these variations influence guideline implementation?

Contact: alenhart@terpmail.umd.edu

Keywords: AI Ethics, Guidelines, Culture, Operations, Implementation

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

195. Timing matters: How does long-term ethnographic research affect concept work and case-making in practice?

Jörg Niewöhner, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Patrick Bieler, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Martina Klausner, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Josefine Raasch, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The conference theme alerts us to ‘timing’ and thus the difficulty of conducting research on emerging phenomena without becoming a fleeting observer ourselves. We ask how long-term research commitments affect how we conceptualize and construct cases, how we attend to the temporalities of these cases and how these temporalities in turn affect our concept work. Inspired by anthropology’s emphasis on long-term ethnographic research, we ask how long-term engagements with research fields shape STS research in practice.

To turn our attention to those stated effects, we propose to focus on the following three dimensions:

1) Based on the assumption that long-term interactions with the interlocutors have an impact on the processes and outcomes of conceptualizing, we ask: What matters shape our conceptualizing? How are these concepts, developed in long-term research, generative of re-conceptualizations in STS?

2) In a similar way, long-term interactions shape the processes and outcomes of case-making. How does long-term research commitment shape what matters and how we construct our cases? How do these cases, developed in long-term research, shape our modes of generalising?

3) And last, we wonder how timing matters in the ways we think about and conceptualize continuities and ruptures: How does it help us to understand degrees of freedom and formations of (inter-)dependencies of processes we observe?

We seek contributions that address these questions based on long-term empirical research projects. The panel is meant to foster an exchange of experiences with long-term research, provide a space for reflecting current efforts and a platform for discussing ways forward.

Contact: joerg.niewoehner@staff.hu-berlin.de

Keywords: long-term research, concept work, case-making, continuities and ruptures

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

196. Title: Acknowledging residues: the (un)-making of an environmental concern

Franziska Klaas; Signe Mikkelsen, University of Oslo

Residues are reduced and transformed remnants of formerly present materials, events, or actions. Frequently associated with chemicals, pesticides, and waste, they are also the result of discard and excess, sticky – yet unruly – bordering both the visible and the invisible. A consequence of past and present material legacies, they pervade and persist in environments, humans, and non-humans alike, carrying with them potentially hazardous or toxic afterlives.

Yet, residues do not always emerge as environmental concerns – nor as bodily, political, or material ones. Rather, they are often a (non)-concern, sometimes evading recognition and response, despite their ubiquitous presence.

This open panel invites contributors to critically engage with the question of when, how, and to whom residues become a concern. It asks under what circumstances particular forms of residue might rise to levels of acknowledgement and political engagement – thereby constituting a call for action – while other forms of residues are silenced, muted, or overlooked.

Attending to the practices, politics, histories, and technologies that go into the making of residues as concerns, it wishes to remain attentive to the (potentially) hazardous materialisations of residues and their ecological and embodied outcomes. This means acknowledging past legacies as well as lasting effects and generated inequalities. This allows for a careful engagement with potential threats embedded within these issues as with political possibilities that might arise from such recognition.

Contact: franziska.klaas@sai.uio.no

Keywords: residues, thresholds, environment, health, monitoring

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

197. Towards a Critical Medical STS

Hined A Rafeh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Rebecca Monteleone, SFIS – Arizona State University; Yesmar Semaj Oyarzun, Rice University

In a world increasingly governed by technoscientific understandings of human bodyminds (Schalk 2018), what might a critical medical STS offer in theory and practice? Through this panel, we aim to contribute to a growing critical and intersectional medical STS research agenda, canon, and community, that centers on the contributions to STS understandings of science and biomedicine from critical race, critical disability, queer, and feminist perspectives. We seek submissions that engage critically with both their own subject matter and with current STS theory and practice to identify pressure points, generative alternatives, and productive coalitions in which to situate ourselves. Drawing on the work of scholars like Dorothy Roberts, Alondra Nelson, Aimi Hamraie, Kelly Fristch, and Emily Martin, we seek to explore what commitments, practices, and alignments STS scholars can and should make in the pursuit of scholarship and praxis regarding medicine, health, illness, and governance.

This panel invites work that aims to cultivate community, practice, and theory that is attentive to multiple matrices of institutional, personal, political and material oppressions in subjects relating to medicine, health, and illness. We welcome presentations that consider questions related to or offer provocations on topics including but not limited to:

– Epistemologies, practices, and perspectives that acknowledge the situated, embodied, or experiential expertise of pathologized bodyminds;

– Re-imaginings, redefinings, and rearticulations of bodyminds through relational practices;

– Interrogation and unsettling of medical authority, categorization, and its relationship to governance; and

– Processes of commercialization, professionalization, and design and deployment of biomedical technologies

Contact: yesmar@rice.edu

Keywords: health; illness; biomedicine; medicine; healthcare

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

198. Transformations and tensions in academic publishing

Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Centre for Sciencs & Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University; Kean Birch, York University

This panel invites contributions that explore practices of writing, reviewing and editing academic literature, particularly in light of recent transformations in its technological, institutional, and commercial formats. In the course of the last decades, digital technology has for example created new possibilities for circulating and reviewing academic research through pre-print archives and post-publication peer review platforms. Debates around Open Access and policy initiatives like Plan S in Europe in turn have re-emphasized unsolved questions regarding the political economy of scholarly publishing. Moreover, practices of writing and reviewing academic literature across all fields are shaped by relentless publication pressure, growing numbers of submissions to established journals, and the constitutive effects of citation metrics like the journal impact factor. We are interested in what these diverse developments mean for different actors in the scholarly publishing system. For example, how do researcher select journals and organize their publication strategies around intended audiences and career goals? How do practices of peer review and selection of manuscripts from an editorial perspective change in light of growing numbers of submissions? What defines publishability and originality in the context of increasingly crowded and stratified journal landscapes? How do relations with commercial publishers affect the outlook of editors on their journals, and how do scholarly communities react in turn? The panel invites studies based on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods.

Contact: wkaltenbrunner@gmail.com

Keywords: publishing, writing, reviewing, editing, open access

Categories: Other

199. (Transnational) research infrastructures as sites of technopolitical transformations

Erik Aarden, University of Vienna; Zinaida Vasilyeva, MCTS, TU München; Oguz Özkan, MCTS Technical University Munich; Kamiel Mobach, University of Vienna

As large-scale collaboration in research and the shared use of data and machinery continue to expand, (transnational) research infrastructures grows increasingly significant for scientific practice and research policy alike. Next to scientific relevance, research infrastructures have long articulated broader political visions of progress and collaboration. Research infrastructures therefore provide a key site for STS to study sociotechnical transformations and related political imaginations across space and time. For this open session, we invite contributions that conceptualize (transnational) research infrastructures as simultaneously epistemic and political spaces that mutually shape one another.

Papers may discuss research infrastructures that include, but are not limited to, large machinery, shared databases and institutional networks. The material and institutional configuration of such infrastructures can range from large-scale, centralized laboratories to distributed networks enabling the circulation of bodies, materials and data. We invite contributions that consider a wide range of research infrastructures from disciplines as diverse as physics, biology, social sciences and humanities, as well as other fields.  We are particularly interested in perspectives on the relations between, on the one hand, the perceived need to coordinate scientific facilities, infrastructures, resources and governance, and, on the other hand, questions of participation, rights and responsibilities, public legitimacy and anticipated public benefits. In what ways are research infrastructures not only expected to enhance scientific knowledge production, but also to produce, consolidate or advance political visions and social orders?

Contact: erik.aarden@univie.ac.at

Keywords: research infrastructures, transnational, technopolitics, collaboration

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

200. Transnational STS: Theories, Practices, and Pedagogies

Kim Fortun, University of California Irvine; Noela Invernizzi, Universidade Federal do Parana; Duygu Kasdogan, İzmir Katip Çelebi Üniversitesi; Aalok Khandekar, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad; Angela Okune, University of California – Irvine

STS scholarship has flourished in diverse regions and institutional spaces, creating a deeply transnational, interdisciplinary research field.  Further, STS scholars in diverse places often study global circuits of ideas, technologies, experts, development models, and so on. Transnational STS thus has many facets and potentials. Building on continuing dialogue about transnational STS in recent years (especially since the 2018 4S conference in Sydney, where TRANSnational STS was the conference theme), this panel will bring together presenters working to conceptualize, practice and extend Transnational STS in different ways. In conversation with STS scholarship that focuses on the constitution of modern technoscience across and between nation-states, this panel seeks to reflect on the transnational character of STS at theoretical, methodological and empirical levels from a comparative perspective. Rather than approaching “transnational” as an ideal temporal-spatial universalism to be achieved, this panel particularly aims to elaborate on and question STS praxis that centers on the analytic of the “nation-state” in studying technoscientific developments as well as reflecting on the uncritical utilization of STS concepts/theories across different contexts. Through opening a self-reflexive space about methodological nationalism and neocolonial orientations in our praxis at this very moment when we witness the haunt of the far-right movements, authoritarian states, post-truth politics, and intentional denial of socio-ecological crises across the world, we invite contributions that reflect on theoretical and methodological capacities of STS to imagine and reclaim for science(s) otherwise. Contributions may address, among others, the following questions:

• What makes STS transnational? How can we think about “transnational STS” in juxtaposition to other concepts, e.g., international, multinational, postnational, supra-national, anti-national, global, cosmopolitan, universal, imperial, and translocal?
• What becomes visible when nation-state as the only analytic breaks down? What is the role of the nation-state with regard to education, research activities and the regulation of technologies in the contemporary period?
• How do STS theories and concepts travel, get used and modified around the world? Are the directions of the flux of theories and concepts changing? To what extent do STS theories and concepts reflect on the inadequacies of existing categories -e.g., “East and West” ; “center and periphery”; “developing and developed”?
• What can we learn from South-South dialogues in STS?
• How are transnational research networks formed and organized? How do these networks set research agendas?
• What infrastructures can support transnational STS formations?
• What are the methods and methodologies used to foster transnational knowledge production in a collaborative manner? How would transnational STS add to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary character of the field?
• What are exemplary cases that demonstrate transnational STS sensibilities?
• How can transnational STS contribute to STS teaching? How can transnational STS add to local efforts in engaging with multiple publics, decision-makers, scientists, activists, and other related actors?
• How can transnational STS contribute to the future of the field? What are the limitations of doing transnational STS?

Contact: duygukasdogan@gmail.com

Keywords: transnational STS, nation-state, neocolonialism, research networks, pedagogyl STS, nation-state, neocolonialism, research networks, pedagogy

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

201. Transplanetary Ecologies

Matjaz Vidmar, University of Edinburgh; Michael Clormann, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich

(Eco)systemic understanding of the patterns of interaction between life and its environment has so far been mainly limited to the Earth. However, with current epistemological and technoscientific expansions further into outer space, a new, more holistic view of our past and future presence in the Universe is required. Technomaterial heritage like artificial satellites, planetary probes and discarded rocket bodies increasingly co-habit with comet dust, rocks and high-energy cosmic particles – forming hybrid material environments of human concern beyond planetary boundaries. Similarly, in our search for liveable environments and signs of life on other planets, from looking for microbes in our Solar System to measuring the composition of atmospheres of exo-planets, we may have to re-examine the core notion of ecological symbiosis of “life” and this emerging “environment”.

Hence, in this panel, we aim to commence a systemic study of the construction of “transplanetary ecologies”, bringing together the insights from developing STS perspectives, be they about search for, and understanding of, extra-terrestrial life, or the expansion of Earth’s ecologies into outer space. We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions from colleagues conducting STS-inspired research in any related fields (astrobiology, geoscience, astronomy, space exploration, etc.). In particular, we aim to address questions along the lines of what “off-Earth” ecologies might be framed as, how they are different/similar to their Earthly equivalents, and how are they are affecting the development/understanding of the ecology as a concept.

Contact: michael.clormann@tum.de

Keywords: outer space, ecologies, Earth, materiality, planetary

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

202. Traveling Knowledge: Translational Practices in Different Countries and Fields

Sandra Patricia Gonzalez-Santos, Universidad Anahuac; Noemie MerleauPonty, Ehess; Karen Jent, University of Cambridge

Basic scientific research does not directly translate into applied knowledge. Then, how does knowledge travel from where it is produced in the research site to its application and use (e.g. from bench to bed side)? What shapes the different translational practices? This panel invites those interested in exploring these questions. Our proposal is structured under four working assumptions: (a) knowledge travels in diverse, situated and multi-directional trajectories, (b) each country and scientific discipline has its own translational practices, (c) these practices both facilitate and obstruct knowledge to travel between spaces and users, and (d) studying how knowledge travels between actors, settings and countries is another way of tracing how knowledge and technology are being made useable. With these assumptions in mind, we call for papers addressing translational practices in a variety of fields (e.g. reproductive science, biomedicine, environmental studies, artificial intelligence, etc.) with the objective of creating a comparative analysis. The following questions are meant to trigger this analysis:

What shapes translational practices?

How do local and global translational practices stagger or propel translation?

How do translational practices make knowledge (in)accessible?

How do translational practices participate in shaping the way basic science is conducted and valued?

How does translational practices shape and create knowledge?

Contact: sandragonzalezsantos@gmail.com

Keywords: translational science, knowledge production, science circulation, frontiers of knowledge, technological innovations, feminist and postcolonial science and technology studies

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

203. Universals’ Locales: Locating Theoretical Sciences in Global Modernities

Michael Barany, University of Edinburgh

In theory, the ideas and methods of modern theoretical and mathematical sciences are born universal, ungoverned by researchers’ locales and unconstrained by geopolitical borders. In practice, material and political constraints, linguistic and national barriers, and the manifold idiosyncrasies of individual research settings have historically divided theoretical and mathematical scholars more than their putatively placeless quarry has united them. This contrast between universal ideals and local practices has been one of the most durable and important features of the theoretical and mathematical sciences across their history, and one of the most persistent challenges for their history and sociology. We now live in a period of global science that dates to the mid-twentieth century, when dramatic changes in the scale of research, travel, collaboration, publication, and disciplinary organization fundamentally transformed who could participate in debates and research programs about abstract theories, where and how they could do so, what mathematical and other theoretical frameworks they could use, and what they could do with them.

This open panel seeks historical and sociological studies as well as theoretical and methodological examinations that interrogate how producers of theoretical and mathematical science lay claim to universal knowledges between local and global contexts, and what this means for the social, institutional, infrastructural, and political conditions and implications for such endeavors. The panel continues discussions from the January 2020 “Universals’ Locales” workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, and welcomes both new and returning participants to these conversations.

Contact: M.Barany@ed.ac.uk

Keywords: universals, theory, globalization, internationalism, ideals

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

204. Unpacking Food Chains: Knowledge-Making, Biotechnoscience, and Multispecies Connectivity in Troubled Societies

Mariko Yoshida, The Australian National University; Shiaki Kondo, Hokkaido University

STS scholarship has addressed a variety of topics with perspectives drawn from the intersection between political ecology of food and multispecies anthropology, such as the microbiopolitics of raw dairy consumption (Paxson 2013), food sovereignty in the aftermath of infectious zoonotic diseases (Keck 2015; Lowe 2010; Porter 2019), or/and the reconstruction of labor and domestication of industrial animals entangled with nonhuman biological agents such as viruses and parasitic microbes (Blanchette 2015). This panel aims to bring together empirical research on the implications of biotechnologies in the contemporary food industry, which unfold relationalities of ambiguous agents, a so-called “quasi-species” (Lowe 2010). We will examine how interests of actors including small-scale producers, consumers, scientific experts, and administrative institutions reconfigure the notion of ecologies and power. This panel will trace the far-reaching range of focus areas and methodological approaches that are pertinent to questions of environmental and food governance, the role of biotechnologies that achieve optimization for cost efficiency and high value-added products, and the implication for resource management. Potential topics include but are not limited to: the socio-technical imaginaries underlying food justice; knowledge practices in shaping commodity food chains; infrastructures of food risk and safety; the construction of food-related ethics surrounding genetically-modified organisms, synthetic biology, and mass DNA sequencing; multi-species networks in agri- and aquaculture systems at local, national, and global levels; the continuities and ruptures among hygiene management, scientific frameworks, and lay expertise; and intersections between modes of food production and conservation technologies.

References:

Blanchette, Alex. 2015. Herding Species: Biosecurity, Posthuman Labor, and the American Industrial Pig. Cultural Anthropology 30 (4) 640-669.

Keck, Frédéric. 2015. Liberating Sick Birds: Poststructuralist Perspectives on the Biopolitics of Avian Influenza. Cultural Anthropology 30 (2): 224-235.

Lowe, Celia. 2010. “Viral Clouds: Becoming H5N1 in Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 625–49.

Paxon, Heather. 2013. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Porter, Natalie. 2019. Viral Economies: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Contact: mariko.yoshida@anu.edu.au

Keywords: Food safety, commodities, knowledge, multispecies, microbiopolitics

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Knowledge, Theory and Method

205. Unpacking the Foundations of the Current Biometric Moment

Michelle Spektor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ranjit Pal Singh, Cornell University

From unlocking smartphones to verifying financial transactions, from boarding airplanes to clocking in at work, and from issuing national IDs and passports as tools of data-driven governance, the use of digital biometric technologies that rely on fingerprints, facial recognition, iris scans, and other metrics have increasingly become part of everyday life in the 21st century. While the proliferation of biometrics-based digital identities might be new, the use of biometrics – techniques of measuring the human body – to identify and/or classify individuals and groups has a much longer history.

This open track panel explores how individuals, states, and institutions have used biometrics to define individual and collective identities transnationally, and how those subjected to biometric identification experience it, accept it, or resist it. By bringing together papers that address how biometric identification encapsulates politics of identity in both the past and present, the panel aims to illuminate how past biometric systems inform the technological and socio-cultural features of the current biometric moment. Broadly, it inquires into how biometric identification (re)configures relationships among and across citizenship, migration, borders, and national belonging; race, gender, class, and disability; policing, surveillance, and criminality; labor, bureaucracy, and imaginaries of technological progress; power, subjectivity, and the body; social security, national security, and global development. It welcomes papers that address how STS tools and concepts can be leveraged to unpack the ways conceptions of identity shape and are shaped by biometric identification infrastructures in the past, present, and future.

Contact: spektor@mit.edu

Keywords: biometrics, identity/identification, governance, citizenship, surveillance

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Big Data

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

206. Value in Biomedicine

Katharina Kieslich, University of Vienna; Saheli Datta Burton, King’s College London; Katharina Theresa Paul, University of Vienna; Barbara Prainsack, University of Vienna; Gabby Samuel, King’s College London /Lancaster University

The frequency with which the concept of ‘value’ is used by policymakers, practitioners, insurers, researchers, managers, and patients to justify, question or promote new interventions underlines that its applications and definitions are a contemporary phenomenon, yet there is little understanding of what value is. We invite both empirical and conceptual papers that use biomedicine and health care as platforms through which to empirically address or reconceptualize understandings of value. The question of value, we expect, is particularly salien in areas such as genomics, health technology assessment (HTA), artificial intelligence (AI) and value-based pricing (VBP), but also public health. We ask: How are practices, ´things`, and processes made valuable in biomedicine and health care? What continuities and changes in understandings of value can be discerned? Who gets to define value in contemporary democracies, and how are these understandings of what (treatment, technology, data point etc) is valuable inscribed into sociotechnical infrastructures? What social practices and technologies are involved in these practices? What criteria and measurement tools are used in different contexts (organizational settings, policy contexts, etc)? How are ethical, moral, and economic norms involved and what role do appeals to ‘value’ have for the emergence of new solidarities? In this panel, we welcome both conceptual and empirical papers on the subject of value, and encourage speakers to reflect on the impact of their research on policy and practice.

Contact: katharina.t.paul@univie.ac.at

Keywords: value, biomedicine, data, health care, policy

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

207. Veterinary anthropology : the impact of animal studies on medical sciences

Ludek Broz, Institue of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Frédéric Keck, Laboratoire d’anthropologie socialem – CNRS

Over the last 5 years, the sub-discipline of veterinary anthropology has emerged in the wake of ethnographic and historical studies on zoonotic diseases, such as avian influenza, swine fever, rabies and the plague. Veterinary anthropology has been partly informed by Science and technology studies, and this panel aims to promote even closer synergy between these fields by engaging two pivotal questions: How is the body of veterinary knowledge generated? How does it travel from the centres of scientific knowledge production into bodies of normative practices nested in geographical, socio-cultural and political contexts?

These questions invite panellists to explore the relations between humans, animals and techniques in the different settings where humans care for animals and anticipate cross-species disease transmissions. Biosecurity interventions (culling, vaccinating or monitoring animals) requalify borders between territories and between species, building new collectives of humans and non-humans. We encourage investigation of different kinds of agency involved in these borderlands, be they those of pathogens or animals, of animal breeders or animal activists, and most importantly the agencies of vets as necessary and often invisible intermediaries in contemporary interactions between humans and animals.

Recognizing attention to zoonoses as a productive entry-point into veterinary anthropology we simultaneously invite panellists to engage what often stays in the shadow of “one health” concept including questions such as: Can animals be considered patients? Do they consent to their treatment? Do they evaluate the interactions that take place around their health? Who is authorized to distinguish a normal animal from a pathological one?

Contact: broz@eu.cas.cz

Keywords: veterinary anthropology, multispecies ethnography, zoonoses, biosecurity

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Medicine and Healthcare

208. Waste. Locating, Learning From, and Living With the Lively Afterlives of Globalization’s Distributed Materialities

Christian Peter Medaas, University of Oslo, Dept. of Social Anthropology; Samwel Moses Ntapanta, University of Oslo, Dept. of Social Anthropology

Environmental toxins. Persistent organic pollutants. Microplastics. Municipal waste. Growing dumpsites. The discarded and “disposable” objects of consumer culture. Contaminated areas of space and time. Nuclear waste. One salient way in which globalization is localized and distributed (unevenly) over Planet Earth is through its various forms of waste.

While often hazardous, their accumulation and detrimental effects engendering feelings of urgency and powerlessness, many of these material wastes also constitute livelihoods to those who live and work with and amidst them – managing, remediating, scavenging, trading, recycling, repairing. A glance at these practices makes it clear that waste – often both a poison and a promise – is a contestable and unstable category, as well as one worthy of closer scrutiny.

Might an attention to people’s many material practices of relating to the wastes of globalization (or the ruins of capitalism) – in particular those which are not simply ameliorative, or for that matter economic – but which may also be described as innovative, productive, or critical – provide a fruitful way of approaching some of the broader questions and anxieties of the Anthropocene world we find ourselves in? How can we as researchers learn from waste and waste practices?

This panel invites participants interested in waste and those who work with waste to engage with the above questions and each other, paying attention to the material (as well as narrative) forms that wastes take, the places in which they occur, and the practices of co-existence through which people relate to and live with wastes.

Contact: christian.medaas@sai.uio.no

Keywords: waste, materiality, toxins, discards, innovation

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Engineering and Infrastructure

209. What happens when we all agree: Governing non epistemic controversies

Javier Guerrero, Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano de Medellín; Jorge M Escobar, Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano

The study of controversies has been a key topic within STS. The usual analysis of scientific controversies focuses on disagreements about facts, whether there is a fact or not, who established it first, or theories whether it is correct or not, who established it first. However, some contemporary scientific controversies do not seem to be about facts or theories: the different actors involved in the controversy agree on the facts, but the controversy persists. For example, the controversy about tolerable levels of pollution or the banning of products such as asbestos, as the actors agree on risks, harmfulness and the effects on economy. There is therefore no epistemic disagreement, but the scientific controversy over solutions or prohibitions persists. We have called this type of controversy non-epistemic controversies. The session looks for proposals dealing with examples of this type of controversy, what kinds of knowledge is produced in such controversies?, what keeps them open?, how to study such controversies?, what should be the role of STS in such controversies?, and consequences for the governance of science and technology.

Contact: jeguerreroc180@gmail.com

Keywords: Controversies, governance of S&T, non-epistemic controversies

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

210. ‘What is the worth of a Nature-paper when the climate is in crisis?’

Thomas Franssen, Centre for Science & Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University; Maximilian Fochler, University Of Vienna; Sarah de Rijcke, Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS); Ruth Falkenberg, University of Vienna; Lisa Sigl, Research Pla

Researchers across the world increasingly feel the need to engage with the current climate crisis and change the practices of science. For instance communities gradually move to more web-based forms of conferencing to reduce co2-emission. Also, there is increasing critical scrutiny of the growing carbon footprints of big data centers worldwide. Scholars increasingly ask, is what we do worth it in the current climate crisis?

But how do these new practices relate to dominant forms of organization and valuation in science? How, when and under which conditions do new forms of knowledge production become possible? Do mission-oriented funding programs allow researchers to engage differently with their work and have broader impact? Or is much work funded just “mainstream as usual” with a rhetoric bow to climate relevance? Can interdisciplinary approaches speak better to the climate crisis? And if so, how do they fare in current structures of valuing scientific outputs and careers?

This panel asks how the climate crisis reconfigures (the governance of) science, when eventually not only fields that address current environmental challenges, but all research communities will be affected by it. We invite studies of these reconfigurations and the new frictions that emerge when the earth is given increasingly more agency to determine whether certain decisions (choosing a research question, booking a flight, submitting a research proposal) are warranted. Potential subthemes include, but are not limited to, effects on valuation practices (what is valued in and about research) and academic subjectivities (what kind of researcher should one be).

Contact: t.p.franssen@cwts.leidenuniv.nl

Keywords: climate crisis, valuation practices, science governance, academic subjectivities, scientific practices

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

211. What science, technology and innovation, for which transformations?

Carla Alvial Palavicino; Juan Felipe Espinosa, Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello; Arne Maibaum, TU Berlin; Zoe Robaey, WUR

We live in times of growing anxiety – something has to change! We need radical transformations! In many circles, problems and changes are handled in one distinct way: the call for innovation. We can innovate our way out of climate change, inequality, or many other societal challenges that affect us today. Very often, innovation is conflated with technology and market developments as the means to deliver products and services, which can become a means to control and economize new dimension of life.

At the same time, we are now aware that innovation is not only a solution, but also part of the problem. This has resulted in a call to reform the institutions of science and innovation, for example, under the name of Responsible Research and Innovation, Social Innovation, or Transformative Innovation. Do we fall into the same trap and search only for innovations when we embrace these labels? If innovation is also one of the sources of the problem, can we solve it with another type of innovation?

In this panel we want to bring in an interdisciplinary dialogue about what it means to transform science and innovation, and – if and how – can science and innovation contribute to larger-scale transformations. What historical and recent dynamics lead to this phenomenon? Are there new forms of doing science or achieving social progress that transcend this nexus? Are there new forms of knowledge e.g., from a perspective of the global south, queer or other formats that break the mold?

Contact: c.m.e.alvialpalavicino@uu.nl

Keywords: Innovation, transformations, policy, alternatives

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Other

212. Where Did THAT Come From? Locating Transnational Diffusion of Governance Knowledge

Joy Zhang, University of Kent; Saheli Datta Burton, King’s College London

It is easy to loose sight of the increasingly rapid global diffusion of scientific norms when transnational collaborations and policy harmonisation are increasingly the norm rather than choice) of today’s global science. It is also easy to assume that the diffusion of governance knowledge (e.g. bio-ethical norms, technical standards, regulatory frameworks) that crucially facilitate and shape the diffusion of scientific knowledge in particular retains a traditional North-South direction. Yet over the past 20 years, the rise of China and India in science and innovation, especially China, have not only challenged this traditional this North-South directionality of governance knowledge diffusion, but have also, in many cases, substantially changed or expanded governing knowledge in Europe and the USA. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that some policies diffused instead of others and an understanding of the unsuccessful policies/attempts are just as important as those that did diffuse. For both the successful dissemination of governance knowledge and the failed/ignored attempts crucially shape the process, nature and extent to which an emerging science becomes embedded in society. By proposing the panel on ‘locating’ transnational diffusion of governance knowledge, we aim to push the examination of global science and policy exchanges one step further. That is, in addition to ‘mapping’ or ‘tracing’ which idea diffused where, we hope to invite examinations that ‘locate’ the social agency, the pathways, the narratives and the prioritising mechanisms in global fora that gave certain policies greater socio-political visibility than others, and thereby enabled or constrained the global uptake of research norms and ultimately the diffusion of emerging scientific knowledge.

Contact: y.zhang-203@kent.ac.uk

Keywords: Diffusion, Global South, governance, transnational collaboration, policy

Categories:

213. Where is Care? (Un)Settling Place, Materialities and Imaginaries in the Making of Healthcare

Dara Ivanova, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management; Iris Wallenburg, institute for Health Policy and Management; Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Andrea Ford, University of Chicago; Martyn Pickersgill, University of Edinburgh

Where care is provided has become a prominent policy concern in many nations, as healthcare systems attempt to solve a variety of issues through spatial reorganizations. Siting care within specific spaces, be they urban or rural areas, ‘healing’ gardens or high-tech hospitals promises to improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare provision. However, as geographers, STS scholars, and others have demonstrated, place is not ‘just’ a location on a map; places are imbued with affects such as feelings of (not) belonging and (un)safety, and shape and are shaped by multiple discourses of ‘good care’. It is these interrelations within care places that we wish to explore: we ask what and how materialities and imaginaries of care make and matter (for) the spaces of healthcare and what kinds of (care) places they engender

Building on STS work on place and the placing of care, this panel considers how healthcare spaces and places are (un) settled through preexisting and novel materialities and imaginaries. We seek empirical and theoretical contributions examining how the ‘where’ of care is (discursively, socially, materially) produced and productive of multiple ontologies of caring. We are particularly interested in the processes of place making for care, by which ‘countryside’, ‘city’, ‘region’ and ‘neighborhood’ co-constitute particular ways of doing, organizing and imagining care.

Contact: ivanova@eshpm.eur.nl

Keywords: care, health, place, imaginaries, materiality

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

214. Who are the Publics of Outer Space?

Richard Tutton, University of York; Lauren Reid, Freie Universität

Who are the publics of outer space? How do spaceflight and research agencies, commercial companies, and advocacy organizations address public subjects in different capacities such as citizens, consumers, or audiences? While national institutions led the development of spaceflight in the last century, today new commercial entities are coming to the fore: wealthy billionaires in particular have assumed the role of speaking on behalf of humanity and its future. In this new technopolitical economy of spaceflight, this panel investigates enduring and emerging technoscientific imaginaries of national or global publics (Welsh and Wynne 2013). We address the relationship between institutional framings of space technoscience and the roles that publics play, for example, by validating, objecting to, or confirming the societal and economic value of scientific research and international cooperation.  The panel also considers how research agencies and institutions recognize public diversity and difference in the context of outer space technoscience, and the extent to which people of colour, LGBTQ, women, and other underrepresented publics are addressed by dominant commercial and public actors when framing the meaning and logics of current and future human activity in outer space. The panel therefore contributes to STS scholarship on public engagement as well as the social studies of outer space.

Contact: richard.tutton@york.ac.uk

Keywords: outer space, spaceflight, publics, imaginaries

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Other

215. Whose Dream House?

Tamara Kneese, University of San Francisco; Hannah Zeavin, UC Berkeley

The home has long been figured as a site of tension between the outside world and its most intimate interior. Historically, smart homes are associated not only with a more leisurely future, but nostalgia for a comfortable middle-class existence and gendered division of labor (Schwartz Cowan 1985). Smart appliances perform the duties of a housewife, optimized according to the owner’s wishes. But they also rely on specific protocols and physical systems to work their magic. People must perform manual and digital housekeeping within the smart home, or what Lynn Spigel (2005) calls “posthuman domesticity.” Despite the maintenance work they require (Strengers and Nicholls 2018), smart homes have a ghostly aura. Alexa’s creepy laugh is the virtual housewife gone rogue. Moving beyond the built environment, families using smart tech track one another as they enter and leave the domicile. The domestication of smart technologies theoretically gives consumers control over their environment and family. The flip side of the security supposedly afforded by the smart home is the system’s hackability, which subjects the home’s inhabitants, including children, to surveillance (Barassi 2017) while fostering domestic abuse, as the smart home is often designed and controlled by men (Bowles 2018).

This panel traces the gendered impacts of technological labor as the home becomes imbricated with new forms of surveillance, security, and spookiness. Following STS explorations of automation and gender— from dishwashers to Siri— papers may consider the history of domesticated technology from the 1950s forward and/or the sociological impacts of current smart technology usage.

Contact: tkneese@usfca.edu

Keywords: labor, gender, domesticity, surveillance, automation

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Information, Computing and Media Technology

216. Windows of Opportunity?: Critical Understanding of ELSI/ELSA at Different Moments

Koichi Mikami, Keio University

This panel explores how differently the idea of ethical, legal and social implications/aspects (ELSI/ELSA) is conceived at different moments and how this difference shapes the way in which scholars of social sciences and humanities collaborate with scientists and policymakers. While the mode of engaging with ELSI/ELSA of science and technology, that was put forward as part of the Human Genome Project, has been criticized, its legacy is still alive within some science and science policy communities, and in some instances it presents scholars of social sciences and humanities with an opportunity to work closely with scientists and policymakers. The challenge associated with taking up such an opportunity, however, is that the nature or the rule of collaboration tends to be defined by the scientists and policymakers, although it may be negotiated once the collaboration begins and through scholars of social sciences and humanities moving between different roles and ‘playing the Chameleon’ (Balmer et al. 2015). This panel invites papers concerning the relationship between scientists’ and policymakers’ conception of ELSI/ELSA and the role that scholars of social sciences and humanities are expected to play, that is, the shape of the window of opportunity for collaboration. While the assumption here is admittedly that there tends to be a power imbalance between scholars of social sciences and humanities and scientists and policymakers at the moment of entering collaborative relationship, papers examining the cases where scholars of social sciences and humanities are in the position to set the terms of collaboration are also welcome.

Contact: kmikami@keio.jp

Keywords: ELSI, ELSA, Post-ELSI, Collaboration, Power

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

217. Workshop on Experiments with Algo-governance and Future-Making: STS Scholars as Designers

Denisa Reshef Kera, University of Salamanca; Judith Christine Igelsböck, MCTS, Technical University of Munich; Galina Mihaleva, Nanyang Technological University; Tincuta Heinzel, Loughborough University; Hannah Perner-Wilson, Kobakant collective; Josef Ho

Participants will offer their algo-governance prototypes, scenarios & projects to the group for experiencing, modifying, experiment with and reflecting. We will create a Github page and a small booklet with examples of algo-governance experiments and prototypes that try to embed regulations into code and algorithms or show attempts to define standards, specifications, constraints for design, auditing, testing or certifying emerging infrastructures (blockchain, DLTs, machine learning, AIs, autonomous robots). The main problem with code-centered, rule-based systems promising automated and blockchain or AI-driven futures is their democratic deficit and ahistorical narrative of some deep structures (of human or social behavior and politics) behind the code that remains a black box even if it is “open source”. We would like to respond to this by experimenting and testing with alternatives to the algo-governance attempts to reduce the political and historical processes of deliberation and consensus-building into decontextualized game theory concepts or various proposals to crowdsource data and attitudes. Can we make the actual code of our future infrastructures more historical and contextual, open to political deliberation and engagement?  How to connect the conceptual and historical depths of the governance concepts and ideas with the flexible and experimental approaches of prototyping and testing?

Contact: denisa.kera@usal.es

Keywords: prototypes, design, blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, AIs, machine learning, governance-by-design, technological governance, algorithmic governance

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method