ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–Engineering and Infrastructure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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