ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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