ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–Knowledge, Theory and Method

2. Aesthetic Interventions: Exploring emerging worlds through art

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

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

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

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

Contact: regula.burri@hcu-hamburg.de

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

4. Alchemical Transformations: On Matters of Substance and Change

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

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

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

Contact: bradleyjones@wustl.edu

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

5. Alternative Knowing Spaces

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: s.jerak-zuiderent@amsterdamumc.nl

Keywords: Forms of the good, Empirical Ethics, Care

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Medicine and Healthcare

Other

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

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

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

Contact: k.holden@qmul.ac.uk

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

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

Shirley Sun, Nanyang Technological University

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

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

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

Contact: hlsun@ntu.edu.sg

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

22. Charismatic Technology: Promises and Perils

Francis Lim

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

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

Contact: fkglim@ntu.edu.sg

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

24. Choreographies: Rhythms and Movements in Research

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

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

Contact: nikivermeulen@gmail.com

Keywords: Choreography, time, space, research practice

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

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

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

Contact: julian.cortess@urosario.edu.co

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

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

26. Classic STS Papers

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

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

Contact: sismondo@queensu.ca

Keywords: classic STS, marginalized STS, history of STS

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– How do we decolonize computing and its methodologies?

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

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

Contact: claude.draude@uni-kassel.de

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

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

33. Death Itself: Technology, Ethics, and Ambiguity

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

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

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

Contact: amanda.vanbeinum@carleton.ca

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

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

36. Defining the Patient in Biomedicine Today

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: garethedel@gmail.com

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

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Knowledge, Theory and Method

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

37. Democracy in the making

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

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

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

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

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

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

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

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

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

Contact: lina.franken@uni-hamburg.de

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

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

Warren Pearce, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield

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

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

Contact: warren.pearce@sheffield.ac.uk

Keywords: expertise, digital platforms, knowledge democracies,

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Science Communication/Public Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: florian.eyert@wzb.eu

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

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

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

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

Josef Barla, Goethe University Frankfurt

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

Contact: barla@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

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

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

58. Envisioning a Decentered Academic Knowledge System Online

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

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

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

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

Contact: garethedel@gmail.com

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Science Communication/Public Engagement

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

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

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

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

Contact: teun.zuiderent-jerak@vu.nl

Keywords: Inclusive technologies, experiment

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

61. Exploring Empowerment in The Co-creation of Innovation

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: s.tsui@tue.nl

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

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

63. Fakes and legitimacy reordering

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

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

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

Contact: cristina.popescu@ehess.fr

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: catharina.landstrom@chalmers.se

Keywords: big data, environment, computer modelling

Categories: Big Data

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: s.tsui@tue.nl

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

72. Grotesque Epistemologies

Lee Nelson, RPI; Joanna Radin, Yale University

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

Contact: lee.lcnelson@gmail.com

Keywords: grosteque, decomposition, putrefaction, decay, rot

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Other

76. Hegemony, counter-hegemony and ontological politics

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

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

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

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

Contact: andrzej.w.nowak@gmail.com

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

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

79. Holding It Together?  Data And Disasters

Louise Elstow, Lancaster University; Ben Epstein, UCL

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

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

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

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

Contact: l.elstow@lancaster.ac.uk

Keywords: Disasters, data, crisis, performativity, movement

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Big Data

Knowledge, Theory and Method

84. Inclusion in scientific communities

Jochen Glaser, TU Berlin; Nelius Boshoff, Stellenbosch University

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

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

Contact: Jochen.Glaeser@tu-berlin.de

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

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

88. Inhabiting Warming Worlds – Transforming Climate Knowledge

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

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

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

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

Contact: celine.granjou@irstea.fr

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

90. Inquiries into the Global

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

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

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

Contact: nassima.abdelghafour@mines-paristech.fr

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: FARAONDEMETAL@GMAIL.COM

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

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keywords: integration, stakeholders, participation, methods, beginning

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Governance and Public Policy

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

Simcha Jong, Leiden University; Richelle Boone, Leiden University

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

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

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

Contact: rboone470@gmail.com

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

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

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

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

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

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

Contact: of1@soas.ac.uk

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

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

95. Interventions with, through and in ethnography

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

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

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

Contact: eitel@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Keywords: ethnography, intervention, collaboration

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

97. Locating & Timing Governance in STS and Universities

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

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

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

– fragility and resilience of university cultures.

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

– work life and agency of academics

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: knut.sorensen@ntnu.no

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

98. Locating Psychoanalysis in STS Terrains

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

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

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

-Object/subject relations;

-Shifting/novel intersubjectivities;

-Climate and environmental affects;

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

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

-Interiority/exteriority;

-Embodiment, sexuality and gender;

-Epistemological plurality, ontological multiplicities;

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

-Scientific and legal positivism;

Contact: aftabmirzaei@gmail.com

Keywords: psychoanalysis, subjectivity, technoscience, theory, methods

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Other

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

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

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

Contact: rps244@cornell.edu

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

Alexander Wentland, Technical University of Munich

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

Contact: alexander.wentland@tum.de

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

101. Maintenance and its knowledges

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

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

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

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

Contact: jerome.denis@mines-paristech.fr

Keywords: maintenance, care, knowledge

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

107. Marxist STS

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

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

Contact: johan.soderberg@sts.gu.se

Keywords: Capitalism, Ideology, Critique, Marxism, Class

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

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

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

Contact: uli.beisel@uni-bayreuth.de

Keywords: multiplicity, materiality, knowledge, inequality, circulation

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

June Jeon, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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

Contact: jjeon24@wisc.edu

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

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: szymanskiea@hotmail.com

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

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Knowledge, Theory and Method

116. Negotiating independence in academic careers

Grit Laudel, TU Berlin; Ed Hackett, Brandeis University

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

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

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

Contact: grit.laudel@tu-berlin.de

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

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

Lizzie Richardson; James Ash, Newcastle University

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

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

Contact: e.richardson@sheffield.ac.uk

Keywords: Networks, platforms, social form, ICTs

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Information, Computing and Media Technology

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

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

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

Contact: timotheus.flink@googlemail.com

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

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

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

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

Contact: maniagoralska@gmail.com

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Information, Computing and Media Technology

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

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

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

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

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

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

* deliberate ways of not doing (something)

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

* acts that make non-acts possible

Contact: annelieke.driessen@lshtm.ac.uk

Keywords: agency, absences, method, action, practice

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

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

Gabriele Griffin, Uppsala University; Marja Vehviläinen, Tampere University

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

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

 We invite contributions on topics such as:

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

Contact: gabriele.griffin@gender.uu.se

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

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: andreas.metzner-szigeth@unibz.it

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

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

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

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

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

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

Contact: christian.ritter@tlu.ee

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

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: bluemel@dzhw.eu

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

132. Performative Futures: Fighting Reification Inertias through Open Anticipations

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

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

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

Some potential questions include:

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

Contact: sergio.uruena@ehu.eus

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

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

135. Politicization of Sociotechnical Futures: Prerequisites and Limits

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

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

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

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

Contact: paulina.dobroc@kit.edu

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Other

136. Politics and practices in the ethnographies of legitimate knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: cinzia.greco@manchester.ac.uk

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

153. Science, Technology and Sport

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

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

Contact: jennifer-sterling@uiowa.edu

Keywords: sport, science, technology, data, interdisciplinary

Categories: Big Data

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

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

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

Contact: michael.penkler@tum.de

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

159. Social justice in Climate Adaptation Policies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: u.pesch@tudelft.nl

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

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

163. States of Planetary Environmental Knowledge

Jenny Elaine Goldstein, Cornell University; Leah Aronowsky, University of Illinois

This panel explores the politics of planetary-scale environmental knowledge production. In convening scholars from across the methodological spectrum, we seek to ask: what, and whose, politics come into play when local knowledge is scaled up or planetary/global knowledge is localized? How is difference maintained or collapsed in the making and governance of global environmental knowledge? What forms of governance and/or infrastructure emerge out of planetary/global knowledge? Possible themes may include:

Geographies/spatialities of planetary environmental knowledge

How localized environmental knowledge is scaled up, aggregated, and/or made relevant at planetary and global scales

How models about the global environment are assembled

Questions of the planetary commons and climate governance

Experiments, simulations, and models for producing planetary knowledge

The limits of knowability, certainty, and quantification

Contact: goldstein@cornell.edu

Keywords: global, environment, knowledge, planet

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

166. STS for a post-truth age: comparative dialogues on reflexivity

Emine Onculer Yayalar, Bilkent University; Melike Sahinol, Orient-Institut Istanbul

The linear model of knowledge creation and diffusion has frequently been criticized by STS scholars through an emphasis on social contexts of knowledge. Based on this critique, reflexivity plays an important role in pushing the academic boundaries of STS. True to the conference focus “locating and timing matters”, it is important to take into account various accelerated ways of knowledge circulation, as STS scholars are faced with challenges of the post-truth age.

The panel calls for laying the groundwork for a reflexive dialogue on how to practice STS in the post truth age by emphasizing the importance of reciprocal sharing across a diverse group of participants. We are interested in contributions that engage empirically and theoretically with the concepts of truth, evidence and objectivity from a comparative perspective. We are particularly seeking contributions that highlight the digital and infrastructural materiality of the post-truth age. We also welcome studies of STS practices in different cultural settings, shedding light on heterogeneous ways of practicing and doing STS for a post-truth age. We invite papers dealing with but not limited to following questions:

What does sustainable STS look like? What kinds of practices and output should we be aiming for without necessarily swinging back to the ideal of objectivity?

How can STS continue to critically engage with the hegemonic narratives of S&T and find meaningful ways to address the promotion of alternative facts?

How can we conceptualize expertise in an age of networked advocacy, citizen journalism, participatory science and new demands on verification?

Contact: melike.sahinol@googlemail.com

Keywords: post-truth age, dialogues on reflexivity, academic boundaries of STS

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Other

182. The Future of Quantifying Humanity: Reflections on Artificial Intelligence

Yu-cheng Liu, Nanhua University

The idea of algorithm constitutes almost every aspect of AI technology. Likewise, the development of AI technology and what goals AI can accomplish also depend on the advancement of algorithm. There are at least two implications when applying algorithm, one is simplification, and the other is quantification. Neither are the two concepts, simplification and quantification, completely equal to each other, nor are they contradictory with each other. As a function of algorithm, the aim of simplification is to know what it simplifies. In doing so, it applies various methods of quantification to assist and to accomplish its function of simplification. Furthermore, the two implications and their related technologies attempt at fixing, enhancing, improving or even replacing some – almost every – aspects of humanity. For example, the feeling of love can be generated through algorithms simulating the operational mechanisms of neocortex of human brain. Other qualities of humanity such like creativity, compassion, or rationality may also be quantified with AI-featured algorithms in the near future. It is possible to think that the boundary between humans and non-humans, or between nature and culture, may have a dramatic change or even will be completely canceled. What if those aspects of humanity, to some extent making humans a unique species, can be quantified, how do we think of ourselves what makes us human? The panel welcomes manuscripts that focus on reflection of quantifying humanity and related researches. It will be a platform for participants to discuss the near future of quantifying humanity.

Contact: ycliu15@gmail.com

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, quantification, humanity, algorithm, simplification

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

184. The Life of Numbers: Models, Projections, Targets and Other Enumerations

Tim Rhodes, Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW; Kari Lancaster, UNSW Sydney

Numbers are afforded life through their entanglements in situated practices. While numbers are often depicted as transcending contexts, this Panel appreciates numbers as relational beings. This orientates us towards exploring how and what numbers become, what they do, and the material effects they make through their implementations, appreciating enumerations as ‘evidence-making interventions’ (Rhodes & Lancaster, Social Science and Medicine, 2019). 

This Panel explores numbering practices as forms of anticipation and governance. Enumerations are afforded a power-of-acting through models, projections and targets which shape the present in relation to imagined futures. This is apparent in the field of global health, where mathematical models and numerical targets are shaping agendas, including as nations strive to achieve futures in which diseases might be eliminated. Enumerations are also key to the making of futures in relation to science, technology, environmental management, and climate. Reflecting on how numbers do their work in different policy, science and implementation sites, this Panel asks how the governing work of numbers – especially through models and modes of projection – is made-up in practices, with particular affects, inviting speculative thinking on the possibilities that enumerations can afford as well as on the futures they might close down.

We invite papers seeking to trace the life of enumerations, in action, in practices, as matters of method, affect and ethicopolitical concern, across different sites of policy, science and implementation. We are especially interested in health, including in relation to disease control, climate, and environment, but also economics, social policy, political science, and technology.

Contact: k.lancaster@unsw.edu.au

Keywords: Numbers, Governance, Futures, Implementation, Models.

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Medicine and Healthcare

Knowledge, Theory and Method

185. The Means And Ends of STS: What Role For STS In The Post-Truth Era?

Rob Evans, Cardiff University; Kjetil Rommetveit, University of Bergen, Norway; Martin Weinel, Cardiff University

One of the biggest changes since the 2016 4S/EASST conference has been the rise of so-called ‘post-truth’ or ‘post-shame’ politics. Exemplified by US President Donald Trump, but by no means limited to the US, politicians across Europe and Latin America appear less and less constrained by the scientific consensus or even their own previous statements. These events matter for STS. Assuming we want to contribute to social, epistemic or environmental justice, what role is there for a field whose methods emphasise the contingent and constructed nature of expertise when those in authority already act as if science is little more than another vested interest?

In this panel we invite papers and presentations that address this challenge in one of two ways. One approach is to focus on explicating the current political crisis and, in particular, the role of science and/or technology in facilitating or resisting it: big data, mainstream and social media, and the work of anti or pro-science groups are all possible ways into this topic. The other approach is to focus on STS itself and its relationship with social movements, expert advisory groups or democratic institutions. Here we are particularly interested in whether, and to what extent, STS can move from an observer to a more active role – to ‘intervene and be relevant’ as the conference theme puts it. In plenary we will take up the reflexive challenge and explore how normative aspirations can mesh with the complexities of contemporary technology and politics.

Contact: evansrj1@cardiff.ac.uk

Keywords: Expertise, Democracy, Post-Truth, Epistemic Injustice, Populism

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

186. The mise-en-scène of science and technology: the role of non-conventional sources

Maria Luísa Veloso, ISCTE-IUL; Telmo Clamote, ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon; Nuno Medeiros, IHC – NOVA FCSH and ESTeSL-IPL, Lisbon

This panel is concerned with exploring the role that unconventional sources – such as film, photography and written works – have played in the scientific framing of the social world and in the social framing of science. Those media were historically used to enact and disseminate certain forms of scientific inquiry and to represent the cultural project of science and scientists in modernity, becoming documents of their own social agency in the shaping of the relation between science and society.

Various social processes and agents can converge in this production of representations: the use of those media as scientific instruments to produce, document and divulge specific forms of expert knowledge of the world (such as the use of film and photography for medical training or diagnosis); their use as means of self-representation by scientists, depicting their own views of scientific work and its role in society (such as autobiographies); their use by non-scientific actors (artists, investors, regulators, etc.) to represent the scientific field from a particular point of view.

The discussion over these seldom explored sources of knowledge can be methodologically and epistemologically challenging, as they not only document the mutual shaping of science and the wider society but are causally consequent, thereby revealing different aspects of its configuration and social agency.

The use of these sources is particularly worth of notice to stress the legacies of modernity, to discuss the heterogeneity of paths to the understanding of science and technology and to question the conventional paths adopted to its social inquiry.

We welcome proposals focusing on the mise-en-scène of science and technology, through different media, of theoretical, methodological or empirical nature, in various formats and with different supports.

Contact: luisa.veloso@iscte-iul.pt

Keywords: MIse-en-Scéne, social representation, science and technology, method, sources

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

187. The Ontological Politics of the Anthropocene

António Carvalho, Centre for Social Studies – University of Coimbra; Ana Raquel Matos, University of Coimbra; Vera Ferreira, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra

The Anthropocene has been described as an event in social theory (Blok and Jensen, 2019). Its manifold conceptual iterations – Capitalocene (Moore, 2016), Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016), Necrocene (McBrien, 2016), Plantationocene (Haraway, 2015) – shed light on various tenets of this proposed geological epoch – extractivism, capitalist accumulation, multispecies engagement, the sixth mass extinction.

Aligned with longstanding concerns within STS, the Anthropocene has led to calls for relational ontologies (Jensen, 2017), collaborative engagements between artists, STSers and climate scientists (Latour, 2017; Saraceno, Engelmann and Szerszynski, 2015) and methodologies that attend to more-than-human agency. Affective and disciplinary “arts of attentiveness” (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster, 2016)  are entwined with an attempt to overcome the “one-world world” (Law, 2015) of dominant cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2005), characterized by modern hubris, paving the way for the emergence of what some authors have described as a pluriverse (Blaser and Cadena, 2018).

Nevertheless, the ontological politics of the Anthropocene are heterogenous, including options such as permaculture and solar radiation management (Martindale, 2015), and attempts to build a “good Anthropocene” (Bennett et al, 2016) – often aligned with relational and symmetrical ontologies – have been criticized as an “immunological biopolitical fantasy” (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018: 3).

We welcome theoretical and empirically grounded contributions that problematize the ontopolitical heterogeneity of the Anthropocene, including (but not limited to) the following topics:

–              Anthropocene, depoliticization and post-politics

–              Technofixes and emerging technologies (such as geoengineering and carbon capture and storage/utilization)

–              More-than-human engagements with the Anthropocene

–              The politics of theory of the Anthropocene

Contact: antoniomanuelcarvalho@gmail.com

Keywords: Anthropocene, Ontology, Cosmopolitics, Climate Change, Emerging Technologies

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

188. The politics of progress

Torsten H Voigt, RWTH Aachen University; Larissa Fischer, RWTH Aachen University; Bettina Paul, Universität Hamburg

Since industrialization, modern societies were defined by progress in various forms, most notably economic and technological growth as well as the idea of scientific progress. Despite Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) seminal work on the myth of scientific progress as a linear process, ideas and concepts about progress are still mostly characterized by incremental change to the better. In other words, progress is considered to introduce novel technologies, ideas, and practices. Progress, however, is not always understood as new, innovative, or scientific. It can come in many different shapes, forms, and practices depending on time and space. Progress and tradition need not be mutually exclusive. It may mean the use of an old technology in a new setting. A practice or technology may also be framed as progress but in fact turn out to be standstill or even regress from a certain perspective, for a particular group of actors or a particular practice.

Borrowing from Law and Joks (2018) as well as Danyi (2016) we invite contributions that trace the politics of who, politics of what and politics of how of progress in today’s society. Who considers certain practices, developments and technologies as progress? What is considered progress? And most importantly, how is progress enacted in practices thus shaping different realities? How do those practices relate to different understandings of progress? How does it gain significance and agency in emerging worlds? We are interested in contributions that address a broad range of understandings and practices of progress.

Contact: thvoigt@soziologie.rwth-aachen.de

Keywords: progress, politics of how, forms of knowing, tradition, technology

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

189. The Politics of Uncertainty; Visualizing, Quantifying, and Fact-Checking Truth Claims in an Era of Polarized Politics

Christopher Anderson, University of Leeds

“The Politics of Uncertainty; Visualizing, Quantifying, and Fact-Checking Truth Claims in an Era of Polarized Politics.”

In various public-facing media genres (such as journalism, scientific blogs, and fact-checking outlets), knowledge claims are more nuanced, robust, and methodologically sophisticated than they have been at any point in modern history. And yet, across social life, “the truth” seems more of a political weapon than ever. Large technology platforms debate the validity of fact-checking political advertisements, while the progressive left has doubled down on “the truth” as a cudgel to wield against populist authoritarians of allstrips. Certainty seems more important and yet further away than ever.

Within Science and Technology Studies, the analysis of how facts are constructed and made robust has been one of the dominant areas of scholarship since the invention of the field. In communication and media studies, research increasingly looks at how journalists visualize and mediate public facts. This panel proposal draws inspiration from the recent disciplinary intersection between these two fields to ask the question: how is uncertainty constructed, both in science and in journalism? How is “a lack of exactitude” made robust and visualized for a public audience? Is uncertainty always politically debilitating? Does it lend itself to being manipulated and exploited by populist politicians? The panel will draw on a range of STS and STS adjacent disciplines in order to understand the politics of the construction of uncertainty in the present moment.

Contact: heychanders@gmail.com

Keywords: certainty, facts, data visualization, public communication

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

191. The Sober Sciences of Intoxicated Subjects: Psychedelics and Their Societies

Nancy D. Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Erika Dyck, University of Saskatchewan

As the sober sciences of intoxication proliferate in the so-called psychedelic renaissance, psychedelics are in the process of surging across the policy-created border between medicine and not-medicine. As a boundary object, psychedelics are useful for interrogating the primacy of western-based, bio-medical sciences of intoxication. Papers in this panel will investigate such questions as, How has history of psychedelics affected our understanding of the culture of drug discovery and regulation? This open panel is particularly interested in the view that place and social location matter for what kind of science is done, who is credited in the process of discovery, and what subjects and objects of knowledge matter. This panel hopes for papers that explicitly engage with the political and epistemological aspects of pharmacology; with the social shaping of societies that engage with psychedelics; and with archivally grounded historical work. Historians have begun to track some of the major figures and events within the history of psychedelics, but the role of women and indigenous people, particularly as investigators and leaders in this science, has often been muted. The participation of these players challenged scientific methodology at the time, but much of the historiography has reinforced these actors as ‘others’, rendering certain figures hypervisible and others invisible in the process of reclaiming psychedelic science as a legitimate feature of psychopharmacological development in the mid-20thcentury.

Contact: campbell@rpi.edu

Keywords: Pharmaceutical drugs, science studies, psychedelic drugs, indigenous knowledges

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Medicine and Healthcare

Knowledge, Theory and Method

192. The tacit governance of decision-making in knowledge production

Ruth Falkenberg, University of Vienna; Maximilian Fochler, University Of Vienna; Ruth Müller, MCTS TU München; Lisa Sigl, Research Platform Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice, University of Vienna

Decisions in knowledge production practices are made on different levels and in different situations: in funding streams, evaluation procedures for proposals and careers, but also in everyday research practices. In the past decades, concerns have been raised that under conditions of hyper-competition for funding and careers, decisions in knowledge production are increasingly dominated by these competitive dynamics and researchers’ focus may shift away from questions of societal relevance. Similarly, it has been questioned which kinds of researcher subjectivities and valuations are privileged within such conditions.

Recent STS research has contributed to understanding how different aspects (such as (e)valuation practices, funding structures, temporalities, subjectification processes) come to matter in such decisions and what kinds of knowledge are made possible or unlikely within specific situated arrangements. This panel wants to foster a debate on how these aspects play together in tacitly governing knowledge production.

In particular, this panel invites papers that discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different analytical dimensions such as valuation, subjectification, or temporality for studying decision-making practices in knowledge production. It also invites contributions that consider the potentially performative character of such analytical dimensions, as well as the added value of combining different analytical dimensions. The panel encourages reflections on questions such as: On which levels should we study decision-making in knowledge production? What decision-making processes are accessible for investigation, and what decisions tend to stay unavailable for scientific studies and public scrutiny? Which methodological approaches allow studying the complex entanglements of aspects involved in decision-making in knowledge production?

Contact: maximilian.fochler@univie.ac.at

Keywords: valuation, subjectification, time, knowledge practices

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Other

193. Theorizing in STS

Sebastian Dahm, TU Berlin; Tim Seitz, Technical University Berlin

The conference call places reflexive engagements within STS at the center of its concern. In our panel, we would like to respond to that invitation with respect to practices of theorizing. In line with its interdisciplinary calling, STS encompasses a multitude of theoretical frameworks that interact with each other in many ways. One of the core preoccupations of STS has always been the analysis of various epistemologies and their consequences. Our panel is going to attempt an exercise in reflexivity by applying this analytical stance to STS themselves. In doing so, we try to engage theories not as static, self-contained entities. Rather, we would like to invite the participants to address practices of theorizing within STS, thereby placing an emphasis on theory-crafting as a fluid and contingent enterprise. Contributions may or may not address some of the following questions:

What characterizes STS theory? How do we as STS scholars pursue the work of theorizing/working with theory? How do practices of theorizing reflect a sense of urgency in face of existential threats? How do we relate theories to our fields and vice versa? What alternative approaches of theory-building could be pursued? What place does theory hold in STS? How could/should its role shift?

In raising those questions, we try to explore the potentials that STS theorizing holds regarding the instable and shifting worlds that we all currently face. We would like to spark a discussion that tries to connect our scholarly practices to the challenges we are entangled in.

Contact: sebastian.dahm@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: Theory, Epistemologies, Performativity, Methodologies, Reflexivity

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

195. Timing matters: How does long-term ethnographic research affect concept work and case-making in practice?

Jörg Niewöhner, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Patrick Bieler, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Martina Klausner, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Josefine Raasch, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The conference theme alerts us to ‘timing’ and thus the difficulty of conducting research on emerging phenomena without becoming a fleeting observer ourselves. We ask how long-term research commitments affect how we conceptualize and construct cases, how we attend to the temporalities of these cases and how these temporalities in turn affect our concept work. Inspired by anthropology’s emphasis on long-term ethnographic research, we ask how long-term engagements with research fields shape STS research in practice.

To turn our attention to those stated effects, we propose to focus on the following three dimensions:

1) Based on the assumption that long-term interactions with the interlocutors have an impact on the processes and outcomes of conceptualizing, we ask: What matters shape our conceptualizing? How are these concepts, developed in long-term research, generative of re-conceptualizations in STS?

2) In a similar way, long-term interactions shape the processes and outcomes of case-making. How does long-term research commitment shape what matters and how we construct our cases? How do these cases, developed in long-term research, shape our modes of generalising?

3) And last, we wonder how timing matters in the ways we think about and conceptualize continuities and ruptures: How does it help us to understand degrees of freedom and formations of (inter-)dependencies of processes we observe?

We seek contributions that address these questions based on long-term empirical research projects. The panel is meant to foster an exchange of experiences with long-term research, provide a space for reflecting current efforts and a platform for discussing ways forward.

Contact: joerg.niewoehner@staff.hu-berlin.de

Keywords: long-term research, concept work, case-making, continuities and ruptures

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

197. Towards a Critical Medical STS

Hined A Rafeh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Rebecca Monteleone, SFIS – Arizona State University; Yesmar Semaj Oyarzun, Rice University

In a world increasingly governed by technoscientific understandings of human bodyminds (Schalk 2018), what might a critical medical STS offer in theory and practice? Through this panel, we aim to contribute to a growing critical and intersectional medical STS research agenda, canon, and community, that centers on the contributions to STS understandings of science and biomedicine from critical race, critical disability, queer, and feminist perspectives. We seek submissions that engage critically with both their own subject matter and with current STS theory and practice to identify pressure points, generative alternatives, and productive coalitions in which to situate ourselves. Drawing on the work of scholars like Dorothy Roberts, Alondra Nelson, Aimi Hamraie, Kelly Fristch, and Emily Martin, we seek to explore what commitments, practices, and alignments STS scholars can and should make in the pursuit of scholarship and praxis regarding medicine, health, illness, and governance.

This panel invites work that aims to cultivate community, practice, and theory that is attentive to multiple matrices of institutional, personal, political and material oppressions in subjects relating to medicine, health, and illness. We welcome presentations that consider questions related to or offer provocations on topics including but not limited to:

– Epistemologies, practices, and perspectives that acknowledge the situated, embodied, or experiential expertise of pathologized bodyminds;

– Re-imaginings, redefinings, and rearticulations of bodyminds through relational practices;

– Interrogation and unsettling of medical authority, categorization, and its relationship to governance; and

– Processes of commercialization, professionalization, and design and deployment of biomedical technologies

Contact: yesmar@rice.edu

Keywords: health; illness; biomedicine; medicine; healthcare

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

199. (Transnational) research infrastructures as sites of technopolitical transformations

Erik Aarden, University of Vienna; Zinaida Vasilyeva, MCTS, TU München; Oguz Özkan, MCTS Technical University Munich; Kamiel Mobach, University of Vienna

As large-scale collaboration in research and the shared use of data and machinery continue to expand, (transnational) research infrastructures grows increasingly significant for scientific practice and research policy alike. Next to scientific relevance, research infrastructures have long articulated broader political visions of progress and collaboration. Research infrastructures therefore provide a key site for STS to study sociotechnical transformations and related political imaginations across space and time. For this open session, we invite contributions that conceptualize (transnational) research infrastructures as simultaneously epistemic and political spaces that mutually shape one another.

Papers may discuss research infrastructures that include, but are not limited to, large machinery, shared databases and institutional networks. The material and institutional configuration of such infrastructures can range from large-scale, centralized laboratories to distributed networks enabling the circulation of bodies, materials and data. We invite contributions that consider a wide range of research infrastructures from disciplines as diverse as physics, biology, social sciences and humanities, as well as other fields.  We are particularly interested in perspectives on the relations between, on the one hand, the perceived need to coordinate scientific facilities, infrastructures, resources and governance, and, on the other hand, questions of participation, rights and responsibilities, public legitimacy and anticipated public benefits. In what ways are research infrastructures not only expected to enhance scientific knowledge production, but also to produce, consolidate or advance political visions and social orders?

Contact: erik.aarden@univie.ac.at

Keywords: research infrastructures, transnational, technopolitics, collaboration

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

200. Transnational STS: Theories, Practices, and Pedagogies

Kim Fortun, University of California Irvine; Noela Invernizzi, Universidade Federal do Parana; Duygu Kasdogan, İzmir Katip Çelebi Üniversitesi; Aalok Khandekar, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad; Angela Okune, University of California – Irvine

STS scholarship has flourished in diverse regions and institutional spaces, creating a deeply transnational, interdisciplinary research field.  Further, STS scholars in diverse places often study global circuits of ideas, technologies, experts, development models, and so on. Transnational STS thus has many facets and potentials. Building on continuing dialogue about transnational STS in recent years (especially since the 2018 4S conference in Sydney, where TRANSnational STS was the conference theme), this panel will bring together presenters working to conceptualize, practice and extend Transnational STS in different ways. In conversation with STS scholarship that focuses on the constitution of modern technoscience across and between nation-states, this panel seeks to reflect on the transnational character of STS at theoretical, methodological and empirical levels from a comparative perspective. Rather than approaching “transnational” as an ideal temporal-spatial universalism to be achieved, this panel particularly aims to elaborate on and question STS praxis that centers on the analytic of the “nation-state” in studying technoscientific developments as well as reflecting on the uncritical utilization of STS concepts/theories across different contexts. Through opening a self-reflexive space about methodological nationalism and neocolonial orientations in our praxis at this very moment when we witness the haunt of the far-right movements, authoritarian states, post-truth politics, and intentional denial of socio-ecological crises across the world, we invite contributions that reflect on theoretical and methodological capacities of STS to imagine and reclaim for science(s) otherwise. Contributions may address, among others, the following questions:

• What makes STS transnational? How can we think about “transnational STS” in juxtaposition to other concepts, e.g., international, multinational, postnational, supra-national, anti-national, global, cosmopolitan, universal, imperial, and translocal?
• What becomes visible when nation-state as the only analytic breaks down? What is the role of the nation-state with regard to education, research activities and the regulation of technologies in the contemporary period?
• How do STS theories and concepts travel, get used and modified around the world? Are the directions of the flux of theories and concepts changing? To what extent do STS theories and concepts reflect on the inadequacies of existing categories -e.g., “East and West” ; “center and periphery”; “developing and developed”?
• What can we learn from South-South dialogues in STS?
• How are transnational research networks formed and organized? How do these networks set research agendas?
• What infrastructures can support transnational STS formations?
• What are the methods and methodologies used to foster transnational knowledge production in a collaborative manner? How would transnational STS add to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary character of the field?
• What are exemplary cases that demonstrate transnational STS sensibilities?
• How can transnational STS contribute to STS teaching? How can transnational STS add to local efforts in engaging with multiple publics, decision-makers, scientists, activists, and other related actors?
• How can transnational STS contribute to the future of the field? What are the limitations of doing transnational STS?

Contact: duygukasdogan@gmail.com

Keywords: transnational STS, nation-state, neocolonialism, research networks, pedagogyl STS, nation-state, neocolonialism, research networks, pedagogy

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

203. Universals’ Locales: Locating Theoretical Sciences in Global Modernities

Michael Barany, University of Edinburgh

In theory, the ideas and methods of modern theoretical and mathematical sciences are born universal, ungoverned by researchers’ locales and unconstrained by geopolitical borders. In practice, material and political constraints, linguistic and national barriers, and the manifold idiosyncrasies of individual research settings have historically divided theoretical and mathematical scholars more than their putatively placeless quarry has united them. This contrast between universal ideals and local practices has been one of the most durable and important features of the theoretical and mathematical sciences across their history, and one of the most persistent challenges for their history and sociology. We now live in a period of global science that dates to the mid-twentieth century, when dramatic changes in the scale of research, travel, collaboration, publication, and disciplinary organization fundamentally transformed who could participate in debates and research programs about abstract theories, where and how they could do so, what mathematical and other theoretical frameworks they could use, and what they could do with them.

This open panel seeks historical and sociological studies as well as theoretical and methodological examinations that interrogate how producers of theoretical and mathematical science lay claim to universal knowledges between local and global contexts, and what this means for the social, institutional, infrastructural, and political conditions and implications for such endeavors. The panel continues discussions from the January 2020 “Universals’ Locales” workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, and welcomes both new and returning participants to these conversations.

Contact: M.Barany@ed.ac.uk

Keywords: universals, theory, globalization, internationalism, ideals

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

204. Unpacking Food Chains: Knowledge-Making, Biotechnoscience, and Multispecies Connectivity in Troubled Societies

Mariko Yoshida, The Australian National University; Shiaki Kondo, Hokkaido University

STS scholarship has addressed a variety of topics with perspectives drawn from the intersection between political ecology of food and multispecies anthropology, such as the microbiopolitics of raw dairy consumption (Paxson 2013), food sovereignty in the aftermath of infectious zoonotic diseases (Keck 2015; Lowe 2010; Porter 2019), or/and the reconstruction of labor and domestication of industrial animals entangled with nonhuman biological agents such as viruses and parasitic microbes (Blanchette 2015). This panel aims to bring together empirical research on the implications of biotechnologies in the contemporary food industry, which unfold relationalities of ambiguous agents, a so-called “quasi-species” (Lowe 2010). We will examine how interests of actors including small-scale producers, consumers, scientific experts, and administrative institutions reconfigure the notion of ecologies and power. This panel will trace the far-reaching range of focus areas and methodological approaches that are pertinent to questions of environmental and food governance, the role of biotechnologies that achieve optimization for cost efficiency and high value-added products, and the implication for resource management. Potential topics include but are not limited to: the socio-technical imaginaries underlying food justice; knowledge practices in shaping commodity food chains; infrastructures of food risk and safety; the construction of food-related ethics surrounding genetically-modified organisms, synthetic biology, and mass DNA sequencing; multi-species networks in agri- and aquaculture systems at local, national, and global levels; the continuities and ruptures among hygiene management, scientific frameworks, and lay expertise; and intersections between modes of food production and conservation technologies.

References:

Blanchette, Alex. 2015. Herding Species: Biosecurity, Posthuman Labor, and the American Industrial Pig. Cultural Anthropology 30 (4) 640-669.

Keck, Frédéric. 2015. Liberating Sick Birds: Poststructuralist Perspectives on the Biopolitics of Avian Influenza. Cultural Anthropology 30 (2): 224-235.

Lowe, Celia. 2010. “Viral Clouds: Becoming H5N1 in Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 625–49.

Paxon, Heather. 2013. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Porter, Natalie. 2019. Viral Economies: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Contact: mariko.yoshida@anu.edu.au

Keywords: Food safety, commodities, knowledge, multispecies, microbiopolitics

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Knowledge, Theory and Method

209. What happens when we all agree: Governing non epistemic controversies

Javier Guerrero, Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano de Medellín; Jorge M Escobar, Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano

The study of controversies has been a key topic within STS. The usual analysis of scientific controversies focuses on disagreements about facts, whether there is a fact or not, who established it first, or theories whether it is correct or not, who established it first. However, some contemporary scientific controversies do not seem to be about facts or theories: the different actors involved in the controversy agree on the facts, but the controversy persists. For example, the controversy about tolerable levels of pollution or the banning of products such as asbestos, as the actors agree on risks, harmfulness and the effects on economy. There is therefore no epistemic disagreement, but the scientific controversy over solutions or prohibitions persists. We have called this type of controversy non-epistemic controversies. The session looks for proposals dealing with examples of this type of controversy, what kinds of knowledge is produced in such controversies?, what keeps them open?, how to study such controversies?, what should be the role of STS in such controversies?, and consequences for the governance of science and technology.

Contact: jeguerreroc180@gmail.com

Keywords: Controversies, governance of S&T, non-epistemic controversies

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

217. Workshop on Experiments with Algo-governance and Future-Making: STS Scholars as Designers

Denisa Reshef Kera, University of Salamanca; Judith Christine Igelsböck, MCTS, Technical University of Munich; Galina Mihaleva, Nanyang Technological University; Tincuta Heinzel, Loughborough University; Hannah Perner-Wilson, Kobakant collective; Josef Ho

Participants will offer their algo-governance prototypes, scenarios & projects to the group for experiencing, modifying, experiment with and reflecting. We will create a Github page and a small booklet with examples of algo-governance experiments and prototypes that try to embed regulations into code and algorithms or show attempts to define standards, specifications, constraints for design, auditing, testing or certifying emerging infrastructures (blockchain, DLTs, machine learning, AIs, autonomous robots). The main problem with code-centered, rule-based systems promising automated and blockchain or AI-driven futures is their democratic deficit and ahistorical narrative of some deep structures (of human or social behavior and politics) behind the code that remains a black box even if it is “open source”. We would like to respond to this by experimenting and testing with alternatives to the algo-governance attempts to reduce the political and historical processes of deliberation and consensus-building into decontextualized game theory concepts or various proposals to crowdsource data and attitudes. Can we make the actual code of our future infrastructures more historical and contextual, open to political deliberation and engagement?  How to connect the conceptual and historical depths of the governance concepts and ideas with the flexible and experimental approaches of prototyping and testing?

Contact: denisa.kera@usal.es

Keywords: prototypes, design, blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, AIs, machine learning, governance-by-design, technological governance, algorithmic governance

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method