Over 200 open panel proposals have been accepted for the EASST/4S meeting. They are listed by title below. Use the menu on the left to browse the full abstracts.
The purpose of calling for Open Panel proposals is to stimulate the formation of new networks around topics of interest to the STS community. Open panels have been proposed by scholars working in nearly every continent and relating to just about every major STS theme.
When submitting papers to open panels on the abstract submission platform, you will select the Open Panel you are submitting to. Papers submitted to an open panel will be reviewed by the open panel organizer(s) and will be given first consideration for that session.
Also at the time of submission, you will also be asked to nominate two alternative open panel preferences for your paper. In the event that your paper is not included in the open panel of your first preference it will be considered for the alternative panels indicated in your submission.
Abstracts
By subject
Economics, Markets, Value / Valuation
Engineering and Infrastructure
Environmental /
Multispecies Studies
Gender / Sexuality / Feminist STS
Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology
Information, Computing and Media Technology
Race / Racialization / Indegeneity
Science Communication / Public Engagement
STS and Social Justice / Social Movement
19. Careful engagements
Doris Lydahl, University of Gothenburg; Niels Christian Nickelsen, Aarhus University, School of Education
During some time, interventionist research has become an important topic of conversation in STS (Zuiderent-Jerak 2015). This is important in a time where many research grants come with stipulations about partnership with actors outside academia. It appears that nobody offers clear advice on what to do or whom to turn to while engaging as a researcher in practice (Martin 2016). Thus, in this panel, we will discuss dilemmas and ambitions to engage and intervene with STS. Jensen (2007) proposes to ‘sort’ the various attachments the researcher encounters to different parties in the studied field to be aware of which parties the research strengthens and weakens. This leads to a number of questions. What inequalities do we risk producing especially when there is funding involved? Are there ways to avoid these by engaging with care (Viseu 2015)? What tensions and struggles do we meet while engaging in practice? How does this affect academic work and output? There is not much doubt that considering closer engagement as a scholarly method for producing new STS-insights into our research topics is opposed to using strategic interventions for achieving normative goals defined by managers, professionals and researchers. We foresee that the prospect of engagement will help STS scholars to explore what it means to live in concerned communities. In addition, engaging as a STS researcher in practice undoubtedly evoke Howard Becker’s pivotal question “Whose side are we on?”
Contact: doris.lydahl@gu.se
Keywords: engagements, interventions, care
Categories: Other
73. Growing old in a more-than human world: Materialities of care and interspecies entanglements
Nete Schwennesen, Copenhagen University; Daniel Lopez Gomez, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya; Joanna Latimer, SATSU, University of York
This panel calls for papers with an interest in exploring the recent ‘post-humanist turn’ within ageing studies (Andrews & Duff 2019). While age studies has privileged anthropocentric visions of agency, usually as a way to contest the deficit-based visions of later life in care, a recent interest has grown around studying how late life is shaped and emerge through more-than-human ecologies which involves digital technologies, robots, architectures, plants, landscapes, animals, music etc. At the same time, new theoretical orientations such as new materialism, material-semiotics, assemblage theory, non-representational theory, and affect theory have come to inform studies on later life about the need to explore more-than-human entanglements in aging, and the configuration of later life. In this panel we invite papers with an interest in exploring how later life are configured through more-than-human entanglements, and asks: What does ageing becomes, when ageing is seen as a stage of becoming-with more-than-humans? How does ‘post-human’ theories challenge human centric notions of care? How does imaginative visions of eldercare shape future entanglements of late life and more—than-humans? What are the new opportunities for intervention and experimentation, that opens up, when we think about later life as constituted through more-than-human entanglements?
Contact: ns@anthro.ku.dk
Keywords: ageing, care, ecologies, more-than human, materiality, technology, affect, interspecies entanglements
Categories: Other
149. Robotics Innovation in Care: Ethical Considerations
Núria Vallès-Peris, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Ludovica Lorusso, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Cecilio Angulo, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya; Miquel Domenech, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Robots designed to accompany our elderly or to help people with Alzheimer; robots used in therapies with children with autism or to help them learn medication guidelines; robots to reduce the anxiety or pain of patients or to facilitate virtual assistance of hospitalized people; robots to feed or bathe people with limited mobility; robots designed to have affective and/or sexual relationships… Robotics innovation for care in daily live. We are living in an innovation framework in which development and technological application seem to have been previous or separated to the discussion on the moral, social, economic or political model that these innovations entail. Beyond usual debates regarding its alleged incorporation in daily life, and the utopian or dystopian scenarios that accompany its progressive introduction, the interaction with robots enacts controversies that require alternative forms of ethical reflection. In the same way, the ideation, design or commercialization strategies that are mobilized around this type of robots, suppose certain ways to conceptualize human-machine interactions, as well as certain ways to understand care and the role of care in our world. In these landscapes and dreamscapes, this panel has as main aim to discuss about ethical controversies that emerge (and disappear) with the development of robotics in care relations. We propose a multidisciplinary approach to this issue, from multiple and different perspectives: technological mediation, imaginaries, public controversies, risk identification…
Contact: nuria.valles@uab.cat
Keywords: robots, care, ethics, health, daily life
Categories: Other
198. Transformations and tensions in academic publishing
Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Centre for Sciencs & Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University; Kean Birch, York University
This panel invites contributions that explore practices of writing, reviewing and editing academic literature, particularly in light of recent transformations in its technological, institutional, and commercial formats. In the course of the last decades, digital technology has for example created new possibilities for circulating and reviewing academic research through pre-print archives and post-publication peer review platforms. Debates around Open Access and policy initiatives like Plan S in Europe in turn have re-emphasized unsolved questions regarding the political economy of scholarly publishing. Moreover, practices of writing and reviewing academic literature across all fields are shaped by relentless publication pressure, growing numbers of submissions to established journals, and the constitutive effects of citation metrics like the journal impact factor. We are interested in what these diverse developments mean for different actors in the scholarly publishing system. For example, how do researcher select journals and organize their publication strategies around intended audiences and career goals? How do practices of peer review and selection of manuscripts from an editorial perspective change in light of growing numbers of submissions? What defines publishability and originality in the context of increasingly crowded and stratified journal landscapes? How do relations with commercial publishers affect the outlook of editors on their journals, and how do scholarly communities react in turn? The panel invites studies based on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods.
Contact: wkaltenbrunner@gmail.com
Keywords: publishing, writing, reviewing, editing, open access
Categories: Other