ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: sblacker@yorku.ca

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

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

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

46. Disciplining the senses

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

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

Contact: sandra.calkins@fu-berlin.de

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

Categories: Other

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

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

Brian Noble, Dalhousie University

Contact: bnoble@dal.ca

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

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: nckrd@mail.ru

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

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

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

Martin Andrés Perez Comisso, SFIS – Arizona State University

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: mapc.088@gmail.com

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

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Engineering and Infrastructure

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

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

89. Innovating and regenerating the migrant-technology boundary

Olga Usachova

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

Contact: olga.usachova@phd.unipd.it

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

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

Information, Computing and Media Technology

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

104. Making Home, With Care

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: b.pasveer@maastrichtuniversity.nl

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

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: franziska.dahlmeier@uni-hamburg.de

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

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

113. More-than-Human Ethnographies of Global Health

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

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

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

Contact: luisarc@mit.edu

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

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

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

Yoehan Oh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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

REFERENCES

* Acker, Amelia, and Joan Donovan. 2019. “Data craft: a theory/methods package for critical internet studies.” Information, Communication & Society 22(11): 1590-1609.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Ebner, Susanne. 2019. “Hierarchies of Knowledge: Usage of a Chinese Media App in Rural Tamil Nadu” presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, New Orleans, U.S.

* Eglash, Ron. 1999. African fractals: Modern computing and indigenous design. Rutgers University Press.

* Forsythe, Diana E. 1993. “Engineering knowledge: The construction of knowledge in artificial intelligence.” Social studies of science 23(3): 445-477.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Noble, Safiya Umoja, and Brendesha M. Tynes. 2016. The intersectional internet: Race, sex, class, and culture online. Peter Lang International Academic Publishers.

* Petrillo, Anthony. 1994. “Ethnocomputers in Nigerian Computer Education.” Paper presented at the 31st Annual Conference of the Mathematical Association of Nigeria (March 1994).

* Philip, Kavita, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish. 2012. “Postcolonial computing: A tactical survey.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(1): 3-29.

* Posner, Miriam. 2016. “What’s Next: The Radical Unrealised Potential of Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the digital humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 32-41. University of Minnesota Press.

* Risam, Roopika. 2018. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

* Snow, Jackie. 2018. “We’re in a diversity crisis”: Cofounder of Black in AI on what’s poisoning algorithms in our lives.” MIT Technology Review (Feb 14, 2018).

* Stöckelová, Tereza, and Jaroslav Klepal. 2018. “Chinese Medicine on the Move into Central Europe: A Contribution to the Debate on Correlativity and Decentering STS.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society. 12(1): 57-79.

* Rankin, Joy Lisi. 2018. A People’s History of Computing in the United States. Harvard University Press.

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

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

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

* Tinn, Honghong. 2018. “Modeling Computers and Computer Models: Manufacturing Economic-Planning Projects in Cold War Taiwan, 1959–1968.” Technology and culture 59(5): S66-S99.

* Watson-Verran, Helen, and David Turnbull. 1995. “Science and other indigenous knowledge systems.” In Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 2nd edition, edited by Jasanoff, S., G. E. Markle, J. Peterson, and T. Pinch, 115-139. Sage.

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

Contact: ohy@rpi.edu

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

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

141. Radical and Radicalizing Workers In The Scientific Enterprise

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

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

Contact: yarden.katz@gmail.com

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

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

148. Re-scaling outer-space(s)

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

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

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

Contact: james.merron@unibas.ch

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

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

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

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

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

Contact: susanne.koch@tum.de

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

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: kayaakyuz@gmail.com

Keywords: translation, languages, semiotic intervention, postcolonial STS

Categories: Other

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

164. STS and Political Ecology: Exploring socially just and ecologically sustainable emerging worlds

Marx Jose Gomez Liendo, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas; Maria Victoria Canino, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas

Our current global ecological crisis has ontological and epistemic roots. Therefore, sustainability transitions are also the design of transformative pathways to other modes of being and knowing. Living otherwise is a huge challenge, but an unavoidable one. This panel calls for proposals that explore socially just and ecologically sustainable emerging worlds through links between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Political Ecology (PE). We invite submissions focused but no limited to some of the following aspects for a STS-PE joint analysis:

– Multi-actor asymmetries and controversies related to hegemonic (capital-centered) and counter-hegemonic (eco-centered) understandings of sustainability in socio-technical changes.

– Contested temporalities (economic, ecological, political, existential, etc.) in innovation processes, farming practices, health systems, industrial production, and extractive activities.

– Intercultural dialogues and experiences in sustainability policies.

– Situated strategies and knowledges to manage a wide range of commons (water, seeds, forest, traditional practices, etc.) through different spatial scales (local, regional, global).

– Theoretical and empirical contributions to think alternative understandings (non-modern, posmodern and/or transmodern) about energy and to develop different kinds of energy transitions.

Contact: mjgl1189@gmail.com

Keywords: STS, Political Ecology, Sustainability Transitions, Ecological Crisis, Knowledge Crisis

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

177. The “Contemporary Synthesis” of Race and Biotechnology in Emerging/Developing Worlds

Tien Dung Ha, Cornell University

How are race and racial differences conceptualized, molecularlized and mobilized in emerging and developing worlds? Scientists from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds are pushing for the diverse inclusion of underrepresented groups in biomedical research. Duana Fullwiley (2014) argues that the increasing need for “diversity” produces a “contemporary synthesis” between the conceptualization of race as biological categories and the politically-inclusive call for “diverse” representation in biomedical research. This panel seeks to advance this “contemporary synthesis” argument by exploring ways that science and medicine, a historically-imperial tool of control and colonization, have taken on a new role in building national science, aiding economic development, and constructing national identities among these postcolonial and emerging states.

The panel explores how different forms of biotechnologies are giving rise to new configurations of bioeconomies and biopower that are shaping the governmentality, sovereignty, identity and bodies of the emerging/developing worlds. To this end, the panel is motivated to unpack a series of questions including (but not limited to):

1. What are the specific conditions that shape the knowledge making of race science in developing worlds?
2. How do race and racial differences become co-opted into postcolonial science projects?
3. How do we account for transnational networks of people, funding, capital, data, and infrastructure that refigure national belonging and state politics?
4. How are populations ethnically and racially relabeled inscribed and categorized amid the forces of race science and the global pharmaceutical industry?
5. What does “diversity” mean in biomedical research in these emerging/developing worlds?

Contact: dvh27@cornell.edu

Keywords: genomics and identity, contemporary synthesis, molecularization of race and racial differences, diversity in postcolonial science, politics of inclusion

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

178. The Bio(Techno)logical Politics of Synchrony

Rachel Vaughn, UCLA Institute for Society & Genetics

Michelle Rensel, UCLA Institute for Society & Genetics

We are a behavioral endocrinologist and a feminist food and discard studies scholar exploring the 30+ year history of science behind the search for menstrual synchrony and its extension to modern-day biotechnologies. In our research we suggest that the persistent search for synchrony is exemplary of broader sociopolitical and scientific interest in controlling and making manageable (i.e., predictable and regular), if not marketable, biological processes presumed ‘female.’ We also consider the gendered, classed and racialized assumptions embedded within the design or ‘re-design’ of biotechnologies of health, wellness, and bodily management. This open call for panel participants seeks interdisciplinary inquiries into a host of critical, feminist and anti-colonial interpretations of the technoscientific, including interventions and capitalist consumer objects questing after ‘optimal’ timing, synchrony and bodily management—from biohacks to the rise of sustainable menstrual management products, from nutritional, hormonal and cycle-tracking apps to technological re-design aimed at mediating or reducing toxic exposures, waste and its multiple lifespans and regenerations. As interdisciplinary, contingent faculty striving to maintain creative research programs in spite of precarious employment, we aim to cultivate an inclusive space for research bridging the life sciences and humanities. We seek to learn from other scholars with similar research or design interests, and to create a cross-disciplinary, cross-generational opportunity within which we might support publication outcomes on these themes. To this end, we especially welcome scholars who would consider pre-circulating and workshopping their materials for thoughtful, mutual feedback.

Contact: rvaughn@women.ucla.edu

Keywords: Synchrony,  Discard, Biotechnology, Life Sciences, Feminist Science & Technology Studies

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

200. Transnational STS: Theories, Practices, and Pedagogies

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

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

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

Contact: duygukasdogan@gmail.com

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

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

201. Transplanetary Ecologies

Matjaz Vidmar, University of Edinburgh; Michael Clormann, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich

(Eco)systemic understanding of the patterns of interaction between life and its environment has so far been mainly limited to the Earth. However, with current epistemological and technoscientific expansions further into outer space, a new, more holistic view of our past and future presence in the Universe is required. Technomaterial heritage like artificial satellites, planetary probes and discarded rocket bodies increasingly co-habit with comet dust, rocks and high-energy cosmic particles – forming hybrid material environments of human concern beyond planetary boundaries. Similarly, in our search for liveable environments and signs of life on other planets, from looking for microbes in our Solar System to measuring the composition of atmospheres of exo-planets, we may have to re-examine the core notion of ecological symbiosis of “life” and this emerging “environment”.

Hence, in this panel, we aim to commence a systemic study of the construction of “transplanetary ecologies”, bringing together the insights from developing STS perspectives, be they about search for, and understanding of, extra-terrestrial life, or the expansion of Earth’s ecologies into outer space. We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions from colleagues conducting STS-inspired research in any related fields (astrobiology, geoscience, astronomy, space exploration, etc.). In particular, we aim to address questions along the lines of what “off-Earth” ecologies might be framed as, how they are different/similar to their Earthly equivalents, and how are they are affecting the development/understanding of the ecology as a concept.

Contact: michael.clormann@tum.de

Keywords: outer space, ecologies, Earth, materiality, planetary

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

202. Traveling Knowledge: Translational Practices in Different Countries and Fields

Sandra Patricia Gonzalez-Santos, Universidad Anahuac; Noemie MerleauPonty, Ehess; Karen Jent, University of Cambridge

Basic scientific research does not directly translate into applied knowledge. Then, how does knowledge travel from where it is produced in the research site to its application and use (e.g. from bench to bed side)? What shapes the different translational practices? This panel invites those interested in exploring these questions. Our proposal is structured under four working assumptions: (a) knowledge travels in diverse, situated and multi-directional trajectories, (b) each country and scientific discipline has its own translational practices, (c) these practices both facilitate and obstruct knowledge to travel between spaces and users, and (d) studying how knowledge travels between actors, settings and countries is another way of tracing how knowledge and technology are being made useable. With these assumptions in mind, we call for papers addressing translational practices in a variety of fields (e.g. reproductive science, biomedicine, environmental studies, artificial intelligence, etc.) with the objective of creating a comparative analysis. The following questions are meant to trigger this analysis:

What shapes translational practices?

How do local and global translational practices stagger or propel translation?

How do translational practices make knowledge (in)accessible?

How do translational practices participate in shaping the way basic science is conducted and valued?

How does translational practices shape and create knowledge?

Contact: sandragonzalezsantos@gmail.com

Keywords: translational science, knowledge production, science circulation, frontiers of knowledge, technological innovations, feminist and postcolonial science and technology studies

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

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

Michael Barany, University of Edinburgh

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

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

Contact: M.Barany@ed.ac.uk

Keywords: universals, theory, globalization, internationalism, ideals

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other