ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

14. Borders in the Anthropocene: Transformations of Climates, Human and Nonhuman Mobility, and the Politics of the Earth

Huub Dijstelbloem, University of Amsterdam; Polly Pallister-Wilkins, University of Amsterdam

This panel engages with the matter of the border in the Anthropocene. STS studies show that networks of humans, technologies and nature form the earth where we live, but are often left out of the political representation of this world. But how do these hybrid networks affect borders and the trinity of states, territory and sovereignty? How should borders be conceived in the Anthropocene when international mobility is increasingly concerned with nonhuman entities? 

“Borders in the Anthropocene” asks attention for the emergence of new kinds of migrants and new categories of migration such as climate migration and environmental refugees as well as new categories of disasters and humanitarian and security issues related to the Anthropocene. The panel investigates the transformation of borders in landscapes and seascapes, such as the role of borders in the Arctic, border surveillance in the Sahara or the emergence of new migration routes in mountain regions. “Borders in the Anthropocene” analyzes the hybrid nature of these transformations, the way these transformations are monitored and how information systems are set up to register mobility in the Anthropocene, varying from human migration to health surveillance, travelling pathogens and the circulation of species.  

The panel aims to bring scholars together who study the transformation of borders in the Anthropocene and engage with climate change, environmental disasters, epidemics, the geopolitics of the earth and the circulation of people and all kinds of nonhuman entities. “Borders in the Anthropocene” welcomes empirical, conceptual and normative contributions as well as visual presentations, artistic work and political interventions.

Contact: dijstelbloem@gmail.com

Keywords: Borders, Anthropocene, Migration, Politics, Nonhumans

Categories: Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

20. Categories of Hatred: Unearthing algorithmic cultures of hate groups, marginalization, and surveillance of minorities

Melissa Adler, Western University; David Nemer, University of Virginia

Categories and classifications make algorithmic cultures possible. Unlike former bureaucratic classificatory technologies that assumed and insisted upon the stability of categories, the categories in Big Data machinery are on the move by design—shifting, modulating, defining, and redefining (Cheney-Lippold 2018). This modularity also functions to refine and tailor categories to their users and users to their categories. The consequences of these algorithmic functions depend upon their context—whether their purpose is policing or border patrol, selling goods and services, or organizing political movements. For example, one might argue that online hate groups gain power by specifying the characteristics of the targets of their hatred and installing those profiles within information communication technologies are intimately connected in and through algorithms, in vast, networked apparatuses that serve state capitalism. This panel will explore the use and formulation of categories in various contexts, including hate groups in instant messaging and social media platforms, surveillance of visible minorities, consumer profiles across different platforms, and so on. The panel has three primary aims: 1) To understand the ways that categories function in different algorithmic contexts and cultures. 2) To unearth the methods by which ICTs actively produce and refine categories, and to what ends. 3) To gather a sense of the role of categories in the interconnectedness of local and global contexts, governments, corporations, and militaries within and across ICTs.

Contact: nemer@virginia.edu

Keywords: hate group, classification, algorithm, social media, surveillance

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

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

27. Collective Forms Of Governance: Rethinking The Role Of Civic Engagement With Science & Technology In Epistemically Fragmented Societies

Madeleine Murtagh, Policy, Ethics & Life Sciences Research Centre, Newcastle University; Barbara Prainsack, University of Vienna; Alessandro Blasimme, ETH Zurich

Western democracies are facing harsh criticism for their alleged inability to meet their own standards of inclusivity and justice. Against the backdrop of rising inequalities within and across societies, dissatisfaction with the rituals and symbols of representative democracy is mounting. A pronounced anti-establishment rhetoric is eroding the institutional culture of democracy, its reliance on scientific and other established sources of knowledge, and the credibility of expertise and competence. Consequently, collective decision-making about complex sociotechnical options (such as genome editing, access to sensitive personal data for research and care, and climate change) is increasingly taking place within a legitimacy void. Resistance to a Western normativity, both in the Global South and Global North, demands alternative modes, reference points, spaces of decision making.

In this panel we ask: How might we deploy collective forms of governance in epistemically fragmented and diverse societies? What role can civic engagement – understood as the involvement of publics in the governance of science and technology within and outside of the traditional institutions of representative democracy – play in producing democratically legitimate decisions on complex sociotechnical matters? What practices of public deliberation can enhance the quality of science and technology governance? Can civic engagement be an antidote to the political manipulation of public opinion? We do not assume civic engagement to be an unproblematic ‘good’. Rather we encourage critical reflection and engagement with these questions to ask what can be or might be the effects of such civic engagement? Particularly, looking beyond the precepts of a Western sensibility.

Contact: madeleine.murtagh@newcastle.ac.uk

Keywords: collective governance, governing science and technology, diversity, normativity

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Science Communication/Public Engagement

30. Contesting the ‘migration/border control machine’: entanglements of information and surveillance infrastructures with the making of publics/’non-publics’

Nina Amelung, University of Minho; Silvan Pollozek, MCTS, Technical University of Munich

In recent years information and surveillance infrastructures of migration and border control have gained more attention of civic actors, activists and researchers. Work at the intersection of STS, critical migration and border studies scrutinizes the hidden processes of data and information processing and their consequences on citizens and migrants, the seemingly neutrality of technologies or the role of technocratic experts.

But what could or should enable ‘non-publics’, those affected by the infrastructure’s consequences of social sorting, to transform into visible collectives and publics? How are other critical voices part of larger publics and controversies? How do publics emerge, and which issues and concerns gain authority and affect the design and working of surveillance and information infrastructures?

The panel engages with the making of ‘non-publics’, publics and controversies around information and surveillance infrastructures of migration and border control and addresses multiple forms of critique and contestation. It explores the arenas in which controversies unfold, the actors involved and the issues and concerns being articulated. It critically examines which actors’ voices are in- and excluded, amplified or silenced, as well as the processes and dynamics which enable or restrict public contestation. Furthermore, it reflects upon the ontological politics of research and researchers themselves. How is epistemic authority constructed within publics and beyond when engaging as experts, opinion makers and (expert) activists?

We invite contributions that study emergent publics and their arenas, actors, issues and contestations unfolding around the regulation, implementation and use of surveillance and information infrastructures of migration and border control.

Huub Dijstelbloem, University of Amsterdam, will act as discussant of this session.

Contact: nina.amelung@gmail.com

Keywords: infrastructures, migration and border control, contestation and (non)publics, ontological politics, epistemic authority

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

Science Communication/Public Engagement

34. Decentralized and Distributed Systems: Technologies of Resistance

Victoria Neumann, Lancaster University; Anna Adamowicz, Institute of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University

The internet has been called the “largest experiment involving anarchy in history” (Schmidt & Cohen, 2013) and is characterized by decentral and distributed network technologies which disseminate information. However, there is a tension as these (infra-)structures incorporate dialectic contradictions of “radically distributes control into autonomous locales” and protocological “control into rigidly defined hierarchies”(Galloway, 2004).

Politically, control in and over cyberspaces is often fought along the lines of (1) governments expanding surveillance and automated, algorithmic decision-making that reinforce traditional hierarchies (Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018; Zuboff, 2019); (2) neoliberal and libertarian tech enthusiast reconfiguring capitalism based on cybernetic logics (Kelly, 1994; Marks, 2006); and (3) (h)activist movements striving for emancipation and create spaces for sovereignty, autonomy, and withdraw from censorship/repression (Barlow, 1996).

In this panel, we are interested in works around distributed and decentralized systems as technologies of resistance. We invite contributions from a wide range of areas in which technologies are used to build infrastructures that foster counter hegemonies or highlight social and political power struggles. These contributions may be theoretical, practical, and/or empirical cases such as scientific studies, manifestos, declarations, or practical reports on collectives’ work.

Examples include, but are not limited to:

• Cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and distributed ledger technologies
• Decentralized or distributed social media outlets (e.g. privacy-preserving projects like Fediverse’s Mastodon, Riot.im, Diaspora)
• Alternative communication tools, infrastructures and protocols (e.g. Tor, local ISPs, Matrix)
• Protest, communities and movements using tech such decentralized server networks (e.g. Mesh, Police Tracking apps)
• Hacker and knowledge-sharing cooperatives, and non-centralized collaboration (e.g. open/free software developments)

Contact: v.neumann@lancaster.ac.uk

Keywords: Decentralization, Distributed Systems, Resistance, Information Technologies, Agency

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

49. Disrupting Biomedicine: The Politics and Practice of Open Source and Biohacked Drugs and Devices

Colleen Lanier-Christensen, Harvard University; Nicole Foti, University of California, San Francisco

Frustrated with the existing landscape of drug and medical device development—including its high costs, top-down research and development processes, and proprietary, non-interoperable systems—grassroots efforts have emerged that counter dominant structures and practices in the production and use of biomedical knowledge. Biohackers, DIY biologists, medical device modifiers, and open source pharmaceutical and medical hardware initiatives are examples of such burgeoning critiques and reactions. Rather than submit their bodies to clinically defined models of patienthood and government-regulated commercial products, these individuals strive to reshape biomedical science and technology to address systemic failures, or to fit their wills. These projects—such as developing open source estrogen, insulin, epi-pens, prosthetics, and automated insulin delivery systems— aim to disrupt the hierarchical structure of traditional healthcare systems and challenge the role of professionalized, credentialed experts in determining medical care.

This panel seeks to explore open source, DIY, and hacking practices—past and present—across diverse health conditions and diseases, therapeutics, regulatory spaces, and healthcare systems. We invite contributions exploring these practices’ modes of resistance, as well as their opportunities, barriers, and limitations. Papers might examine, for example, how such projects build on or depart from more traditional patient advocacy and medical social movements; the different forms of risks, conceptions of empowerment, and promissory claims entailed; critical forms of knowledge production; or the shifting socio-technical landscape enabling these developments (e.g., smartphones, 3D-printing, predictive algorithms, open software, novel hardware tools). The diabetes space is especially rich for such inquiries; scholars working in this area are encouraged to contribute.

Contact: colleenlanier@fas.harvard.edu

Keywords: Biohacking, biomedicine, social movements, pharmaceuticals, medical devices

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

51. Doing STS amid the Procession of Disaster

Steve G. Hoffman, University of Toronto

The procession of disaster – extreme weather events, industrial legacy hazards, and the cascading failures of sociotechnical infrastructures – is the new normal. The impact of this procession on daily life ranges from inconvenient (e.g. campus closures due to extreme weather) to catastrophic (e.g. ice storms, floods, toxic contamination, catastrophic wildfires, increasingly angry hurricanes, etc.). As the regularity of large-scale tragedy accelerates, calls for sustainability, climate adaptation, and disaster resilience are converging. This open panel invites contributions that draw out the continuities and discontinuities in this convergence, especially where the links are tense for STS scholarship. Governance practices around sustainability and climate adaptation, for example, have developed from technocratic planning frameworks that promote economic growth while trying to preserve bio-physical resources. Here we find a persistently practical if pollyannaish emphasis on human behavior change and less wasteful consumption. STS scholars of disaster, in contrast, have focused on longer term sociomaterial legacies of modernity. Here we find theoretically rich but often quite removed deconstructions of the very concepts of crisis and disaster, accounts of the unequal distribution of vulnerability, exposes of entrenched institutional power, or broad denunciations of post-colonial and/or neoliberal governance. Where can STS scholars locate a constructive engagement with the programmatic emphasis of sustainability governance, disaster and emergency management, and climate adaptation? How do we continue to raise challenging epistemological and ontological questions while also engaging practical contributions to the climate crisis and procession of disaster? How are we to live, work, suffer, mobilize, and love within the new normal?

Contact: steve.hoffman@utoronto.ca

Keywords: disaster, catastrophe, climate adaptation, climate crisis, sustainability

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

55. Engaging Health Activism, Sexual Politics and STS

Lisa Lindén, Departement of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg; Emily Jay Nicholls, Goldsmiths University of London

The relationship between activism, biomedicine and sexual politics has been a focus in STS since Steven Epstein’s 1996 book Impure Science: AIDS Activism and The Politics of Knowledge. In focusing on how patients, citizens and organisations mobilise to transform biomedicine and healthcare, STS has taken a particular focus on public/expert entanglements, such as how health advocacy groups collaborate with healthcare professionals and mobilise citizens’ experiences to influence health practice (Akrich et al. 2014).

In this panel we want to combine this focus on health activism with recent calls to address the possibilities afforded by a greater attention to pleasure and to sexual bodies in STS (Race 2019). Here we also include an attention to the ways sex and sexuality are mobilised in political engagements with health and illness. As digital technologies open new possibilities for doing politics, sex and intimacy, and uncertain and turbulent times raise new problems for health programming and notions of expertise, we hope to explore the analytical generativity of doing STS research at the intersection of sex, sexuality, health and activism.

We welcome contributions that engage with ‘health activism and sexual politics’ in various ways, and from a range of empirical areas. This might include:

• Public/expert entanglements
• Sexual bodies, affect and pleasure
• The enactment of ‘biosexual citizenship’ (Epstein 2018) in health activism
• Continuities and discontinuities: troubled pasts (Murphy 2012) and possible futures
• Health activism and LGBTQ movements (Roberts & Cronshaw 2017)
• Categorisations, standards, risk and politics of (sexual) inclusion
• Engagements with Queer Theory

Contact: lisa.linden@gu.se

Keywords: sex, sexuality, health, activism, biomedicine

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

67. Fossil Legacies – Re-Assembling Work, Gender and Technology in the Coal Phase Out

Jeremias Herberg, Leuphana University Lüneburg; Thomas Turnbull, Max Planck Institute For the History of Science

The certainty of climate change and the availability of alternative pathways have not brought about post-fossil societies. In the Czech Republic, Australia, Germany and many other regions, coal is still continuously extracted. In this context, the prospect of a just energy transition is being disrupted by ‘fossil legacies’: Be it the technological cultures of fossil fuels, the populist distortion of worker interests, male worker pride and culture, or the corporatist alliances of democratic parties – these and other legacies jeopardize the economic livelihood of some, and the survival of others.

STS contributions to energy research have focused on transformative dynamics, innovations, and engagements. In the present context, STS can also trace and reconfigure the relational ties that fossil legacies engender. The coal phase out in particular is a process that involves re-assembling inherited technologies, businesses, worker identities, and political alliances. Transformative openings and practices are re-distributed and the role of science and technology must be re-assessed.

– How do involved actors dis-/associate themselves with/from coal-related notions of work, gender, or technology?

– What connections emerge when fossil legacies are challenged by political movements or climate diplomats?

– How does right-wing mobilization intervene in the (dis-)association of fosil-fuel associated work, gender and capitalism?

The contributions in this session historically trace, sociologically map or philosophically question the re-assembling of gender, work, technology and capitalism in the process of the coal phase out. Contributors theorize the transformation of fossil assemblages and reflect on their role in transforming fossil legacies.

Contact: jeremias.herberg@iass-potsdam.de

Keywords: coal phase out, assemblages, gender, work, populism

Categories: Energy

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

71. Grassroots Innovation: Hacking, Making, Hobby, Entrepreneurship

Chen-Pang Yeang, University of Toronto; Wen-Ching Sung, University of Toronto

A hallmark of our emerging world is that the general public obtains not only access to modern technologies but also the knowledge, means, and incentives to generate new products and applications from them.  While self-made inventors populated history, do-it-yourself and technological explorations outside big companies, government, and academia nonetheless become a social movement with conspicuous collectives, information channels, and media coverage.  Today, hackers work on open-source, free-access software and firmware for fun and profit.  Makerspaces spread everywhere for the cause of sharing manufacturing, participatory design, recycling and reuse, nurturing start-ups, or community building.  Made-in-garage is a common myth in high-tech.  “Mass innovation” or “STEM for everyone” is promoted by the states around the globe.  In this panel, we welcome various approaches and perspectives to make sense of this phenomenon of grassroots innovation.  We ask: What are its connections to the longstanding traditions of technical hobbies?  Which organizational and managerial platforms do grassroots innovators introduce that influence the development of new technologies?  What is the nature of the tension between non-profit and commercial, between amateur and professional, in these activities?  How do the hackers’ and makers’ political actions intertwine with their technical innovation?  While hacking and making are seemingly global, what are their major differences in different countries and regions, especially between the affluent North and poor South?  How does grassroots innovation reconfigure the current technological landscape?  What are the roles of the state and capital in shaping grassroots innovation, and how is such shaping grappled from below?

Contact: chenpang.yeang@utoronto.ca

Keywords: innovation, hacking, makerspace, technical hobby, entrepreneurship

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

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

80. Hormonal paradoxes: circulations, access, exposures

Mariana Rios Sandoval, Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale et Société (cermes3), Paris; Olivia (Roger) Fiorilli, IFRIS, Cermes3

Synthetic hormones, as well as hormone-like chemicals, impregnate our everyday lives. “Sex” hormones are among the most sold molecules on the pharma market, while endocrine disruptors can be found in virtually every other household and industrial product. These chemicals do not stay put, but circulate, react, transform, bind, break, agglomerate, accumulate, dislodge, and endure, and in doing so they transform tissues, bodies, relations, lives and ecosystems. They travel from labs, through human and non-human bodies, through membranes, sewage systems and bodies of water, and often back again into bodies through environmental exposures. Hormones and hormone-like chemicals circulate and accumulate, but they do so unevenly and following patterns of race, class and gender-based inequalities and oppressions defined by capitalism, binary and cis-normative gender orders, and the coloniality of power. Therefore, paradoxically, often the same molecules that are promoted or even imposed to some, are denied to others.

In this panel we ask: what can be learned by following synthetic hormones and hormone-like chemicals across material, social and epistemic boundaries? How do access, exposure, pollution, and hormonal balance and disruption look like if we choose such an approach? In order to attend to these questions we seek presentations exploring the uneven circulation of synthetic hormones and hormone-like chemicals, through contrasting places, organisms, social worlds, theoretical and disciplinary fields. We welcome presentations in the form of text, video, performance, and experimental formats.

Contact: mariana.riossandoval@cnrs.fr

Keywords: Synthetic hormones, hormone-like chemicals, inequality, power, multispecies

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

81. How can STS support a multiplicity of practices in Citizen Science?

Christian Nold, University College London; Alexandra Albert, UCL

Citizen Science is a field of growing interest for governments and social science researchers. The current situation of increased EU funding means Citizen Science is being put under pressure to professionalise, add quality and evaluation criteria. Furthermore, there is an increasing pressure to define what is Citizen Science and what it is not. One effect of this might be the exclusion of practices based around activism, art and situated knowledge that have previously been the core of citizen-led practices, and yet are being pushed to the fringes in this move to professionalisation.

STS has often uncritically supported this technocratic logic of utility and empowerment via Citizen Science. The logic of utility aims to make science cheaper by outsourcing scientific labour to the public, while at the same time claiming scientific involvement creates empowered citizens. Yet there are few actual empirical studies of impacts of this utilitarian logic on participants or what empowerment might mean in practice.

This panel asks:

What activism, art and situated knowledge practices should be seen as citizen science and how can they benefit from being framed as Citizen Science?

How can STS researchers actively support a multiplicity of Citizen Science practices?

What STS approaches can be used to expand the scope of citizen science?

This session is looking for papers that combine empirical and theoretical engagements with Citizen Science.

Contact: christian@softhook.com

Keywords: Citizen Science, Public Engagement, Art, Activism, Situated Knowledge

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

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

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

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

102. Making chemical kin

Emma Garnett, King’s College London; Angeliki Balayannis, University of Exeter

This panel aims to generate space to plot, evoke, and tell stories about chemicals. Research with chemicals is often approached through late industrial landscapes of exposure, however this often results in negating the new relations, material attachments, and shared pleasures which emerge through chemical encounters. As an entangled method and form of representation, stories offer ways to think and act with chemicals differently. By focussing on ‘making’ we will collectively imagine what different relationships with chemicals could entail. Inspired by efforts in STS to resist the all-encompassing concept of the anthropocene that beckons total and permanent exposure, we seek to capture the instability of ‘the chemical’ in ways that activate efforts to find better ways of governing, managing, and living with these materials.

Attending to relations that matter for the stories we tell, reorients chemical concerns from toxic politics to chemical kinships (Agard-Jones 2016; Murphy 2018). Stories of chemical kin are not necessarily affirmative, kin after all can be both enabling and harmful. We encourage papers to consider the full spectrum of chemical encounters; moving beyond pollution and toxicants, while at the same time maintaining a commitment to the violent legacies which shape how chemicals are distributed – even if their material connections are difficult to conjure. By thinking with and beyond the ‘villainous object’, we invite contributions that expand understandings of chemical entanglements, particularly those engaged in artistic, experimental, and ethnographic work.

Contact: emmargarnett@gmail.com

Keywords: chemical, kin, making-doing, experiment, stories

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

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

105. Making science in public: Studying science communication and public engagement

Sarah Davies, University of Copenhagen; Noriko Hara, Indiana University; Maja Horst, University of Copenhagen

Science communication and public engagement with science are key mechanisms by which scientific knowledge is mediated, negotiated, and transformed. Over the past decades, STS research has outlined the ways in which science and society are co-produced through public communication activities and catalysed a shift towards dialogue and engagement in science communication practice. More recently, issues of representation, exclusion, and contestation have risen to the fore in discussions of science in public, as well as concerns about public (dis)trust in expertise, the dizzying impacts of social media, and debates about science’s role in political activism and resistance.

This open panel invites paper proposals that analyse such ways that science is represented, transformed, contested or negotiated in public venues. Papers may explore, for instance, citizen science; science and technology-related activism; science in social media; science in museums; deliberative experiments; popular science writing; science blogging; sci­art activities; news media; or science comedy – as well as the myriad other sites and mechanisms by which science is done in public. We invite critical analysis of these sites and mechanisms. For example, papers might analyse the constitution of publics and knowledges within particular science communication activities; discuss affective or temporal regimes of public engagement with science; or give accounts of experimental practice that show how STS might contribute to doing science in public in just, generous, and collaborative ways. In particular, any analysis that showcases the significance and agency of STS in examining diverse public engagements with science is welcomed.

Contact: sarahrachaeldavies@gmail.com

Keywords: public engagement with science, science communication, STS, democratisation of science

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

106. Making, Having, Thinking: Sex, Technology and Science

David Andrew Griffiths; Benjamin Joseph Fleminger Weil, University College London; Natalie Hammond, Manchester Metropolitan University

Sex has distinct yet co-constitutive meanings in science and society. These include: physical characteristics that comprise ‘biological sex’; identity categories; erotic practices and relations. This panel will investigate science and technology’s roles in the construction of these meanings of “sex” and will act as an incitement for STS to take sex both seriously and playfully and get its hands dirty (or downright filthy).

Submissions might consider, but need not be limited to:

Making Sex

• How have scientific/biomedical technologies made and remade sex in the past? How might we make sex otherwise in the future?
• How do we make sex happen? What is the role of science and technology in the facilitation and regulation of sexual practices, pleasures and possibilities?

Having Sex

• How does a multiplicity and variation of biological sex characteristics produce the notion of two biological sexes that one can “have”?
• How do science and technology intervene in the dynamics of sexual play or practice? Conversely, in what ways are erotic practices embedded within science and technology?

Thinking Sex

• How can the tools of STS help us to think sex beyond limited and often biomedical binary imaginaries?
• In the four decades since Rubin’s ‘Thinking Sex’, what has STS scholarship done to “think sex”? Where do we need to go from here?

We welcome submissions that engage with the rich history of scholarship in this field (including gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist science studies) as well as those concerned with the futures of sex, technology and science.

Contact: d.a.griffiths@surrey.ac.uk

Keywords: sex, gender, sexuality, queer, feminism

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

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

123. Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense

Adam Fish, University of New South Wales; Michael Richardson; Edgar Gomez Cruz, University of New South Wales

Seeing—and the sense making that follows—is usually conceived as something humans alone do. Anthropocentric vision has been radically decentered by both computer vision and by multispecies ontologies, even if all-too-human biases stain the former and the latter is anything but surprising to indigenous people. And yet nonhuman vision remains under-examined and under-theorised in disciplines cognate to STS, where image and sense-making often remain the privilege of the human. This panel offers a corrective by advancing vivid case studies in non-human vision that center technologies and animals as agents of meaning-making.

From analogue photography to computer vision, technologies of vision see in nonhuman ways (Mackenzie and Munster 2019, Zylinska 2017). Photons are processed into computer readable code, filtered by algorithms, and correlated by machine learning to build so-called artificial intelligence. Animals, too, can see beyond, differently, and better than RGB, the human visual light spectrum (Barad 2007). While the chasm separating human vision from other animal vision is vast, efforts towards remembering and forging inter-species companionship are essential to responding to the species extinction and climate crisis (Haraway 2016). Seeing as non-human–technological or animal–uniquely challenges key concepts in media studies: who or what makes sense of symbols.

Across the assembled papers, this panel explores some of the crucial technical, affective, multi-species and multi-modal ways in which nonhuman vision figures in the contemporary moment. In doing so, it brings expertise in STS, new materialism, visual culture, media arts, and cultural studies to the study of communication and technology. Collectively, we question the politics of vision: who or what sees who? What, how, and when? What or who can avoid being seen, provide consent, and avoid the gaze? Awareness of how vision technologies and non-human animals see and sense–or avoid such efforts–in uncanny and alien ways not only challenges but should transform human relationships to others, both technical and animal.

Contact: mediacultures@protonmail.ch

Keywords: vision, animal, drone, visual, seeing, gaze

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

140. Race and Biomedicine Beyond the Lab: 21st Century Mobilizations

Melissa Creary, University of Michigan, School of Public Health; Nadine Ehlers, University of Sydney; Zimitri Erasmus, University of the Witwatersrand; Vivette Garcia Deister, UNAM; Amade M’charek, University of Amsterdam – AISSR; Anne Pollock, King’s Col

This open panel invites analyses of the ways that race and biomedicine are mobilized beyond the lab in the 21st century. There is already rich STS scholarship that accounts for the construction of race in scientific practices and the epistemological problems that entails. In this open panel we seek to shift the focus beyond the lab: how is the science understood, constructed, contested, and diversely deployed in public arenas, to what ends, and with what effects?

We seek to foreground how non-scientists are at the forefront of novel, plural, generative deployments of biomedical ideas of race. On the one hand, these ideas are being used by broader stakeholders to maintain or revive historically entrenched ideas about race, to reinforce difference and inequality. On the other hand, biomedical ideas of race are also strategically mobilized in alternative directions, to stake claims and resist race-based injustice. We hope that the papers will span wide-ranging geographies and domains. Papers might explore race as mobilized by (1) inhabitants of environments, e.g, epigenetic impacts of toxicity and medical hot-spotting; (2) consumers within markets, e.g, genetic ancestry testing and race-based pharmaceuticals; (3) citizens and professionals, e.g. deploying forensic genetics in genocide claims or nation-state-specific framings of group rights. 

The panel will build on and expand the work of the emerging international network gathering around the theme of Race and Biomedicine Beyond the Lab (RaBBL), exploring how individuals and groups in wide-ranging contexts reimagine and seek to reconfigure racial futures.

Contact: anne.pollock@kcl.ac.uk

Keywords: race, biomedicine, health disparities, medical consumers, human rights

Categories: Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

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

145. Re-evaluating the high-tech and the low-tech: ideals and ideologies of the material

Hannah Cowan, King’s College London; Charlotte Kühlbrandt, King’s College London; Natassia Brenman, The University of Cambridge

This panel invites participants to question how values of high- and low-tech become attached to and emerge from particular kinds of materialities. There is growing concern in STS research around topics that get labelled ‘technoscience’, such as CRISPR genetically-engineered babies and cyborg-esque uses of artificial intelligence. But here we want to trouble scholarly focus on the materialities that get labelled high-tech, by thinking about the “lowness” of low-tech (such as water supply, housing infrastructures etc). We question taken-for-granted urgencies created by the politics and ethics of the high-tech and point to stagnated material relations that perpetuate economic inequality. Building on new materialism’s attention to the mundane as well as its often-neglected roots in historical materialism, this panel invites participants to think about how different kinds of materialities matter in particular spatiotemporal milieus. We encourage papers from different theoretical or ideological perspectives to ask: When and how should STS studies follow the biomedical endeavour to chase emerging worlds, and when should we pay more attention to the present, or even dare to imagine our own worlds? How should we as STS scholars collaborate or align ourselves with different kinds of materialities? And what are the effects of how medical practitioners, highly funded organisations, and STS scholars themselves, care for these different types of materialities?

Contact: Hannah.Cowan@kcl.ac.uk

Keywords: New materialism, Historical materialism, high-tech, low-tech, inequality

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

146. Reexamining Narratives within Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)

Wouter Van de Klippe; Ingeborg Meijer, Leiden University; Ralf Lindner, Fraunhofer ISI; Roger Strand, University of Bergen; Erich Griessler, Institute for Advanced Studies; Anne Loeber, University of Amsterdam

Reexamining narratives within Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)

Keywords: Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), Societal responsibilities of researchers, social inequality, Policy, Governance.

While Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is ostensibly an orientation point for efforts to make research and innovation more societally responsive, there exist contentious narratives framing RRI which both open and close forms of scholarly work.

These narratives include envisioning RRI as…

1. an intervention to command and control researchers and innovators to become more responsive to their negative societal impacts;
2. a tool to coerce citizens into becoming more acquiescent in their support for research and innovation;
3. an intervention to facilitate the development of novel forms of collaboration between representatives from diverse sectoral, disciplinary, and societal perspectives to align research and innovation with broader societal needs;
4. a policy concept which is self-serving and aims develop its own network of practitioners and supporters to sustain itself.

We invite contributions to this panel to explore questions such as: 

• What scholarly work do these narratives either open or close?
• What other narratives are present within RRI?
• Which actors are ultimately served by these narratives and how can or should this be changed?
• How are these narratives reflected in funding schemes / science policy documents?
• What does knowledge production with the aim of addressing societal concerns resemble through each of these narratives?
• What forms of knowledge production have been systematically excluded within these narratives?
• How do these narratives either encourage or discourage engagement with social movements and/or social justice struggles?

Contact: w.van.de.klippe@cwts.leidenuniv.nl

Keywords: Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), Social Responsibilities, Policy, Governance, Narratives

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

152. Science Technology & Innovation (STI) Roadmaps and the SDGs

Emmanuel Ejim-Eze, Institute of Engineering, technology and innovation Management; Caleb Muyiwa Adelowo, National Centre for Technology Management, Nigeria

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) progress reports, index and dashboards are open to the public after four years of sustainable development (SD) programme. Some countries (especially those in sub-Saharan Africa) remained backwards. With 17 goals and 169 targets; SDGs are multidimensional and ambitious. It’s hard to achieve by 2030 without development of science, technology and innovation (STI). Despite challenges new technological innovations widen gaps for STI laggards. This panel intends to throw lights on impacts of rapid technological changes on attainment of SD? Rapid technological change disrupts markets, exacerbate social divides and raise normative questions.  However, big data; machine learning; artificial intelligence; robotics; block-chain; 3D printing; nanotechnology; satellite & drone technologies, e.t.c can bring transformation of economies. We also need to know how developing nations can build STI capacities to deploy these transformative technological innovations. How can we use these disruptive technologies (as indicators) to monitor progress or lack of local actions in poor-performing countries? STI Roadmaps for SDGs are meant to speed up process of developing new or adapting existing solutions to meet SDGs and targets by 2030. What kinds of STI policies or roadmaps will help countries lagging behind without appropriate socio-technological systems or transitions? How can nations use regional and global partnership to develop STI capabilities? What are the roles of global STI communities? Can there be co-production of STI roadmaps for SDGs and how can we harness grassroots innovations to achieve SDGs? This panel contributes knowledge to STS on how sustainability science is shaping the emerging world.

Contact: ejim_kings@yahoo.com

Keywords: Sustainable development, Science, technology and innovation, sustainable development goals, disruptive technologies, technological change

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

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

171. Sustainable mobility in urban cities in Africa

Emmanuel Ejim-Eze, Institute of Engineering, technology and innovation Management; Deborah Ogochukwu Ejim-Eze, Foundation for Sustainability Science in Africa/ Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) cities face unprecedented crisis of passenger and freight movement. African cities seem to have the least mobility when compared with cities in other climes. Several studies indicate that low mobility leads to low productivity, widens inequality gaps; affecting the poor, women, children and the elderly disproportionately.  Lack of public mass transits exerts pressure with damages on Africa’s road infrastructure. This raises road maintenance budgets. Consequently high freight cost also increases cost of goods and affects competitiveness.  Informal motorized transport in SSA remains the resilient mobility mode for residents, providing employment and serving local political interests. This para-transits in SSA are now crowded with commercial motorcyclists. This chaotic form of mobility have thrived under urban sprawl challenges with congested streets, big pot-holes restricting traffic flows, reckless driving, extortion and violence from security officers and street touts. Consequently the vehicles easily wear out contributing to high emission of dangerous gases (health hazards), and deaths of passengers due to accidents.

How can cities in SSA improve living conditions of its populations by meeting mobility needs in a sustainable manner? Secondly, what kind of institutional arrangements and governance systems can integrate land-use and transport planning?  How does urban mobility strategy affect decisions pertaining to residential, employment and service locations?  How can cities integrate other non-motorized transport modes (walking & cycling) into sustainable mobility plans? This panel hopes to contribute knowledge on how sustainable mobility can help to lower poverty, inequality, and reduce climate change impacts &improve standard of living in SSA

Contact: ejim_kings@yahoo.com

Keywords: Sustainable mobility, transportation, cities, sub-Saharan Africa, inequality

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Engineering and Infrastructure

173. Teaching interdependent agency: Feminist STS approaches to STEM pedagogy

Kalindi Vora, University of California Davis; Maya Cruz, University of California – Davis; Anita Say Chan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This panel discussion of STEM graduate training brings together insights from feminist theory with social studies of science to address deep bias in scientific research to suggest methods and frameworks that produce more accountable, accurate and responsible scientific research. This panel is interested in talking about how feminist STS (fSTS) scholars are using, or exploring the use of, the critique of objectivity to address biases in science. How are we engaging with STEM graduate education to teach a more nuanced “situatedness” (Haraway 1988) in culture and history to produce more responsible and accountable science?

Research in STEM education suggests that integrating socio-cultural context and communal values into STEM education can increase recruitment and retention of women, under-represented minorities (URMs), and first-generation students in STEM. Building on the contributions of Jenny Reardon, Karen Barad, and Banu Subramaniam to feminist approaches to STEM pedagogy, this panel invites papers addressing how feminist STS can move STEM graduates toward greater engagement with social justice, as well as deep collaboration with social sciences and humanities. What sort of curricular changes could lead to a transformation of STEM research and the diversity of researchers conducting it? How can STS scholars use pedagogy to empower STEM researchers to be agents of social transformation even in the face of anti-science discourse, and anti-women, racist, anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ cultural politics?

Contact: kavora@ucdavis.edu

Keywords: feminist, curriculum, objectivity, situated knowledge, social justice

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

176. The ‘elsewhere’ of sociotechnical life at night

Casper Laing Ebbensgaard

If our desires to lead certain forms of life on earth that ultimately threaten our ability to do so in socially, politically, and environmentally just ways (Berlant, 2011; Povinelli, 2016), we must, as commentators suggest, rethink, reimagine and rework modes of ‘planetary inhabitation’ (Gabrys, 2018). As an analytical category for exploring intersecting processes of technological innovation, biological change and geological shifts, the night – and in particular the urban night – is claimed to offer alternative, multi-modal ways of conceptualising and imagining life on earth (Crary, 2013; Ekirch, 2005; Melbin, 1987; Shaw, 2018). The techno-fixation that drives a global urban shift towards ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’ lighting infrastructures, simultaneously puts the conditions for life under threat ‘elsewhere.’ This session demands critical attention towards the ‘elsewheres’ of sociotechnical life at night, to address and undo present ways of living in un/desired ways. By turning towards the socio-technological infrastructures of light the session addresses the question: how can configurations of planetary life and ways of being human be rethought, reimagined and reworked through ‘light’? In addressing this question, the session invites papers that engage with historical and contemporary processes of ‘light’ extraction, production, design, consumption, inhabitation, and distribution to address their impacts on social (Ebbensgaard, 2019; Meier, Hasenöhrl, Krause, & Pottharst, 2015), biological (Rich & Longcore, 2006) and geologic (Gandy, 2017) ‘life’-forms. With an interest in developing a more hopeful, contestatory or radical future for ‘planetary inhabitation,’ the session welcomes contributions that develop alternative ways of imagining, representing, practicing and performing sociotechnical life at night.

Contact: c.l.ebbensgaard@qmul.ac.uk

Keywords: night, lighting, environmental justice, inhabitation, planetary life

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Information, Computing and Media Technology

179. The changing landscape of genetic databases: Blurring boundaries between collection and practice

Rafaela Granja, Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS); Gabby Samuel, King’s College London /Lancaster University

In recent years, the collection, analysis, processing, and use of genetic data has grown massively, leading to the establishment of large DNA databases in both the health and forensic arena. More recently, and due to the increasing number of companies offering direct-to-consumer genetic tests, there has been a significant increase of recreational genetic databases. Coupled to this expansion, we have been witnessing a blurring of boundaries between previously distinct kinds of genetic collection and genetic practice: some genetic databases are being used beyond the purpose for which they were originally intended, for example, recreational DNA genealogy databases are being used for criminal investigation purposes.

The future may rest not on further building and expanding mass databases, but rather on the collation of existing genetic information and the exploitation of its potential. In a time of data abundance, it is therefore important to understand how such data is being conceived and appropriated by a wide range of actors, including policymakers, researchers, private companies and citizens.

We invite both theoretical and empirical contributions that critically engage with the social, ethical and techno-political dimensions posed by the blurring of boundaries between different types of genetic databases. Specifically, we aim to explore which social actors and epistemic cultures have been playing the leading role in the establishment and regulation of databasing systems, what values and social norms have underpinned this, and/or what ethical and social principles, such as privacy, consent, altruism, solidarity, and reciprocity are taken into account when considering genetic databases.

Contact: r.granja@ics.uminho.pt

Keywords: genetic databases; recreational genealogy databases; health; forensic

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

181. The Era of Voice: STS and Emerging Healthcare Activism around Science, Politics and Markets

Ilaria Galasso, University College Dublin; Théo Bourgeron, University College Dublin; Sonja Erikainen, University of Edinburgh

Fostered by social media and the development of transnational social movements, new forms of activism have emerged. People once silenced can now easily find others in similar conditions, build connections and speak up. These movements affect the fields of science, regulation and markets by catalyzing public attention and provoking increased political and commercial engagement.

In the medical domain, publics increasingly coalesce into activist groups and articulate their concerns and interests around all sorts of issues, including clinical practices, research priorities, pricing levels, pharmaceutical regulation, and policies around socio-environmental exposures.

We want to investigate how the healthcare landscape is reshaped by the unprecedented capacities of voice and activism in a reflexive way, by scrutinizing the engagements of STS in this process: we seek submissions that demonstrate the potential roles of STS in analyzing renewed healthcare activism, in engaging with activists, and possibly in doing activism.

We welcome papers from theoretical and empirical perspectives, critically engaging with these and related issues:

–              The transformative power of voice in medical practice, research, markets and policies

–              Voice in the medical domain from a historical and global perspective

–              Extended capacities of voice provided by social media: pros and cons

–              The voices that, for structural or contingent reasons, remain unheard

–              The range of medical issues that fail to catalyze activism

–              Neoliberalism and activism

–              STS in the era of voice and of healthcare activism: from roadmap to research activism

–              STS and activists: forms of reciprocal engagement

Contact: ilaria.galasso@ucd.ie

Keywords: voice, healthcare activism, research activism, healthcare markets, social media

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

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

194. They’re Just Guidelines: Operationalizing AI Ethics

Anna Lenhart, University Of Maryland College Park / IBM Public Sector

2018 & 2019  have seen a surge of frameworks or guidelines that lay out principles of how Automated Decision Systems (ADS) can be developed and implemented ethically. The Private Sector, Multistakeholder Groups and Government Agencies have published guidelines covering principles of transparency/explainability, fairness/non-discrimination, accountability, safety/security and privacy (Algorithm Watch, 2019). Occasionally, these guidelines include the demand for AI be socially beneficial and protect human rights. Few include recommendations or examples of how to operationalise these principles.

Today, most major technology companies using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have agreed to comply with these guidelines. But has the development of ADS changed? What challenges still remain? This panel seeks to convene scholars from multiple disciplines who are interested in the operationalization of AI ethics and welcomes submissions exploring themes such as:

*Are AI ethics guidelines changing the way companies and universities educate/train their data scientists and AI developers?

*How are factsheets, fairness toolkits, scenario planning exercises, etc being used within industry? (Stories of success and barriers)

*How does corporate culture influence the oversight and enforcement of AI ethics guidelines?

*What responsibilities fall on executives compared to data scientists?

*How are traditional approaches to risk management being applied to AI & ML?

*How do AI ethics guidelines vary across sectors, domains and cultures? How do these variations influence guideline implementation?

Contact: alenhart@terpmail.umd.edu

Keywords: AI Ethics, Guidelines, Culture, Operations, Implementation

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

208. Waste. Locating, Learning From, and Living With the Lively Afterlives of Globalization’s Distributed Materialities

Christian Peter Medaas, University of Oslo, Dept. of Social Anthropology; Samwel Moses Ntapanta, University of Oslo, Dept. of Social Anthropology

Environmental toxins. Persistent organic pollutants. Microplastics. Municipal waste. Growing dumpsites. The discarded and “disposable” objects of consumer culture. Contaminated areas of space and time. Nuclear waste. One salient way in which globalization is localized and distributed (unevenly) over Planet Earth is through its various forms of waste.

While often hazardous, their accumulation and detrimental effects engendering feelings of urgency and powerlessness, many of these material wastes also constitute livelihoods to those who live and work with and amidst them – managing, remediating, scavenging, trading, recycling, repairing. A glance at these practices makes it clear that waste – often both a poison and a promise – is a contestable and unstable category, as well as one worthy of closer scrutiny.

Might an attention to people’s many material practices of relating to the wastes of globalization (or the ruins of capitalism) – in particular those which are not simply ameliorative, or for that matter economic – but which may also be described as innovative, productive, or critical – provide a fruitful way of approaching some of the broader questions and anxieties of the Anthropocene world we find ourselves in? How can we as researchers learn from waste and waste practices?

This panel invites participants interested in waste and those who work with waste to engage with the above questions and each other, paying attention to the material (as well as narrative) forms that wastes take, the places in which they occur, and the practices of co-existence through which people relate to and live with wastes.

Contact: christian.medaas@sai.uio.no

Keywords: waste, materiality, toxins, discards, innovation

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Engineering and Infrastructure

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

211. What science, technology and innovation, for which transformations?

Carla Alvial Palavicino; Juan Felipe Espinosa, Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello; Arne Maibaum, TU Berlin; Zoe Robaey, WUR

We live in times of growing anxiety – something has to change! We need radical transformations! In many circles, problems and changes are handled in one distinct way: the call for innovation. We can innovate our way out of climate change, inequality, or many other societal challenges that affect us today. Very often, innovation is conflated with technology and market developments as the means to deliver products and services, which can become a means to control and economize new dimension of life.

At the same time, we are now aware that innovation is not only a solution, but also part of the problem. This has resulted in a call to reform the institutions of science and innovation, for example, under the name of Responsible Research and Innovation, Social Innovation, or Transformative Innovation. Do we fall into the same trap and search only for innovations when we embrace these labels? If innovation is also one of the sources of the problem, can we solve it with another type of innovation?

In this panel we want to bring in an interdisciplinary dialogue about what it means to transform science and innovation, and – if and how – can science and innovation contribute to larger-scale transformations. What historical and recent dynamics lead to this phenomenon? Are there new forms of doing science or achieving social progress that transcend this nexus? Are there new forms of knowledge e.g., from a perspective of the global south, queer or other formats that break the mold?

Contact: c.m.e.alvialpalavicino@uu.nl

Keywords: Innovation, transformations, policy, alternatives

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Other