To reverberate is to echo, to repeat, to transmit further, to convey. Reverberations are also relays—wave-like, rolling, seismic or subtle—between points in space and time, felt evidence of distant yet interpenetrating events. In this sense, to reverberate is to exhibit a strange kind of force—an infinite regress of effects perceived as causes perceived as effects. For STS, reverberation figures science and technology not only as an effect of myriad practices and multiple agencies but also as normative sites where diverse politics and disparate struggles are resounded, reworked, and—consequentially—reactivated.
The 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S): Reverberations calls for presentations, panels, and adjacent gatherings that engage reverberations across form and content. The theme offers layered meaning, across the senses. For example, it invites an engagement with the past as it reverberates in the present, which reflects on varied STS histories – in the Seattle region, longstanding and ongoing colonialism and resource extraction, as well as protest and Indigenous resistance. Extending from that, Reverberations also has a spatial dimension, both geologically, as we will be gathering in a seismically active place, and in a broader sense, as what happens in one place can ripple outward with transcontinental impacts. On another register, Reverberations brings to mind music, which has been such an impactful site of Seattle’s pop cultural impacts. And there could also be myriad opportunities to bring the evocatively tactile theme of Reverberations into conversation with theoretical concepts impactful within STS, ranging from the classic interest in the agency of objects, to inquiries into what attending to diffraction might reveal, to sociotechnical systems and imaginaries – and so much more.
The meeting includes a Making & Doing exhibition alongside a special zine exhibition that showcases a plurality of formats and inquiries.
We anticipate that Open Panel Abstracts will be due on November 15th, so keep an eye out for the call for Open Panel Abstract submissions going live in mid-October – more soon!
The salmon cycle has seven stages from the egg to spawning. The logo uses a color for each salmon growth stage; each circle layer is rotated; each layer of circles is placed on a wavy circle; the center circle is a salmon egg.
Denise Emerson is Navajo and an enrolled Skokomish tribal member. Art is in Denise’s body, she creates beadwork and prints inspired by Native designs and ancestral photos, and uses modern technology to create beading patterns, her gut tells her when an art piece is finished. It’s good medicine for her spiritually.
View more of her work on the yhaw Indigenous Creatives Collective website, on her Instagram, or her Etsy.