4S Mission

Fostering interdisciplinary and engaged scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine across the globe.

Latest 4S News

Hybrid Participation

Published On: Jan 24, 2025

Deadline: Aug 20, 2025

An important update to the planning for the 4S Meeting in Seattle in September. In a change of course, we are planning to enable hybrid participation. This meeting will be predominantly in person, but with hybrid set-up to enable online participation as well. Submissions to the conference are due one week from today, on Friday January 31st: https://www.4sonline.org/meeting.php
 
All best,
Anne
4S President

CfP | Medical and Health Humanities: Global Perspectives 2025

Published On: Oct 4, 2024

Deadline: Dec 15, 2024

The 3rd international conference on Medical and Health Humanities: Global Perspectives 2025 in Doha, Qatar on February 7-8, 2025 invites abstracts for oral presentations and posters on the topics of: narrative medicine, medical sociology, philosophy of medicine, medical ethics and narrative ethics, literature and medicine, arts therapies and arts-in-health, healthcare communication, the history of medicine and other humanistic initiatives in health and medicine.
Abstract Submission Deadline: ...

Editor(s), Open-Access Journal Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

Published On: Jan 17, 2025

Deadline: Mar 31, 2025

The Publications Committee of the Society for Social Studies of Science solicits nominations and proposals for Editor(s) to lead the 4S-sponsored diamond open access journal, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. ESTS is a vibrant peer-reviewed venue for addressing how science and technology infuse the world in which we live.
The journal publishes peer-reviewed content in both long-form and short-form genres: original research articles, thematic collections, engagements, perspectives, an...

4S Publications

Science, Technology, and Human Values

For more than forty years, Science, Technology, & Human Values has provided the forum for cutting-edge research and debate in the field of science and technology studies.

Consolidating the Strata: Geoscience and Underground Territory in South Korean Radioactive Waste Disposal

Sungeun Kim

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
In South Korea, the nation with the world's highest density of nuclear power plants, the disposal of high-level radioactive waste has become a pressing sociotechnical concern....

The Hidden Labor of Translation: Introduction to Special Issue

Clémence Pinel

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Translational medicine is concerned with hastening the application of basic scientific discoveries at the bench toward beneficial clinical outcomes at the bedside. Disrupting...

Invisible Participation: Patients with Oncological and Rare Diseases in Russia

Olga Temina

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Scholars have paid much attention to patients’ participation in healthcare, such as engagement in activities developed by healthcare providers and involvement in patient...

Co-Design in Practice: Bringing STS to Post-Brexit Agricultural Policy

Judith Tsouvalis

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Following the Brexit referendum, the United Kingdom's Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) began to "co-design" a new agri-environment policy for...

Afterword: Reflections on the (In)Visibility of Labor in Translational Medicine

James Mittra

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
In this paper I unpack and critically reflect on some of the key insights each paper in this Special Issue if ST&HV offers on the in(visibilities) of labor and practices...

Engaging Science, Technology and Society

Engaging Science, Technology, & Society is an online, open access publication of The Society for Social Studies of Science.

Standards, Pedagogies, and Celebrating the STS Infrastructure Award to ESTS

Published On: Dec 1 2024

Grant Jun Otsuki, Ali Kenner, Clément Dréano, Noela Invernizzi, Duygu Kaşdoğan, Aalok Khandekar, Angela Okune, Sujatha Raman, Tim Schütz, Federico Vasen, Amanda Windle, Emily York

Volume 10 comes in two parts, issue 1 and 2 published together. The double issue includes two Thematic Collections, “Standards and their Containers” and “Pedagogical Intersections.” It also includes two original research...

Tracing the Displacement of Data Work in AI: A Political Economy of “Human-in-the-Loop”

Published On: Dec 2 2024

Bidisha Chaudhuri, Srravya Chandhiramowuli

In this study, we trace the evolution of a data work team in an artificial intelligence (AI) startup in India. By bringing attention to data work, which is the indispensable work of preparing annotated datasets for training AI...

Renewable Ruse: Bioenergy Development in North Carolina’s Coastal Plains

Published On: Dec 1 2024

Dana Powell, Jefferson Currie, Danielle Koonce, Mac Legerton, Rebecca Witter

Rural communities in eastern North Carolina are responding to the emergence of bioenergy development as an extension of environmental injustices, rather than sustainable solutions to climate change as presented by state and industry...

Storying Monocrop Infrastructure: A Conversation on Governance, Scale, and Failure

Published On: Dec 2 2024

Sophie Chao, Kregg Hetherington

Plantations have recently become the focus of renewed empirical and conceptual inquiry across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Scholarship in this interdisciplinary space calls on us to reckon with industrial monocultures’...

4S Blog: Backchannels

Towards fairness in machine learning for dermatology: a skin tone representation disparities study

Celia Cintas
Feb 10, 2025
Images depicting dark skin tones are significantly under-represented in the educational materials used to teach primary care physicians and dermatologists to recognize skin diseases. In this piece, Celia Cintas introduces an open-source initiative to fight this issue.

And the winner is…Alphafold!

Alexandre Hocquet (Université de Lorraine), Frédéric Wieber (Käte Hamburger Kolleg), Marcus Carrier (Technische Universität)
Feb 09, 2025
Reflecting upon the Alphafold as the recent recipient of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize in Chemistry, this post examines the role of artificial intelligence and new ways of 'doing science' aligned toward gamification, contests and awards.

Reimagining Disease Modelling and Outbreak Analysis: A Report on the "Critical Social Science Approaches to Epidemic Intelligence" Workshop

Rachel Yang
Jan 20, 2025
In this post, Rachel Yang reports on the "Critical Social Science Approaches to Epidemic Intelligence" workshop held at the University of Sydney on 21 and 22 March 2024.

Technology, health, and gender: contributions from and with Feminist STS

Mariana Pitta Lima
Dec 30, 2024
In this post, Mariana Pitta Lima discusses contributions from and with feminist STS from the South, drawing on a recently published chapter on technologies, health, and gender based on fieldwork in Brazil.

Backchannels content is contributed by our members to highlight news relevant to their work.

STS News

Items submitted by the community and emailed to members monthly.

United Nations Call for Science-Policy Briefs for the Multi-stakeholder Forum

Jan 23, 2025
The UN Interagency Task Team on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (IATT) is calling upon scientists, engineers, economists, policy analysts, and UN staff experts to contribute science-policy briefs on science and technology issues that they would like to bring to the attention of policy and decision makers. The briefs will provide background knowledge to inform discussions at the MultiStakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainab...

Maastricht | Making and Design in Hospitals Postdoc

Jan 07, 2025
The Department of Society Studies is looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher to undertake exciting research about hospital practices. You will be part of a new team doing research helping to address the escalating issue of clinical waste. The project is called The Upcycled Clinic: A global ethnography of material creativity in contemporary medicine. The focus of this European Research Council funded project is on hospitals and clinics, which have become sites of disposability in recent years. Atte...

CfP | Peer Review in the Age of Large Language Models Workshop

Jan 13, 2025
‘Peer Review in the Age of Large Language Models’ is an interdisciplinary workshop taking place on 14th May 2025 at the University of Bath.
With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), some scholars have begun to experiment with the use of these tools in various academic tasks, including peer review. Recent studies have suggested LLMs could play some legitimate role in peer review processes. However, significant concerns have been raised about potential biases; violations ...

Hybrid Participation

Jan 24, 2025
An important update to the planning for the 4S Meeting in Seattle in September. In a change of course, we are planning to enable hybrid participation. This meeting will be predominantly in person, but with hybrid set-up to enable online participation as well. Submissions to the conference are due one week from today, on Friday January 31st: https://www.4sonline.org/meeting.php
 
All best,
Anne
4S President