4S Mission
Fostering interdisciplinary and engaged scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine across the globe.
Latest 4S News
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 Palestine Forum | Contributions Call
Published On: Jul 30, 2024
The 4S Palestine Forum, launched earlier this year as the initial project of the Working Group on War and Genocide that was initiated at 4S Honolulu in 2023, is welcoming further contributions.
Please submit new short blog-style entries, as well as references to published work, syllabi, and other resources by writing info@4sonline.org.
View the Palestine Forum in its entirety here: https://www.4sonline.org/palestine_forum.php
CfP | Science as Culture Special Issue: Colonial Relations in Modern Techno-Securitisation
Published On: Nov 11, 2024
Deadline: Apr 30, 2025
‘Security’ has become an increasingly dominant frame in recent decades, linking issues such as climate, biodiversity, borders, energy, food and military activities. Ever-more societal issues have been framed as security problems, even as existential threats. These frames seek to justify pre-emptive management through technoscientific expert systems, imagining control over everything and fostering an authoritarian culture. This SaC special issue will explore linkages among three dynam...
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.
Making Light Work: Infrastructures and Their Many Publics
Judith Green
Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
This article explores the multiplicity of publics that are enacted in relation to infrastructures. We take the case of street lighting infrastructure in the UK in 2013/4,...
The Sociotechnical Life of a Shapeshifting Technology: The Bike Lift Trampe in Trondheim
Ivana Suboticki
Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
This article explores the idea that technologies may be considered shapeshifting as they move between and are domesticated in different social worlds. We employ a material-semiotic...
Psychedelic Nation? (De)Provincializing the Psychedelic Renaissance from Brazil
Pietro Benedito
Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances has garnered spectacular international attention. Most of this focuses on research in the Global North....
Between Decay and Maintenance: Tuberculosis Sanatoriums, Care Infrastructures and U.S. Health Policy Debates, 1945–1972
Sydney Goggins
Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
The development of streptomycin and isoniazid transformed the landscape of tuberculosis treatment in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Sanatoriums continued...
Bearly Recognizable: Facial Recognition and the Wild
Emily Wanderer
Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
While big tech companies are growing more circumspect about the use of facial recognition for humans, interest in nonhuman facial recognition is surging. The identification...
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
Bee smellscapes: olfactory relations in urban everyday ecologies
Technology, health, and gender: contributions from and with Feminist STS
Changing toolkits in sustainability research – a perspective on transformative and transforming methods
Possession as Ruse—A Conversation about Digital Dispossession
Backchannels content is contributed by our members to highlight news relevant to their work.
Making and Doing: STS Beyond the Four Corners of the Paper
4S on Twitter
Tweets by 4sWebSTS News
Items submitted by the community and emailed to members monthly.
Houston | Instructional Assistant Professor
Editor(s), Open-Access Journal Engaging Science, Technology, and Society
The journal publishes peer-reviewed content in both long-form and short-form genres: original research articles, thematic collections, engagements, perspectives, an...
4S Palestine Forum | Contributions Call
Please submit new short blog-style entries, as well as references to published work, syllabi, and other resources by writing info@4sonline.org.
View the Palestine Forum in its entirety here: https://www.4sonline.org/palestine_forum.php