4S Mission

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

Latest 4S News

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 | 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: ...

CfP | Unsettling Global Media and Communication Studies

Published On: Oct 10, 2024

Deadline: Dec 15, 2024

The Center for Advance Research for Global Communication fellows are pleased to welcome submissions for the CARGC Fellows 2025 Biennial Conference. This conference is an excellent space for students, early career scholars, and practitioners. We welcome interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches and contributions from early career scholars across various fields. Keynote speech will be given by Dr. Nabil Echchaibi (University of Colorado Boulder).

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.

An Enquiry Into Modes of Non-Existence

Govert Valkenburg

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
After the many symmetries (subject-object, truth-falsity, etc.) that science and technology studies (STS) has explored, one symmetry seems unaddressed: the symmetry of...

Blocks and Overflows of Care: Territorialization and Marine Conservation in the Balearic Sea

Jose A. Cañada

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
The article expands upon care theory in Science and Technology Studies by attending to marine spaces and practices for conservation of marine and coastal ecosystems. Examining...

Co-developing Materials in the Metamorphic Zone: Extending Bacteriocentricity

Tiago Moreira

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Engineered living materials (ELMs) are composite technologies that respond to environmental cues, and are able to remodel, self-organise and self-heal. Proposed as a fusion...

Theaters of Algorithmic Transparency and the Politics of Exemplarity

Loup Cellard

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
This article shows how transparency practitioners seeking to enhance the understandability of French housing tax algorithms produced slow disclosures they claim to be “exemplary.”...

Training Future Comrades: Gender Pedagogy and Model Train Sets in the German Democratic Republic

Mario Bianchini

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
This article investigates how model train sets became a medium for the marketing and development of East German technological utopianism, particularly in order to recruit...

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

Possession as Ruse—A Conversation about Digital Dispossession

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup (Copenhagen University) and Fleur Johns
Dec 09, 2024
This conversation reveals how traditional frameworks of dispossession, while valuable, may not fully capture the complexities of exploitation in today's digital economy.

Reframing histories of vaccine development through non-human animal lenses

Alexis Bedolla Velázquez
Dec 02, 2024
In this post, Alexis Bedolla explores vaccine development in Mexico through non-human animal lenses, arguing for the transgression of epidemiological representations.

Zines as communication tools to engage the public in debates about technology

Jussara Rowland and Ana Delicado
Nov 25, 2024
Engaging the public in critical conversations about technology presents a key challenge for researchers in STS and related fields. Jussara Rowland and Ana Delicado argue that zines are a valuable, yet under-utilized, tool for achieving this goal.

Can science ensure “100% Halal”?

Arum Budiastuti
Oct 07, 2024
As part of her PhD project on the transformation of the concept halal in Indonesia, Arum Budiastuti offers a reflection on how technology-based halal certification introduces a new meaning of halal and what implications this has.

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.

4S Palestine Forum | Contributions Call

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 | Medical and Health Humanities: Global Perspectives 2025

Oct 04, 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: ...

CfP | Unsettling Global Media and Communication Studies

Oct 10, 2024
The Center for Advance Research for Global Communication fellows are pleased to welcome submissions for the CARGC Fellows 2025 Biennial Conference. This conference is an excellent space for students, early career scholars, and practitioners. We welcome interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches and contributions from early career scholars across various fields. Keynote speech will be given by Dr. Nabil Echchaibi (University of Colorado Boulder).

New Book | Driving Decisions: How Autonomous Vehicles Make Sense of the World

Nov 25, 2024
'Driving Decisions: How Autonomous Vehicles Make Sense of the World' by Sam Hind examines the phenomenon of autonomous driving, and the ongoing, complex, costly, and contentious quest to automate driving. Principally organized around the concept of algorithmic decision-making, the book considers how different mapping, sensing, and machine learning (ML)-dependent capabilities are gifted to autonomous vehicles through different kinds of technical work: from computer science students annotating vis...