Mobile Menu

4S Mission

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

Latest 4S News

CfP | InterAcademy Partnership Competitive Grants

Published On: Oct 18, 2024

Deadline: Dec 2, 2024

The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) invites proposals from IAP member academies and regional networks, for projects that would help advance IAP’s mission and strategic goals. Proposed projects should preferably be collaborative across member academies and regional networks. Priority will be given to project proposals that aim to establish or continue support for collaborations across disciplines (for example, collaborations across academies of science, medicine and engineering), especially ...

Chronicity and Its Social Lives: Reflections on Everyday Experiences of Osteoarthritis

Published On: Nov 7, 2025

Deadline: Sep 15, 2025

In this post, Perseverence Madhuku discusses the tensions between biomedical, social, and personal understandings of ageing, immobility, and care in Zimbabwe through the case study of Osteoarthritis.

Call for Assistant Editors for 4S Backchannels (Global South)

Published On: Nov 27, 2025

Deadline: Dec 15, 2025

The Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) is looking for STS graduate students, postdocs or early career scholars from/based in the Global South (especially Africa, Middle East, Asia) who can contribute as Assistant Editors for 4S Backchannels.
The candidate will be part of the team sharing and disseminating STS news, research from/about Global South in the form of short academic writings. Besides some editorial skills, they will encourage potential authors to contribute with their w...

See All 4S News ⪢

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.

Learn More About STHV ⪢

“Bogeymen,” “Murderers,” and “Loonies”: Emotions in Dutch Debates on 5G and Health

Floortje Moes, Christian Bröer, Klasien Horstman

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Scientific advice is often solicited in governance, yet it is increasingly challenged in the public domain. Public participation is often suggested to mediate opposing...

Indigenous Environmental Data Justice: Confronting Colonial Data and Activating Indigenous Sovereignty

María Fernanda Yanchapaxi, M. Murphy1Technoscience Research Unit, 7938University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
This article offers Indigenous Environmental Data Justice (IEDJ) as a framework related to, but importantly distinct from, Environmental Data Justice. IEDJ points to the...

Hard-Earned Glimpses: Using GPS Tracking in Dementia Care

Astrid Meyer, Stinne Aaløkke Ballegaard, Anders Albrechtslund

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking is a common tool used to prevent and handle situations where people with dementia get lost. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at...

Do Artifacts Have Political Economy?

Kean BirchInstitute for Technoscience & Society, York University, Toronto, Canada

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Harking back to Langdon Winner's now classic essay “Do artifacts have politics?,” my aim in this article is to ask a very similar question—namely, do artifacts have...

Infrastructuring Care: Co-Designing Computational Notebooks for Environmental Data Justice

Alejandro Alvarado Rojas, Lourdes Vera, Steve Hansen, Eric Nost, Sara Wylie, Cole Alder, Environmental Data & Governance Initiative EDGI

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
The 2016 election of Donald Trump heightened the disproportionate risks from toxicants faced by minoritized communities from cuts in the US Environmental Protection Agency...

Engaging Science, Technology and Society

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

Learn More About ESTS ⪢

ESTS Incoming Editorial – A New Editorial Collective for ESTS

Published On: Jul 9 2026

Erika Szymanski, Greg Hollin, Aparajita Bhandari, Clément Dréano, Georg Hoehne, Dasom Lee, Óscar Moreno-Martínez, Lucas Nishida, Andrea Quinlan, Kendall Roark, Pankaj Sekhsaria, Federico Vasen, Richa Venkatraman, Susann Wagenknecht

We write to introduce ourselves as the new Editorial Collective for Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. This editorial describes how we are taking up the journal's mission of openness, building on the work of ESTS’s prior...

How Moderation Makes Science: Precautionary Valuation and Boundary-Making in the Early Circulation of Research

Published On: Jul 10 2026

Natascha Chtena, Irene V. Pasquetto, Alice Fleerackers, Stephen Pinfield, Melanie Benson Marshall, Juan Pablo Alperin

As preprint servers proliferate across scientific fields, moderation has emerged as a lightly structured form of gatekeeping that precedes—or bypasses—peer review. This article examines moderation as a site of precautionary...

Commitment Issues in Science & Technology Studies: On the Necessity of Compromising One’s Principles

Published On: Jul 10 2026

Bård Torvetjønn Haugland, Alexander Myklebust

There have been longstanding discussions regarding the place of normative commitments in Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship. Analysing STS critiques of Innovation Studies and accounts of the institutionalisation...

Sounding Uncertainties: An Embodied Strategy for Digital Ethnographic Archives

Published On: Jul 13 2026

Katja de Neergaard

STS scholars have discussed how the technologies we study are becoming part of our infrastructures for research, sparking new forms of collaboration and a growing interest in open research data and digital ethnographic archives....

4S Blog: Backchannels

Art, Science, and the Many Ways of Knowing the Brain: Workshop Report-Back

Lina Pinto-García
Sep 28, 2026
What can art teach us about the brain that science alone cannot? In this report, Lina Pinto-García reflects on a gathering in Medellín where artists, scientists, and scholars came together to explore new ways of understanding neurological experiences, care, and brain health.

Racialised risk in disaster response in Colombia: A note on the earthquake of 10th of August

María Paula Hernández Ruiz
Sep 14, 2026
In this reflection, available in both English and Spanish, María Paula Hernández Ruiz proposes the notion of racialised risk and examines how infrastructure, racialisation, and inequality shaped the emergency response to the earthquake that struck western Colombia on 10 August 2026. Focusing on the country’s road network, she explores how infrastructural inequalities deepen risk for Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and peasant communities in the Pacific region, while considering t...

Being Hybrid: Galls as Multispecies Encounters

Tiziana N. Beltrame is a science and technology anthropologist and a research fellow at the University of Padua. She is involved in the National Biodiversity Future Center, studying natural history collections provenance, conservation practices, digital processes, and museum storage in Europe. She is also an associate at the Centre Alexandre-Koyré (EHESS-CNRS-MNHN) in Paris. Luca Tonetti is a researcher in the History of Science at the University of Padua. His research focuses on the history of early modern medicine as well as natural history collections in Italy. Within the National Biodiversity Future Center, he has worked primarily on botanical collections, exploring the intersections of botany, entomology, and agricultural science in Padua between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Sep 21, 2026
Galls or cecidia are vegetal tissue outgrowths generated when insects or other organisms meet plants. They are resourceful common life entanglements, transdisciplinary by nature.

BOOK REVIEW: Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia (2026)

Mardi Reardon-Smith (University of Monash)
Sep 07, 2026
In Making Do, Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia (2026), Mardi Reardon-Smith (University of Monash) provides ethnographic insights to the ways in which 'care' brings humans, nonhumans, and landscapes of Cape York together through the practices and politics of 'making do'. This book review features stunning photography taken by Reardon-Smith during their time in the field, and an interview with the author.

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

See All Backchannels ⪢

Making and Doing: STS Beyond the Four Corners of the Paper

STS News

Items submitted by the community and emailed to members monthly.

University of Virginia | Open Rank Tenured/Tenure Track Professor of Data Science in Data and Society

Sep 25, 2026
The University of Virginia School of Data Science is a leader in preparing students, advancing research, and developing the intellectual foundations that underpin the age of artificial intelligence. We seek exceptional candidates for an open-rank tenured or tenure-track faculty position in the School of Data Science (SDS) within the Data and Society domain, broadly understood to include integrative work across the social sciences, policy, humanities, law, business, and more technical areas of da...

San José State University | Assistant Professor in Sociology, Specialization in Health and Human/Technology Interaction

Sep 24, 2026
The Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences (SISS) at San José State University (SJSU) invites applications from scholars in the areas of Human/Technology Interaction, Social Psychology, Sociology of Health and Illness/Mental Illness, and/or Science and Technology Studies (STS). Candidates are expected to teach and develop courses in their area of specialty and core sociology topics. The ideal candidate will have a strong research agenda focusing on the societal impa...

Harvey Mudd College| Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellowship in Science and Technology

Sep 24, 2026
Harvey Mudd College (Claremont, California) invites applications for the Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellowship in Science and Technology Studies, beginning fall 2027. Applications are invited from artists and scholars working at the intersection of art and science, technology and society (STS). Applicants’ methods can draw from fields in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, including, but not limited to anthropology, art, design, environmental studies, gender studies, geography, hi...

CfP | Software Libraries: Following the Infrastructures of Code Special Issue

Sep 24, 2026
This Special Issue of Computational Culture addresses the underresearched topic of software libraries by inviting 500-word abstract submissions on topics that may include: following libraries as sociotechnical objects; the political economy and platformization of libraries; libraries as epistemic and normative infrastructures; and creative and critical (re)appropriation.

More STS News ⪢