Over 190 open panel proposals have been accepted for 4S New Orleans. Full descriptions of the panel topics are provided below.
The purpose of calling for Open Panel proposals is to stimulate the formation of new networks around topics of interest to the 4S community. For 4S 2019, open panels have been proposed by scholars working in nearly every continent and relating to just about every major STS theme. Open panel paper submissions should be in the form of abstracts of up to 250 words. They should include the paper’s main arguments, methods, and contributions to STS.
When submitting papers to open panels on the abstract submission platform, you will select the Open Panel you are submitting to. Papers submitted to an open panel will be reviewed by the open panel organizer(s) and will be given first consideration for that session.
Also at the time of submission, you will also be asked to nominate two alternative open panel preferences for your paper. In the event that your paper is not included in the open panel of your first preference it will be considered for the alternative panels indicated in your submission.
Alexander Mirowski , Indiana University
This panel aims to bring together scholars whose work examines critical issues surrounding video games. Such games are not simply games; they let us play, but they are also work, sport, business, sites of cultural production, and lenses for introspection. The field of video game studies is increasingly being recognized for its theoretical rigor and diversity of method, as well as the contributions it has made to academic discussions on topics such as technological development, identity formation, labor, and digital sociality. But, there is more work to be done. This panel thus invites papers representing the rich body of scholarship on video games as well as the diverse webs of actors arrayed around them to encourage discussion about this vibrant medium.
STS provides fertile ground for these discussions about video games and the complex networks in which they are embedded; with critical inquiry, STS shows us how we might uncover and recover diverse actors and practices in the video game ecosystem. 4S 2019 is a prime place to engage in such discussions with its tripartite theme of Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations; after all, video games exist at the confluence of all three. How might we productively study video games using STS theory and methods while exploring this theme? Novel approaches to the study of video games are also welcome, as they represent critical steps towards the innovation and regeneration of video game studies and STS in turn.
Caelyn Randall, University of Wisconsin- Madison
Xerxes Minocher, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Driven by deterministic assumptions that the mere presence of information leads to positive social transformation (Srinivasan, Finn, & Ames, 2017), the era of big data has arrived (boyd & Crawford, 2012), bringing with it a series of critical questions that ask what big data surveillance looks like. As the titles of popular books and articles on the topic of big data surveillance such as Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (O’Neil, 2016), The Dystopia We Signed Up For (Manning, 2017), and How Big Data is Automating Inequality (Eubanks, 2018) all underscore, the way in which big data is being imagined is as a new, nearly cataclysmic threat to public well-being. Such questions, however, may elide the ways in which big data surveillance is embedded within existing socio-political networks of power. As a technology of governance, big data surveillance constrains and enables the mobility of data/bodies asymmetrically. For example, surveillance, especially as an apparatus of state governance, has long been used for the social control of communities of color (Brown, 2015). Although big data surveillance may represent new, 21st century relations between private companies, universities, and the U.S. intelligence community (e.g. Amoore & Piotukh, 2015; O’Neil, 2016), it is still guided by a pre-existing and longstanding ideology of monitoring and controlling (Benjamin 2016). We invite papers that critically engage with big data surveillance practices, either by questioning the epistemological systems underpinning these practices or examining how these practices enable, constrain or distribute economic, political, and social mobilities.
STS IstanbuLab, Research Platform
Authoritarian regimes and political practices have been on the rise in many countries of the world in the last decade. The relationship of this new wave of authoritarianism and science has been particularly tense, with the emergence of post-truth politics, rejection of scientific knowledge and authority where it is not compatible with the projects of the regime, and oppression of scientists and academics who are in opposition to the politics of the authoritarian states. There has also been resistance and discussions of how to engage with these political shifts, among scientists, activists, activist scientists, and the general public who are concerned about the situation. In this environment, we believe that it is vital to discuss how to advocate for science while also critically examine it, as STS scholars.
Thus, for this panel, we, as STS IstanbuLab, invite papers discussing different aspects of the relationship between authoritarianism and science(s): What forms of scientific practice get supported under authoritarian regimes? How do we discuss the relationships between authoritarianism and science through past and present examples? What methodological innovations would STS bring in understanding and challenging authoritarian governance of science? How do we approach the complex and multiple relationships between political power and technoscientific practices taking shape in contemporary states of authoritarianism?
Following the discussions of last year’s 4S conference, we especially encourage a transnational participation, since we also believe this is an issue where focusing on similarities and differences beyond national borders, and non-Western STS scholarship and experiences, are particularly meaningful.
Aimé Sègla, Université d’Abomey-Calavi
The building of Africa South of the Sahara has always been through transformation, interruption and regeneration of knowledge and techniques, both tacit, implicit, unexpressed, body codified, or in language and cognition. As so, this kind of knowledge remains invisible, under-recognized and undervalued. Yet, it is clear and scientifically proven that this locally-grounded and useful knowledge as a particular universal knowledge is one of the most reliable bases for long term, sustainable prosperity nowadays Africa. The panel (can be open / or closed) seeks papers that contribute to provide a forum for networking on appropriate non conventional Technology solutions for the 21st century through the recognition, valorization and re-appropriation of locally-grounded knowledge and practices: Papers may:
Sarah Sachs, Columbia University
The field of science and technology studies is producing a growing literature in response to the increasing prevalence of machine algorithms in everyday life. Research stretches across anthropology, sociology, information science, media studies, organizations, communications, history, and cognitive science—examining, for example, the causes and consequences of bias in algorithmic decision-making or the embeddedness of algorithms in different historical, organizational, and market contexts. These studies serve as a foundation for expanding the social study of algorithms to accommodate for a more nuanced perspective on the interplay between contexts and the different forms and functions these technologies take and serve. Having exposed the black box of the Algorithm and its inscrutability, scholars are now turning their attention to algorithms as varied systems, enacted through a multitude of practices including, but not limited to, the production of models and their codification. This panel seeks to bring into conversation scholars from multiple disciplines who are interested in algorithms in practice (Christin 2017) and welcomes submissions exploring such themes as:
Ellen Foster
James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Yana Boeva, Nuremberg Tech – Technische Hochschule Nuernberg
Science and technology not only describe the focus of research for STS scholars but very often constitute our physical presence within academic institutions. Historians and philosophers of technology teach ethics classes in engineering departments, while anthropologists and sociologists reside in faculties of science – the range of employment possibilities and STS’ impact within STEM fields appear as unbound. Despite STS’ presence in these fields, our pedagogies vary significantly from STEM’s teaching models by following the disciplinary methods, principles, and traditions of social sciences and humanities. However, due to their growing popularity, technological countercultures such as making and hacking have found acceptance within these diverse academic areas, particularly at the crux of interdisciplinarity in which STS exists (Chachra, 2015; Rosner, 2018; Sayers, 2018).
Yet novel and alternative attempts such as digital humanities, critical making, and material practice remain on the margins of traditional pedagogies of STS-related and STEM disciplines. Simultaneously, more recent educational reforms follow a neoliberal course of merging social sciences and humanities into STEM thus promising to increase the critical thinking capacities of students. In other instances, such endeavors result in the foundation of innovation hubs proposing the improvement of STEM education through a systematization and quantification of critical theory and social methods under the vague label of soft skills.
In the light of making and doing and an interest in STS with the promise of hands-on practices, this open panel welcomes paper proposals engaging the multiplicity of issues related to the unfolding of alternative pedagogies.
Henry Buller, University of Exeter
Nicolas Fortané, INRA – IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine
Introduced into agriculture in the late 1940s, antimicrobials have become an integral component of many different aspects of contemporary life, whether that be agricultural production and food supply or human, animal and environmental health. The global problem of antimicrobial resistance, which is increasingly defining antimicrobial use today, is not new. The last few decades have seen a series of attempts to frame and to regulate antimicrobial use and the drug market in veterinary medicine and animal care across different countries with significant varied economic, scientific and political contexts. Hence while their use as animal growth promoters has been banned in Europe since 2006, antimicrobials are still widely employed for this purpose in the rest of the world.
This panel seeks to look specifically at antimicrobial uses in animal husbandry (from the prescription and use of antimicrobials on farms to the production, marketing and sale of antimicrobial medicine) and the different forms of regulation (professional, institutional or market-oriented) that are applied to antimicrobial use. The panel aims to bring new understanding to the social, technical and economic structures of agri-food production and distribution systems that integrate, and have integrated, antimicrobials as key elements in the processes of livestock farming or, on occasion, have sought to encourage their reduction.
The panel will take an STS approach to raise questions about innovation and transition, resilience and resistance, science and regulation, practice and prescription, that offer new perspectives on the hitherto dominant trajectories of livestock farming. We invite contributions on a range of topics including (but not exclusively):
Dara Ivanova, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Roland Bal, Erasmus university rotterdam
Iris Wallenburg, Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management
Cities are increasingly postulated as the scene of the bright future: they are smart, fancy and dynamic. Assembling people, technologies and (green) buildings together, they inhabit the synergy to create a new world (Sennett 2018). The countryside, on the other hand, is shrinking: young people leave for the city, while ‘needy’ elderly stay behind in emptying regions, as municipalities hastily seek to maintain regions livable. Is the countryside declining? The famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas portrays the countryside as the future of the world; ‘empty’ regions being used for large-scale innovative technologies and inhabited by ‘new’ citizens (i.e. refugees, foreign workers) that transform the countryside into geographies of innovation and care.
How to understand these spatial-temporal orders of the countryside and the caring it involves, both for the region and its citizens? What does a caring geography entail? Human geographers and STS scholars alike have put forward the notions of assemblage and ‘carescape’ (Ivanova et al. 2016) to envision how ‘care’ – in its broad meaning of caring for health, society, community, environment and its buildings and animals – and ‘geography’ intertwine, inquiring how public and private services are organized within regions and how this relates to its social, political, economic and physical dynamics (Milligan and Wiles 2010).
In this panel, we seek to explore and conceptualize the countryside as an assemblage, with a particular emphasis to its caring geography. How do carescapes in the countryside change, given demographic and economic developments? How to conceptualize these emerging regional assemblages and their consequences?
Rebecca Jablonsky, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Nick Seaver, Tufts University
Tero Karppi, University of Toronto
In recent years, attention has become a topic of increasing public concern. Digital distractions, addictive design patterns, and ad-driven platforms are said to be decreasing individual attention spans; political crises are described as canny distractions or failures of collective attention. Meanwhile, academic critics call for new forms of attention as solutions to analytic and political problems. This panel will draw together work that attends to attention, using the analytic tools of STS to foreground attention itself as an object bound up with the social production of knowledge, scientific and technical infrastructures, and broader discourses of economic value and cultural values. What work does the concept of attention perform in popular and expert conversations? How might closer attention to attention interrupt common sense discourses about its value and purpose? What work can attention perform, when it is attended to with greater precision and care?
This panel invites contributions that are topically, theoretically, and methodologically related to the intersections of attention and STS—including but not limited to research that addresses the following:
Bidisha Chaudhuri, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore
Soumyo Das, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore
Barely thirty years ago information technology (IT) was considered to be the final answer to the labour question (Zuboff 1988). We are again at a historical juncture, where AI-based automation seems to bring back a similar promise (Levy & Murnane 2004). Whether this new machine age will lead to displacement of human labour or will create new economic opportunities is a matter of a different debate. However, with increasing delegation of human activities to intelligent agents, what we definitely witness is a shift in human skill trajectory (Bright 1958). Michael Polanyi in his book, The Tacit Dimension (1966), argued that much of human knowledge and capability stems from skills and rulesets that lies underneath our conscious understanding. Moreover, human abilities such as empathy, sympathy, trust are often transmitted to us via culture, tradition and are beyond the general directive of ‘skill’. Drawing on earlier work on automation and skill (Spenner 1983; Adler 1987; Vallas 1990), we explore these grey zones in human skills/activities, which, while undergoing the current phase of AI-based automation, go beyond a linear trajectory of deskilling and reskilling (Acemoglu & Restrepo 2018). It manifests rather as a more complex intertwining between human activities, technology, and organization structure. The objective of the panel is to bring together an analysis of these nuanced process through which human skills are evolving and will evolve, given increasing reliance on AI-based automation and how this will impact human identity, which in the modern capitalist system, relies on our occupation.
Marianne Ryghaug, Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU)
Tomas Moe Skjølsvold
Roger Søraa
This session explores imaginaries, politics, users and consequences of the emerging technologies of autonomous vehicles and the digitalization of transportation infrastructure. It problematizes these technologies across temporal, scalar, systemic and disciplinary boundaries. The goal is to stimulate a rich debate on the co-production of autonomous vehicles and society, and to shed light on how the complexity, hybridity, and diversity of these emerging technologies could be understood, interpreted and governed.
According to popular narratives, self-driving vehicles promise wide-ranging socio-technical transformations with potential implications for mobility, safety, environment, infrastructure, urban development and planning. STS scholars have highlighted the ambivalent and contested characteristics of autonomous vehicles and digital infrastructures. While techno-epistemic actors who push the self-driving agenda produce rich imaginaries highlighting massive potential gains within traffic safety, goods transport, energy efficiency and climate mitigation, others question the politics of self-driving vehicles by asking how they feed into wider algorithmic cultures of governance and deep digitalization.
This also raises important questions of cyber security and surveillance and the exploitation of big data by actors such as nation states, corporations, political parties and interest groups. Further on, what are the implications for labor markets, governance and planning? Are current technological scripts socially just? From the perspective of technology users, this raises questions of the changing roles and practices of drivers, ownership of transport data, app-economies, new services, mobility cultures and democracy. Driverless vehicles might also enable engagement with moral dilemmas such as variations of the trolley problem.
Stephen Molldrem, The University of Michigan
Kate O’Connor, University Of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Jallicia Jolly, The University of Michigan
In conversation with ongoing queer, disability studies, feminist, and antiracist projects in STS, this open panel seeks to further disrupt interrogations of sexuality, race, gender, and (dis)ability in the study of science, technology, and medicine by centering deviant objects of analysis and subject-positions: Bad Queers, Bold Crips, and Black Femmes. By the fact of their existence – but also through their intentional deviant practices – Queers, Crips, and Black Femmes disrupt idealized white, able-bodied, masculine, heteronormative, and feminine subject-positions as these are depicted in both popular and medical material. Rather than an STS that merely accounts for this deviance, we seek to build up an STS that actively celebrates these deviant subjects and their practices of self-making, community-building, and collective resistance to normative regimes of science, technology, and biomedicine. We welcome submission from all disciplines, historical time periods, and encourage methodological promiscuity.
STS has a long history of disrupting understandings of bodies, modes of knowledge, and entire disciplines. Operating in that tradition, this panel seeks to put those disruptions into conversation with deviant forms of inquiry and theorizing in queer studies, disability studies, sexuality studies, and Black feminist studies. How do Queers disrupt the technological and biomedical constructions around sex, sexuality, pain, pleasure, disease, and desire? What happens when Crips embrace biomedical technologies that seek to erase disabled subjects and instead use them to create an imagined Crip future? How do STS scholars and biomedical actors respond when working class Black women who are framed as ill or sick – such as women living with HIV – respond with bold assertions of their health?
Inspired by the deviant milieus of New Orleans, Bourbon Street, and with 4S 2019 convening in the shadow of Southern Decadence 2019, we welcome scholars from a wide variety of fields that seek to (re)define, appropriate, and revel in deviance through one or more critical STS lenses. We welcome traditional paper submissions and contributions in other formats or modalities.
Leah Horgan, University of California, Irvine
Margaret Jack
Cindy Lin, University of Michigan, School of Information
Premised on the promises of being data-driven, nation-states across the globe are building web-based, data-driven systems to manage populations, resources, and risk. Scholarship in postcolonial STS and critical data studies critiques the widespread use of data-driven systems, pointing to the racialized, gendered, and socioeconomic consequences embedded in their production and use, and the troubled histories from which such apparatuses arise (Borocas and Selbst 2016; Browne 2017; Crawford and boyd 2012; Noble 2017; Suchman 2007). This research has productively demonstrated that data technologies are not neutral, but instead are socially, culturally, and politically situated ways of knowing and seeing (Browne 2017; Gitelman 2014; Jasanoff 2017; Thakor 2017). While scholars have studied the recent and often algorithmic proliferation of these data-driven practices (Eubanks 2018; Brayne 2017; Lyon 2014), less attention has been paid to the complex interplay between data-driven domination and the changing norms of everyday administration—the day-to-day work of forging of what Oscar Gandy calls ‘‘actionable intelligence’’ (2012: 125). And, how these systems work outside of the West is largely unattended to. Using these conditions as a starting point, we illuminate the range of practices and perceptions of being data-driven, from policy makers in capital cities to mid-management urban police to rural officials. How do government workers develop a sense of data literacy in divergent contexts across regions? How do they derive value in data and data-driven techniques? Through empirical analysis, this panel digs beneath macro trends and rhetoric to query the lived experiences of working through these burgeoning data systems.
Else Vogel, Linköping University
Catelijne Coopmans, Linköping University
Steve Woolgar, Linköping University
Sara Bea, Linköping University
This panel explores the influential landscape of practices of personal change and radical self-transformation. Practices and techniques for self-improvement are part of encounters and ways of operating in healthcare, education, professional development, life coaching, therapy, spiritual practice, movements like the quantified self, etc. Various instantiations share a staged ‘will to goodness’ and an emphasis on the possibility of change, foregrounding an inward turn to learn how to become a happier, healthier, wiser and sometimes also a wealthier version of oneself.
Much existing literature in the social sciences attempts to grapple with the ubiquity of ’the psy-complex’ by analysing the phenomenon as (yet) another manifestation of neoliberal regimes. We wish to move away from such an analytical cul-de-sac and craft stories that do not hinge on unilateral critique or explanatory frameworks. Drawing on STS’ capacity to re-frame the issues under study as well as to reinvent itself, we propose to ignite an STS-inflected examination of ‘techniques of the better self’ that poses novel questions, mobilises inventive empirical methods, and opens up interstitial spaces between critique and justification. What is involved in lived instances or trajectories of ‘becoming otherwise’? What do these allow us to learn about, for example, limits, sameness/difference, choice, care, divisions, subjectivities? In order to address these questions, the panel encourages a wide range of contributions that attend to the teaching/learning, using, incorporating or evaluating techniques of the better self.
Nathanael Bassett, University of Illinois at Chicago
This panel calls for scholarship on non-use and media refusal to examine how ubiquitous technology becomes infastrucutral, and the increasing difficulty of avoiding adoption. While existing works on non-use examine Sally Wyatt’s refuser, resister, and the expelled as well as the excluded, looking at technologies and media as infrastructural leads us to consider non-use as a precarious near-impossibility. Yet interruptions in patterns of use and changes in user behaviors emerge, as we negotiate our relationships with media and technology in context-specific studies. How do we consider what it is to be a non-user when innovation is rapidly the conditions of possibility for living in a technified society? This panel hopes to address that question.
Scholarship on non-use is welcome to examine the issues surrounding innovation, interruptions, (dis)engagement and (dis)empowerment. When we are compelled to participate in media and technology via innovation, how do we measure the exchange of agency, as ways of being in society become technified, commercialized and standardized on new platforms? What is the interuption to older ways of being and historic social infastructure? What is the relationship between (dis)engagements and (dis)empowerment? Case studies, theoretical works, and new perspectives are especially welcome as we try and continue the necessary conversation around non-use.
Stephanie Lloyd, Université Laval
Zoë Wool, Rice University
Technology in disability studies is often seen as the trojan horse of ableism. In STS, for all the considerations of the posthuman, critical conceptualizations of disability remain rare. The research, then, emerging from these fields has largely run in parallel, with few or fleeting intersections. If the conceptual and political points of reference in these fields are characterized largely by disjunctions, the same cannot be said for their subjects of interest. From studies of biomedical technologies such as pharmaceutical and bionic devices to studies of the senses and ways of being in the world, the subjects and objects of concern in critical disability studies and STS overlap significantly. This panel will bring together a set of researchers working at the emerging intersection of these fields to converse within and across the existing tensions. Through a consideration of these tensions will speak directly to the conference theme of innovate, interrupt, regenerate, critically considering the ambivalent, complex positions of biomedical technologies as interventions. Moving beyond the limits of concepts such as therapeutic normalisation and technological enhancement, we will dwell on the way technologies are productive of, and mediate, difference. We will consider how the everyday use of biomedical technologies can sometimes work against normative logics of cure that govern their production allowing people instead to reshape, rather than remove, difference and disability.
Michelle Munyikwa, University of Pennsylvania
What might a uniquely Black feminist approach to the study of health, science, and technology offer to the field of STS as a whole? Both in contrast to and in conversation with feminist science studies, we propose a critical engagement, Black Feminist Health Science Studies, which is invested in a social-justice based science, one which makes clear the co-constitutive nature of medical science and popular perception, underscoring the need to engage them simultaneously (Bailey 2016, 22). As an emergent lens and field, BFHSS is built on existing and growing research that demands a multi-pronged approach to ameliorating the health disparities of Black people. In this vein, our work collectively draws upon the work of a multitude of black sociologists, feminists and critical race scholars including Dorothy Roberts, Alondra Nelson, Cathy Cohen, Ruha Benjamin, and Evelynn Hammonds among others, as we work to grow an interdisciplinary community which is dedicated to creating better understandings of health for Black communities and to examining the media’s role in framing and disseminating this knowledge.
This panel will bring together scholars invested in the project of imagining a future for STS which takes seriously the contributions of Black feminist engagements with science, technology, health, and medicine. We invite ethnographic work, textual engagements, artistic performance, and any synthesis of these and other modalities to ask what might be possible. What kinds of interruptions, interruptions, and regenerations might a black feminist framework afford the study and experience of health across time and space?
Monamie Haines, Nanyang Technological University
Katherine Hendy, Independent Scholar
Science studies scholars have long tracked the variety of political and epistemic projects either conducted by or enrolling lay people to enact science. Whether it is scientists crowdsourcing data or activists questioning corporate or state research agendas, experimental methods, or the ends of research, citizen science encompasses the participatory production of scientific knowledge within and without institutionalized boundaries. As such, tracking the openings and foreclosures of citizen science has brought attention to the instrumental rationality and cultural authority of science underpinning both policy justification and public accountability, particularly in liberal democratic contexts.
In this panel, we seek to expand this conversation by examining the political possibilities of technoscientific engagement that is enabled through bureaucratic interventions rather than the lingua franca of science in multiple political contexts across the world. How might we examine social movements that must demonstrate bureaucratic literacy in order to challenge the boundaries and ends of technological and biomedical projects? For example, Indian anti-nuclear activists, labeled as ‘anti-science’ by the state and denied cultural routes to claiming expertise, have mobilized procedural and legal forms of argumentations to press moral claims. Even in the United States, activists must develop bureaucratic literacy to negotiate the procedural hurdles of ethics committees and regulatory agencies to challenge therapeutic applications for marijuana and psychedelics. We invite papers which explore how these less-examined and braided practices of bureaucraft (Joshi and McCluskey 2018) might expand our understandings of the mutual constitutions of bureaucracy and science as well as the political possibilities of bureaucracy itself.
Aya Kimura, University of Hawaii
Abby Kinchy, Polytechnic Institute
This session explores the inter-connections between citizen science, laws, policies, standards, and regulations. In many countries, citizen science has gained public policy support in recent years, often touted for expanding scientific literacy, producing useful scientific data, and spurring innovation. At the same time, a growing number of scholars are highlighting how citizen science can contribute to progressive social change, bringing attention to social movement activists, union organizers, and scientists who are using citizen science to argue for better protection of the environment and human health. Papers in this session will probe questions such as: How is citizen science and public policy co-produced? How are neoliberal policies implicated in the advancement of citizen science? What are the implications when citizen scientists choose to align (or not) their data and methods with existing regulatory standards? How is the field of citizen science governed? How do citizen science practices encourage or inhibit politicized actions by volunteers? In alignment with the conference theme of innovation, this session also explores how citizen science helps innovation in regulatory science, advocacy strategies, legal arguments, and government policies.
Sergio Sismondo, Queen’s University
Nicole Nelson, University of Wisconsin Madison
For this panel, we invite presenters to return to classic STS papers, and to reflect on the value of doing so for advancing scholarship and building community in STS. Classics might be papers recognized as such. Or, they might be papers that are not part of standard narratives of the field but should be incorporated or re-incorporated into these narratives—recognizing that while narratives can celebrate the collective and cumulative nature of scholarship, they can also marginalize or exclude.
In remembering earlier moments in STS, we ask presenters to explore how those moments can be usefully or interestingly recalled today. We hope that presenters will not only engage with their chosen paper, but will also devote some of their time to freshly delivering parts of it. Such re-enactments might commemorate the contributions of particular scholars, or be performances intended to trouble existing categories or narratives in STS. By engaging with past scholarship through re-enactment rather than citation alone, we aim to foreground the performative aspects of citational practices, making clear how the meaning of a classic paper shifts as it is read aloud by a different speaker, in a different venue, in a different historical moment. In so doing, we aim to create space for thinking about how earlier moments in STS might be productively re-staged as we collectively shape narratives of the field’s trajectories.
Gianluigi Viscusi, EPFL, Switzerland
Jack Stilgoe , University College London
Brice Laurent, Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, Mines ParisTech
Sebastian Pfotenhauer, Technical University Munich
Sophie Nyborg, Technical University of Denmark – DTU
Test beds and living labs (TB/LL) have emerged as a prominent approach to foster innovation across geographical regions and technical domains, including in energy, transportation, smart cities, and robotics. Feeding on prominent policy discourses around grand societal challenges and directed transformation, TB/LL represent a co-creative, experimental approach to innovation policy that aims at once to test, demonstrate, and advance new sociotechnical arrangements in a model environment under real-world conditions. To that end, TB/LL tentatively stabilize new socio-technical orders at the meso-scale in an as-if mode of technology implementation, frequently with the promise that local orders could be scaled up or transferred to future society at large.
In this panel, we interrogate TB/LL as an emergent innovation policy instruments. We invite papers that address the following questions, among others:
Maywa Montenegro, University of California, Davis
Alastair Iles, UC Berkeley
Akos Kokai, University of California at Berkeley
The privatization of public knowledge has become endemic to 21st century times. From corporate battles over drug patents to seed wars, knowledge produced in many forms, sites, spaces, and communities is increasingly enclosed – that is, separated from its knowledge-makers and commodified for the accumulation of capital. Science and technology are at once driving and experiencing the effects of many contemporary enclosures. To counter such trends in enclosures, in the past 15 years, knowledge commons have materialized in some S&T fields (Frischmann, Madison, and Strandburg, 2014), as well as in citizen-led movements such as Wikipedia, Creative Commons, open access science databases, and crowd-sourced science and nature platforms. Yet S&T knowledge is also becoming important to building an array of material infrastructure and institutions, in both the industrial- and developing world contexts (e.g. energy commons and fishery commons). Many of these cases revive traditional customs and norms, braiding centuries-old knowledges into something ‘new.’
We welcome papers that explore the multiple dimensions of both knowledge commons and how knowledge is being used to create or support all varieties of commons. Some potential topics include: What are the potential contributions of commons to helping regenerate and democratize the everyday practice of science and technology? How does knowledge-making enable and sustain the formation of commons, and whose knowledge matters? What sorts of knowledge are produced within commons, and how might these play a role in the identity and governance of commons? How might new technologies update and reinvigorate commons practices? How might it disrupt them? What does it mean to be ‘innovative’ in the context of a commons? Can we move from treating knowledge as a resource to ‘thinking like commoners’?
José Francisco Romero-Muñoz, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla
Rollin Kent, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla
In recent decades, several international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Economic Forum and the European Commission have stated that nations’ progress must be understood in a broader set of ideas, including not just technological innovation but also social innovation. The importance of social innovation has increased because it represents an alternative to the conventional top-down assistance approach of some governments to face the social, economic, political and environmental challenges of the 21st century. Unlike such an approach, social innovation implies the active participation of society in the solution of its own problems. That is to say, we understand social innovation as the intentional change of social practices aimed at the solution of collective problems, through the active participation of a community. In other words, social innovation means social change, especially that intentional change of social practices. Despite its known relevance and conceptualization, several authors point out that social innovation still lacks a coherent theoretical structure and that more empirical research is necessary to understand and promote it. In response to this concern, through this panel we invite STS scholars to join a conceptual discussion on social innovation, helping to define its actors, conditions, potentials and possibilities. Likewise, an additional purpose of the panel is to present results of empirical investigations that show evidence of social innovation processes of particular cases. If the progress of nations requires not only technological innovation, but also social innovation, those who study innovation within the field of STS are the ones indicated to provide a better conceptualization on innovation, involving both concepts in processes that affect the welfare and sustainability of our societies.
Mascha Gugganig, Technical University Munich
Alex Rewegan, MIT
Controlled environments for plant growth—for food production or pharmaceutical development, among others—increasingly materialize in such forms as ‘controlled environment agriculture,’ ‘indoor controlled farming,’ or (urban) ‘vertical farming.’ In that regard, across North America there is an intense proliferation of technoscientific development relating to closed environmental systems for growing a quickly legalizing cannabis. Meanwhile, given the urgency of climate change, many other practitioners argue that closed systems present an inevitable path for future food production. These new technologies, which also includes the minute sensory monitoring and maintenance of humidity, air, temperature, water, light, and nutrients, have led to more ‘efficient’ plant growth, and to new technoscientific ways of knowing and living with plants. Indeed, such growing environments often question the central role of ‘natural’ resources like the sun, while hydroponic, aquaponic, and aeroponic systems have shifted the role of soil which, in conventional settings, is seen as central to healthy plant growth. Plant scientists and engineers thus work in novel interdisciplinary ways, leading not only to innovative forms of plant growth, but to the ‘growth’ of new ecological ontologies, and an expanding knowledge of the botanical sensorium. This panel invites papers that explore the complex human-plant-technology-economy relations that are emerging across a variety of settings. We seek contributions that critically interrogate how plant science and innovation in growth systems work together, and how they in turn co-constitute new plant epistemologies, moral economies, forms of care, and broader human-plant relations, among other possible topics.
Henri Boullier, French National Institute of Health and Medical Research
Boris Hauray, National Institute for Health and Medical Research
The influence of corporate interests – most notably from the cigarette, chemical, pharmaceutical, and food industries – on science and on health and environmental regulation has attracted a growing media and public attention. STS research has explored this issue in different ways, for example through the analysis of the impact of industry-funding on scientific publications, the study of corporate-biases in the production regulatory standards, or more broadly by questioning the commercialization of science. Lately, considerations on the politics, and power relationships, at play in the production of scientific knowledge have been renewed by the emergence of a new political sociology of science. This panel wants to bring together researchers taking on board the question of corporate influence on science and public regulation, and proposes to do so by following three lines of research: (1) first, by opening up a discussion on the notions and theoretical frameworks used to analyze industry or business influence (including, but not limited to: regulatory capture, conflict of interest, bias, production of ignorance, hegemony); (2) second, by studying the social mechanisms it involves (for instance, funding strategies, revolving-door dynamics, ghostwriting, lobbying, or threats and retaliations); (3) third, by analyzing production of policies aiming at controlling corporate influence, and the social mobilizations it triggers. More generally, the panel aims at helping the development of inter-sectoral and international comparison, and consequently welcomes papers that analyze the aforementioned corporate strategies in various industrial sectors and in various geographical areas of the global North and South.
James Hodges, Rutgers University
Yvonne Eadon, UCLA
Resistance to dominant modes of thinking, knowing, and doing can take a variety of forms– and often results in the production of new epistemological communities of practice. The counter-hegemonic epistemologies of conspiracy theorists, self-experimenters, citizen scientists, marginalized and oppressed communities, and members of many other knowledge domains frequently embody narratives and ways of knowing that run against the dominant paradigms of their social and historical contexts. Thomas Kuhn’s work on paradigm shifts is just one example of the turmoil around shifts in dominant scientific epistemology. In many cases, critical or disruptive epistemologies are met by those in power with skepticism and even fear.
This open panel calls for case studies addressing counter-hegemonic epistemologies in the fields of history of science and technology, as well as STS, information studies, education, media studies, and other relevant disciplines. We are particularly interested in research that brings a comparative historical perspective to bear on the continuously contested nature of dominant knowledge systems. Some points to consider could be: how have specific counter-narratives affected the dominant discourses in the fields that they challenge? Alternatively, how do dominant discourses overpower counter-hegemonic epistemologies? What kinds of contexts does this happen in, and what are the social, political, and historical implications of such contestation? We welcome submissions that address communities including but not limited to alternative education, decolonial science and technology, clandestine chemistry, whistleblowing, harm reduction, and radical politics. By bringing such disparate ways of knowing into contact, our panel aims to build towards a robust account of the innovation and contestation that prevail among counter-hegemonic epistemological communities.
Catherine Duchastel de Montrouge, STS Program, York University
Drew Danielle Belsky, STS Program, York University
Feminist STS scholars have stressed the importance of including engagements with creative life including literary and visual media as entry points into analysis of technosocial infrastructures, processes, and relations. Concepts like cyborgs and monsters also emphasize the boundary-crossing, embodied, and material aspects of knowledge creation by which subjecthood and world come into being together. However, use of non-normative forms of human embodiment and experience in STS scholarship has often resulted in the deployment of what feminist disability scholar Rosemarie Garland Thompson calls the theoretical generic disabled body (2011). She proposes instead that disability experience is, in part, one of misfitting between material embodiment and material world. Her definition recognizes the centrality of the fleshiness and contingencies of human embodiment but also the tangible effects of the techno-social worlds we inhabit.
This panel explores the productive and imaginative possibilities that arise from this misfitting of humans and material-social worlds, notably the ways in which practitioners and creators interact with and adjust the conditions of possibility for their representational practices. We invite papers that explore the generative frictions and interruptions to relations of power that engaging with non-normative bodyminds and experiences entail.We are particularly interested in how disabled identities are shaped by, and in turn influence creative practices, from online fan-fiction communities to graphic medicine. From web accessibility protocols to novel technologies, how are structures and processes created that make innovative representations possible? How might analysis of creative practices highlight the relational aspects of materiality as identity- and knowledge-building?
Anna Sofie Bach, University of Southern Denmark
Charlotte Kroløkke, University of Southern Denmark
Cryopreservation has given way to a new scientific ice age: The ability to freeze and bank biological material is today a pivotal technological practice in animal breeding, conservation biology, and human reproduction. In the existing science and technology literature, the innovative and transformative potential of cold temperatures has been theorized as involving forms of hindsight, suspense and salvage (e.g. Hoeyer, 2017; Radin & Kowal, 2017; Radin, 2015). This panel invites transdisciplinary, empirical as well as theoretical papers related to the ways that cryobanking is imagined and animated in scientific, commercial, popular culture, and user accounts. Situated within feminist science and technology studies, we welcome papers that help explore the ways that cold temperatures interrupt understandings of linear time, human/non-human binaries as well as what comes to count as living matter. This includes, but is not limited to: 1. How the cryobanking of human and animal reproductive bits becomes imagined as a type of cryo-insurance, 2. How the cryobanking of human and animal wholes becomes imagined and animated as a type of cryo-optimism, 3. How the cryobanking of multiple species and seeds engage a type of cryopolitics, and 4. The cryo-aesthetics of cryobanking.
Gloria Baigorrotegui, Instituto de Estudios Avanzados – Usach
Flavio D’Abramo ,MPIWG Berlin
Annika Capelán
Dancing is a ubiquitous form and a powerful expression for thinking about bodies, energy, ecology and temporalities. At the same time dance is performed at different scales and intensities while also affected by experiences, improvisations and evocations. Dancing, as performative mode, draws our attention to two issues of ongoing importance to STS: (1) movements, fluidities and meanings and (2) relationality and materiality. Dance may thus be simultaneously literal and metaphorical, structured and spontaneous, producing situations that may lure knowing but render it beyond words. In this way it generates pathways to think through, but also possibilities to rethink/regenerate social life more generally. Here, dancing becomes an interesting focal point for exploring the Anthropocene.
This panel considers dancing as both a lens and a site for understanding social life and naturecultures. We invite papers and/or performances that attempt to disrupt entrenched ideas about human and/or multispecies relations, using dance and dancing to envision alternative worldviews and reframe key problems. We ask: how can STS scholars explore dancing as epistemic practice in the Anthropocene, both in its own terms and in conversation with more conventional academic ways of knowing?
Possible topics are:
Mary Ebeling, Drexel University
Kevin Mellet, Orange Labs
Thomas Beauvisage, Orange Labs
Franck Cochoy ,University Toulouse Jean Jaurès
STS scholars have long been interested in the assorted and diverse devices that equip markets, from market infrastructures to mundane marketing tools like shopping carts, knowledge devices, and measuring instruments. As markets are digitized, data are a key element in the operation of markets in a variety of forms: consumer records, scoring and targeting instruments, customization engines, algorithmic pricing, vending and trading machines. Hence, data act as a versatile, yet vital, apparatus for markets, through the construction of data as a device, a valuation tool, an infrastructure, or an asset. This panel aims to explore these various facets of data, and how these help to achieve markets. We particularly – though not exclusively – welcome contributions on three aspects of market ‘datafication’. First, emergent data-based images of the consumer enhance classic customer representations produced by marketing, through data innovations in CRM databases, data brokers’ segments, cookie-based data pools, and social media data. What lies behind these data doubles, and what are their lived and experiential effects on consumers? Secondly, with big data technologies, marketing knowledge is increasingly produced from the analysis of large databases that combine a diverse array of information on consumers, products, firms, and market operations. These data are then stabilized through metrics, dashboards and standards. How do these new knowledge devices reconfigure practices? Third, data fuels market automation mechanisms, such as algorithmic pricing, recommendation engines, programmatic advertising, high-frequency trading. How do algorithmic markets and digital platforms take place in practice, and how do they reconfigure market agencements?
Joy Zhang, University of Kent
Michael Barr, Newcastle University
The global trajectory of scientific innovations seems to be both interrupted and regenerated by the rise of the Rest. The ascent of China and India as serious contenders for global scientific leadership, thriving pockets of excellence in South America, and an emerging attentiveness to promoting pan-African research excellence, call into question the validity, authority and even relevance of a Western-dominated epistemic vision of what ‘good science’ is. A heightened and widened awareness to decolonise science among both the Global South and the Global North has led to genuine attempts at reshaping the production and delivery of knowledge. Yet such efforts and their impacts cannot be taken for granted. Some have argued that while the world is not flat, there is an observable trend of the ‘cosmopolitanization of science’, where stakeholders in the Global South capitalise on the concepts of risk and give rise to new ways of science governance. Others have cautioned against an intrinsic irony underlying ‘subaltern ethicality’, whose path to international recognition may re-enact existing hegemonic logic and reinforce scientific hegemony rather than decolonize it.
We invoke Spivak’s classic question: To what extent can the Subaltern speak (and be heard) amid a global entanglement of interests? What are the incentives and hindrances to decolonizing science in practice? How does this inform us about the organisation and governance of science for the public good? This session invites discussions on these questions from both the successful and less successful attempts to decolonise science in different regions.
Daniel Breslau, Virginia Tech
The panel will bring together work on the growing number of synthetic social institutions mediated by economic theory, algorithms, datasets, and even experimental trials. These are sites where theory, code, and data, either generate price signals or produce matchings, in order to optimize some measured function. Examples are:
Taken as a whole, these mechanisms raise some crucial questions for the role of knowledge and technology in constituting social reality:
We expect and welcome submissions on a range of empirical topics, employing a range of methods, with the common goal of deriving analyses and insights that bridge these areas and contribute to a general understanding.
Dylan Lott, Center for Healthy Minds/University of Wisconsin-Madison
Advances in life-sustaining and monitoring technologies unavoidably problematize our understandings of dying, death and the range of conscious states in between which, increasingly, are defined through the use of technologically mediated assessments (e.g., coma, persistent vegetative state, MCS). The resultant ethical, economic, and cultural difficulties which attend the promise and perils of technologically mediated death and dying disrupt our notions of personhood, identity, and social obligation even as they tend to increase the length–though less often the quality–of life.
This panel invites papers which use critical, ethnographically informed STS theory and methods to interrogate and explore the technologies, networks, and interstitial spaces in and by which states of consciousness are assessed, the stages of dying are determined, and death pronounced. This panel also invites papers which interrogate the cascade of technologically mediated procedures which often follow, e.g., cessation of palliative care or life support, organ harvesting. Papers which examine institutional settings, practices, and rationale as they relate to specific technological devices (e.g., EEG, Bispectral Indexing) as nodes in diagnostic systems converging on death and dying are encouraged. This panel particularly welcomes papers that explore these topics across a range of cultural and socioeconomic domains and reflect on the ways in which critical perspectives rooted in STS may reflexively inform and configure technologically mediated assessments of dying, death and the states between.
Ritwick Ghosh, New York University
Kelly Bronson, Department Of Sociology And Anthropology, University Of Ottawa
Proponents of digital agriculture argue that innovations in sensing, big data and automation will transform how we think about and organize food systems. Digital technologies may optimize different components of production and distribution, with implications for productivity, profitability, social security and environmental protection. But as the land encounters the digital and the digital the land, it is important to consider how innovations are both shaping and being shaped by social and political processes and institutions. This panel is animated by the normative belief that STS attention to the interplay between technology and the social could advance a generative and timely analysis of digital agriculture.
We invite papers exploring the ways by which digital innovations are mobilized in food production and wider societal re-ordering. Panelists could consider how STS concepts such as co-production, assemblages, socio-technical systems or ontological politics could help in this work? What power dynamics are reproduced under so-called revolutionary innovations, and how are different groups problematizing and resisting stabilization as well as change? What social values are entangled with everyday technical practices to collect, order and (re)present agricultural data? How are farmers, agrochemical corporations, extension workers, governments and other social groups engaging with digital agricultural technologies?
Through this panel critically interrogating agricultural innovation (including what is assumed to be innovative), we secondarily hope to innovate STS’s disciplinary assemblages by making bridges with other fields attending to digital agriculture (food and rural studies, communication studies).
Alessandro Delfanti, University of Toronto
Yujie Chen, University of Leicester
Work is increasingly shaped by algorithms and automated technologies that standardize and organize the labor process, incorporate managerial tasks, and contribute to new forms of value generation. While this is depicted as a smooth process of innovation, the field is ripe with frictions and tensions.
Studies on technology and workers have well-documented workers’ resistance to the introduction of new technologies on the shop floor from manufacturing to call centers. Building on this scholarly tradition, we aim to discuss how algorithmic power is confronted, negotiated, and disrupted by workers in today’s booming sectors of logistics, online crowdwork, or the so-called gig economy. The field of STS offers crucial concepts and tools to challenge the assumption of technology as an external force that single-handedly configures and controls the workforce. STS shed lights on how both the materiality and ideology of innovation are contested and practiced by specific actors.
We are interested in papers that deal with workers’ creative means of counteracting algorithmic control, from strikes and refusal to everyday resistance and coping, as well as new forms of worker-led organizations, in different geographical, social and cultural contexts. Perspectives rooted on user theory, political economy of technology, feminist theory of technology, and labour process theory are welcome among others. We also aim to solicit papers that document and study how workers alter, redefine, and regenerate meanings, opportunities, risks, and rewards other than those imposed by system algorithms and other technologies.
Jennifer Dahmen-Adkins, RWTH Aachen University
Anita Thaler, IFZ – Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture
For decades the European Union has policies in place and funding offered to foster gender equality in academia and research. The notion has turned from ‘fixing women’ to ‘fixing the institutions’ while at the same time new paradigms like ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ (RRI), which see gender equality as integral part of research processes and contents, are proclaimed and advocated by the European Commission. But these policy-driven and requested change processes face inner-institutional as well as societal resistance (e.g. right political movement). Holistic systemic approaches are necessary to disrupt and interrupt traditional organizational structures towards social gender just work environments. The stronger institutionalisation of gender studies for instance in US American universities supported structural changes within the organisations, and makes gender equality efforts on the other hand more difficult in the majority of European institutions where gender studies are not structurally present and thus not acknowledged as research field. And while many European research performing organisations are still lacking gender programmes and gender equality offices, the feminist STS community discusses for decades the necessity to reflect on intersectional, LGBTQI* and postcolonial perspectives, which should be included in structural change policies as well.
In this open panel we want to stimulate cross-cultural knowledge exchange and try to foster the dialogue on intersectional perspectives on structural change in science and research organisations. We welcome theoretical and empirical papers, which contribute towards a better understanding on how structural and institutional conditions of precarious employment affect personal careers in multiple ways.
We are interested in papers on the macro-level of science policy and performance evaluation, on the meso-level of university governance and organisational effects (like ‘advanced discrimination’), and on the micro-level of individual careers and psychological factors (like ‘embodied anxiety’). Beside social justice, gender, and intersectional analyses, we especially encourage queer-feminist approaches and LGBTQ* perspectives. We would like to stimulate a discussion of papers, who dare to develop the vision of a fair, inclusive and just academic environment – how can disruptions from the inside work towards a system change in research and higher education?
JUAN ESPINOSA, Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello
Gloria Baigorrotegui, Instituto de Estudios Avanzados – Usach
Jorge Feregrino, FES Acatlán UNAM
Pedro Seguel-Varas, University of Texas at Austin
Labor is at the center of innovation, whether it is in services or manufacture, media, or any other activity. Popular media and, recently, academic discourse, have been brimming with account on how new technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robots, platforms, and algorithms will transform the landscape of work, with ramifications for occupations and employment on a potentially grand scale. Science Technology and Society studies offer a good toolset to study such sort of disturbances, recreation, and renovation in labor and organizations.
In this panel, we invite diverse reflections that explicitly address how do these technologies replace and/or renovate labor practices and its meaning for societies. For instance, contributions can raise the question about what sort of materialities emerge in new labor ecologies or how modes of production are changing through a human-automation symbiosis in the work system. Contributions can be theoretically and/or empirically oriented.
Furthermore, we invite contributions focused on visibilizing workers that are behind opaque processes of technological solutions (e.g. crowdworkers, maintainers), as well as types of related labor that is usually invisibilized (e.g. emotional labor, moderating, user content, etc.). Our exploration will include consideration of ethics, justice, system design, organization design, technology designers, maintenance, and new forms of work. We also invite to think about labor and power dynamics. For example: How data-driven technologies in the workplace change practices of managing control, surveillance or resistance? How do new technologies interact with outsourcing dynamics on a global scale, as well as with worker organizations?
Nancy Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
This open panel showcases new social innovations designed to address the critical cultural work performed by pharmaceuticals, their less licit siblings, and their difficult-to-classify cousins. The cultural presence of psychoactive drugs has grown in significance with recent changes in governance and commerce; agrarian and industrial production; and environmental and social effects. Risky presents occupy the foreground of drug epidemics, regularly figured as cultural crises through epidemiological reasoning. How shall STS make sense of drug science and pharmaceutical innovation in producing, sustaining, or diminishing drugs and their users? We seek papers that deal specifically with drugs as technologies of solidarity in proliferating sites of consumption and harm reduction; with the interruptions of pleasure, absent from discussions of alarm, pain, grief, loss, and harm; and with the sciences—done and over-done, undone and under-done—that make claims about the cultural work that drugs do in breaking down distinctions between medical and nonmedical sites, spaces, and forms of use. This panel will stage new work that opens up emerging spaces of harm reduction to critical scrutiny; historical, social, and cultural analysis that seeks to regenerate useable pasts; and will take an inclusive approach to new scholarship on the varieties of drug experience and conceptual frameworks used to make sense of drugs as powerful material-semiotic actors.
Amy Johnson
Li Cornfeld, Amherst College
Domestic technologies have long been a generative focus of feminist technology studies, the study of the social construction of technology, and scholarship on the social shaping of technology. Motivated by current sociotechnical challenges to public/private boundaries and the impact of economic disparity, war, and environmental crisis on homes and homelessness, we look anew at the relationship between the technological and the domestic to investigate contemporary lived experience. From this foundation, we pursue three lines of inquiry:
Domestic technologies as objects of the home: Deeply sociotechnical, the home mixes the personal, relational, and architectural. How do household technologies, from weighted blankets to kimchi fridges, produce domesticity? How do different technological conceptions of the home, from refugee camp to castle to networked ecology, shape inhabitants’ lives?
Technologies as domestic persons: From homemaker and domestic worker to digital assistant and autonomous vacuum cleaner, the home supports varied forms of personhood. How do language, performance, and affective labor construct domestic technologies as persons—and humans as domestic technologies? How do materiality and design mark domestic technologies as persons and nonpersons?
The domestication processes of technology: The deep familiarity of the home makes it also a terrain of uncanny valleys. What practices, internal or external to the home, render domestic technologies acceptable, intimate, and familiar? What place does domesticity occupy in larger societal trajectories of technologies?
We invite papers drawing on diverse contexts and methodologies. This Open Panel will have a companion panel at the National Women’s Studies Association conference.
Courtney Addison, Victoria University of Wellington
Timothy Neale, Deakin University
Thao Phan, University of Melbourne, Australia
In recent years, humanities scholars, social scientists, and others outside the physical and material sciences have set upon debates about the existence of a geological ‘age of the human,’ or the Anthropocene, intent to show how scientists are themselves ‘writing culture’ in these debates. The Anthropocene is, as many have noted, ‘a paradigm dressed as an epoch’ (Baskin, 2015). At the same time, there has been a renewed interest in the humanities and social sciences in engaging with many of the same materials at the centre of scientific discussions about the Anthropocene: fossils, minerals, soil, coal, plants, water, and so on. This has involved rethinking the ‘elemental’ basis of our surrounds as composed, perhaps, out of ‘elemental media’ (Peters, 2015).
There are (roughly) three senses of the elemental. In the first sense, elements are discrete chemical entities, like those named and schematised in the Periodic Table of Elements which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. Elemental are the metals and non-metals of specific atomic compositions and weights, arranged and combined in diverse forms. In the second sense, the elemental names the environmental milieu, or material substrate, in which we are irrevocably embedded, in which different forms of life are immersed, enveloped, and take shape. It is from this perspective that scholars have begun to write of technology and infrastructure as ‘elemental’; as, to quote Edwards (2003), our ‘naturalized background, as ordinary and unremarkable to us as trees, daylight, and dirt’. The third sense of the elemental is the ontological one, the philosophical correlate of the first. Here, the elemental is not a material resource or background, but is a claim about the conditions-of-possibility of being and matter themselves. For an elemental philosophy, there are forces or forms of matter from which every other material is derived; they are the condition and horizon of sensible involvement in the world (Engelmann and McCormack, 2018).
At once, the elemental situates us, embeds us, and is beyond us. This panel seeks contributions that explore the value (and limits) of thinking our present elementally.
References:
Baskin J. (2015) Paradigm dressed as epoch: the ideology of the Anthropocene. Environmental Values 24(1): 9-29.
Edwards PN. (2003) Infrastructure and modernity: Force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems. In: Misa TJ, Brey P and Feenberg A (eds) Modernity and technology. Boston: MIT Press, 185-226.
Engelmann, S and McCormack D. (2018) Elemental aesthetics: on artistic experiments with solar energy. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108 (1):241-259.
Peters JD. (2015) The marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Melanie Jeske, University of California, San Francisco
Rosalie Winslow, University of California, San Francisco
Emergent technologies and the implementation of new and innovative models, measures, and systems present rich sites for STS scholars to follow, understand, and intervene on technologies in the making (Brey 2012; Guston 2014). As new technologies are implemented in existing biomedical research and healthcare infrastructures, they carry with them great promise to disrupt standards and routine practice as well as improve our understanding of health, illness, and the human body. Yet as STS scholars have shown, technologies often reproduce and deepen existing disparities (Eubanks 2018; Lee 2003; Murphy 2006; Noble 2018; Sankar et al. 2004; Shostak 2013). Studying how emergent technologies and systems are designed, regenerated, mechanized, commercialized, and integrated offers a window to understand the trajectory of technologies and the racialized, classed, and gendered logic of systems with which they interact. This panel invites empirical contributions that explore how emergent technologies and platforms are constructed, implemented, and standardized in biomedical and healthcare settings. In alignment with this year’s theme, papers should offer innovative approaches and generate new ways of reframing the promises of innovation. We particularly are interested in papers that examine the implications of emergent technologies and systems for inequality and health justice.
Christopher Caulfield, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
The topic of emotions enters into STS work in diverse way. Baier (1987) and Gilligan (1982) have offered ground breaking work on the importance of emotionality for feminist critiques of masculine and patriarchal social structures. The relation between emotions and beneficence, caring, and motivation to help have featured centrally in STS scholarship, e.g. Epstein (1995) has emphasized the importance of people’s willingness to ‘invest emotionally’ in the fate of [a movement] and ‘take personal risks on its behalf' (1995: 413). Polleta, Jasper, and Goodwin (2001) have emphasized the importance of reincorporating emotions such as anger and indignation, fear and disgust, joy and love, into research on politics and protest (2001: 2). A focus on emotions are frequently posited as a useful antidote to instrumental rationality (Putnam & Mumby 1993). Empathy is frequently called for in clinical work as a means of improving care, e.g. Halpern (2014). Empathy and sympathy are considered as important for ethnographic work as a means of building trust and rapport, e.g. Reeves, Kuper & Hodges (2008). This open panel aims for a diverse array of papers on emotions and will consider the following questions:
REFERENCES
Baier, Annette C., 1987. The Need for More Than Justice. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 13 (Supplement): 41–56.
Epstein, S. (1995). The construction of lay expertise: AIDS activism and the forging of credibility in the reform of clinical trials. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 20(4), 408-437.
Gilligan, Carol, 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Halpern, J. (2014). From idealized clinical empathy to empathic communication in medical care. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 17(2), 301-311.
Polletta, F., Jasper, J. M., & Goodwin, J. (2001). Passionate politics: Emotions and social movements. University of Chicago Press.
Putnam, L. L., & Mumby, D. K. (1993). Organizations, emotion and the myth of rationality. Emotion in organizations, 1, 36-57.
Reeves, S., Kuper, A., & Hodges, B. D. (2008). Qualitative research methodologies: ethnography. Bmj, 337, a1020.
Olga Bychkova, European University at St.Petersburg
Nikolai Rudenko, European University at St. Petersburg
STS studies suggest that engineers gather heterogeneous entities in their projects (J. Law, M. Callon, L. Suchman). They make the technology work but also create a world around this technology (B. Latour). A new world entails the possibility of searching funding and political support, building new social ontology and enacting necessary infrastructure. Each engineer turns out to be a maker of a new world.
However, such a picture contradicts the conventional vision. According to this vision, engineers usually rely on the standardized procedures and act as cogs in large technological systems. As such cogs, they tend to be as far as possible from the public discussions of their projects. So, who are the engineers today? The world-makers or those who perform a set of standard operations as far as possible away from public discussions? Are there cultural differences in such perceptions of engineers?
In our section, we propose to discuss the following questions:
Our section invites all participants who are interested in technical expertise and public role of engineers to make a current snapshot of engineering profession around the world.
Miranda Waggoner, Florida State University
Susan Markens, Lehman College, CUNY
The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed increasingly complex questions about ethics in biomedical research, health policy, and clinical practice—from the flourishing field of postgenomic research to the rapidly changing world of reproductive biomedicine. This open panel explores ethical issues in health and biomedicine that are being innovated by and regenerated with STS perspectives. This panel provides renewed attention to how ethics is and can be conceived and constructed by stakeholders involved in shaping and disseminating biomedical knowledge, and it interrogates how differently-situated actors in the biomedical sciences—from researchers and policymakers to those in the clinic—make sense of, define, challenge, and shape what is considered ethical in their work, and the consequences for health delivery and outcomes. Paper submissions may include, but need not be limited by, questions such as: How do biomedical researchers decide which questions about health need to be addressed? How do they conceptualize risk, and how do they recruit research subjects? What considerations matter to biomedical researchers when they convey their results? How and when do health-care policymakers decide to prioritize certain topics? How do policymakers construct guidelines and rules for health research, and to what extent do they consider the impact of their policymaking on different populations? How, when, and why do clinicians offer health testing, information, and interventions to their patients? How do clinicians navigate their various ethical obligations and responsibilities in promoting health and health care across population groups? We invite empirical papers from multiple disciplinary perspectives.
Raymond Fang, University of California, Irvine
This panel aims to explore how ethnic studies and STS—two forms of academic inquiry that have typically remained locked in their own disciplinary silos—can mutually interrupt, regenerate, enrich, and inform the topics, conversations, and theories of each other’s fields in meaningful ways. Concerned primarily with United States-based ethnic studies, including but not limited to African-American Studies, Chicanx and Latinx Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Native American Studies, this panel asks what STS looks like when the questions and problematics central to US-based ethnic studies become key topics of investigation for STS, and vice-versa. What does STS look like—in its research questions, priorities, and theoretical interlocutors—when race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, migration, citizenship, indigeneity, and blackness, among others, become central problem spaces? Similarly, what does ethnic studies look like when science and technology become fundamental subjects and objects of investigation? This panel is looking for papers that attempt to link the problems, objects, questions, and theories of ethnic studies and STS, however constituted, through empirical research, theoretical explorations, and/or literary analysis. Such linkages might include but are not limited to: race and algorithmic governance; gentrification and technology; surveillance and migration; indigeneity and infrastructure; biomedicine and alternative medicine; race, gender, and science; race and environment; posthumanism and critical race theory.
Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, RPI
Guy Schaffer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
When faced with obdurate systems, social movements often create experimental infrastructures that suggest radical new arrangements of resources, knowledges, and power. While these systems are often materially insufficient to immediately address the full scale of the problems that inspired them, they have the potential to reorganize the conditions that limit what people imagine as possible. What is the role of small-scale systems in pushing large-scale change? How do designers, developers, and maintainers of small-scale experimental infrastructures imagine the work of scaling up, building out, or strengthening these systems? How do they challenge the limits of time, materiality, and imagination? And how do small-scale infrastructural innovations challenge and reproduce relations of power?
In this open panel, we invite scholars and organizers who are working with movement-built infrastructures in a wide array of arenas. We are using movement in a broad sense to include any set of people that is working to crease social change.
Fundamentally, we are seeking to better understand how projects with incredible potential could scale in ways that change the conditions of possibility in the direction of a wildly different world. By pulling together these examples, we aim to help each other imagine alternative futures beyond what we can currently conceptualize, and develop strategies for getting from here to there.
Liora Goldensher, Princeton University
Leah Reisman, Princeton University
How should STS approach expert domains that, instead of relying on a codified stock of objective knowledge, privilege the subjective? This panel invites papers about cases including emerging professions and unevenly regulated fields in which experts routinely and explicitly draw on personal experience, beliefs, ethics, and values to make decisions, legitimate their work, and set standards.
Such cases depart from many of the core assumptions of STS scholarship on the social production of scientific knowledge. From the Social Construction of Technology to Actor-Network theory, sociomateriality to infrastructure analysis, human judgment and social interaction are shown by analysts to be crucial in the process and outcome of knowledge production in scientific professions. In most such accounts, analysts reveal that the social production of facts and knowledge is core to a field that is typically–and erroneously–assumed to be objective. Scholars of the professions, too, have tended to presume objectivity as a feature or goal of the standardized bodies of abstract knowledge they describe professionals as applying to particular cases and defending from competitors.
Yet some domains of expert work, like the demedicalized midwifery and nonprofit consulting fields the organizers of this panel study, trouble this assumption with their embrace of the interpretive and the subjective. How might STS contend with knowledge production and standard-setting in these expert domains that do not have uniform goals of objectivity or codified and settled bodies of knowledge? How do other features of expert domains, including codes of ethics and forms of licensure or credentialing, differ in these circumstances? What challenges are presented for prevailing assumptions in STS about the process of knowledge production or standard-setting by considering expert domains that do not rely on the codified knowledge-producing activities and expectations that characterize the subjects of much STS attention to expertise and the professions?
Sarah Rijcke, Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS)
Alice Vadrot, University of Vienna
Healthy oceans contribute significantly to combating climate change. However, a lack of ocean scientific knowledge continues to challenge efforts to protect ocean ecosystems. This gap is steadily closed by global initiatives like the International Census of Marine Life programme. Furthermore, detection methods, observing infrastructures and data management have significantly improved over the past two decades, reconfiguring how oceans are studied and monitored.
In many respects, the study and monitoring of the oceans represents a new form of knowledge production. Challenges include producing systemic insights into ocean ecology; working toward industrial-scale production of innovations; providing scientific data to support environmental policy; and operating against the backdrop of a highly research-focused academic system. These developments are amplified by data scarcity, complicating the command of funding and shaping policies and practices of studying, monitoring and protecting the oceans.
This panel invites contributions on the socio-technical, epistemic, (geo)political, historical and ethical dimension of these developments, including case studies related to global and national policies and practices of ocean science and monitoring. Which dynamics occur when ocean science becomes (even more) subject to multiple valuation registers, including those associated with steering efforts toward more interdisciplinary engagement, societal relevance and demands from policy-makers? How do monitoring policies and practices contribute to the scientific representation of the ocean and its manifestation as a site, where different technological innovations compete for scientific legitimacy and marketability? What are key innovations in ocean science and marine technology and how do they shape the policies and practices of the field?
Luise Ruge, TU München
Alexander Wentland, Technical University of Munich
Sebastian Pfotenhauer, Technical University Munich
Universalist models of innovation face a crisis of both technical reproducibility and societal support. The geography of innovation is thoroughly unequal. Repeated failures to spur innovation in so-called developing or underperforming regions have revealed the limits of thinking about innovation in terms of quasi-universal models (e.g. National Innovation Systems) or best practice transfer (e.g. Silicon Valley). At the heart of this problem is the persistent inability to seriously include local socio-economic traditions, political cultures, and regional identity into mainstream innovation theory.
We invite contributions (incl. unconventional formats) that explore how regions perceive and position themselves vis-à-vis the perceived innovation imperative through their unique local social, cultural, and political constraints. How do globally circulating models interrupt or, perhaps, regenerate existing regional identities and institutional orders? What happens when populations reject or subvert innovation initiatives? What alternative imaginations of economic prosperity and epistemic authority do they propose instead?
This session seeks to muster new support for a cultural turn in innovation theory and practice. We argue that the successes and failures of innovation policy in regions cannot be explained without taking into account the locally specific understandings of what innovation is, what (and who) it is for, how it relates to local history and identity, and in which political culture it is embedded – even if, on the face of it, the policy instruments look the same. We encourage all types of submissions that provide a counterpoint to the persistent tendencies to frame analyses and interventions around quasi-universal models, systems, and best practices.
Charlotte Biltekoff, UC Davis
Julie Guthman, University of California, Santa Cruz
The agri-food sector is seeing a tidal wave of innovation. With the backing of venture capital, scientists cum entrepreneurs are deploying new techniques in artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, tissue engineering, digitalization, big data analytics, robotics, and other fields, with the aim of both improving upon and disrupting farming and food production. As STS and other scholars have pointed out, much of the financial investment is speculative and the technologies promissory, operating with much uncertainty regarding their potential to scale up and be accepted by the public much less provide things of value to their imagined clientele. Papers selected for this open call will draw on case study material to build upon these emergent observations. We are particularly interested in papers that cross fertilize questions and concerns from STS, such as public acceptance of technology, with those of food studies, such as the exceptionalism of food and agriculture. More pointedly, we ask how and to what extent do food and farm tech entrepreneurs engage the specificity of food and farming as organic, biological processes uniquely laden with cultural meaning in their techno-utopian dreams for Anthropocene futures.
Lisa Lehner, Cornell University
Jade Henry, Goldsmiths, University of London
Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) can be a subfield, an ethico-political commitment or a methodological sensibility. At its heart, it shares concerns for subjectivities that are devalued, marginalized or erased through technoscientific practices. Through their efforts, feminist scholars participate in the material-semiotic becoming of things (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) and alternative world-making.
This panel (re)connects reflexively with these ethico-political commitments and sensibilities. We will explore how the disruptive, inventive and (re)generative potential of FSTS might give rise to new and alternative, if partial and imperfect, worlds of scholarship and living. We want to understand how we can trouble and reinvent our methods and concerns in order to (re)configure the precarious and unstable worlds in which we live and work. How can we move our commitments beyond the academy; how must methods and theories change; how might they then reconfigure academia itself? Which novel collaborations, networks and assemblages can we forge; what roles can FSTS research (not) take? How might we mobilize ambivalences and situated knowledges to connect with worlds inhospitable to them; what challenges and dangers lie therein?
This panel is not exclusive to but actively encourages PhDs and early-career scholars from FSTS, post-colonial STS and other emancipatory engagements with technoscience to showcase their creative/disruptive interpretations of these themes. Provocations may, but need not, include: reflections on ethnographic positionality and research ethics; novel pathways for non-traditional academic careers; new epistemic and aesthetic forms of knowledge production; fostering alternative attachments and alignments across traditional boundaries of human/nonhuman, social/natural, academia/beyond.
Jessica Weinkle, University of North Carolina- Wilmington
Modern finance is highly dependent on technology and scientific research. The interdependency is clearly apparent in the extent to which the financial sector actively supports research in-house, and in university and government institutions. The relationship is mutually beneficial. Scientists demonstrate the relevance of their work to society through use by financial interests. In turn, financial interests garner legitimacy from the high esteem society bestows on science and scientists. Yet, society also struggles with its modern financial systems at every level: from global economic instability to the equitable allocation of financial resources at the individual level. Often these struggles are tied to changes in scientific knowledge and the (mis)use of technology. The aim of this panel is to consider society’s struggles with its financial systems, broadly construed, from the perspective of finance as a technology and innovation system. What new insights are gained by shifting the focus on finance from one of market mechanism and legal obligation to one of science, technology and innovation? How do these new insights expand the options available for improving progress towards higher order societal goals and financial accountability? In what ways has financial processes become inescapably political due to its close relationship to the politics of science and technology? Given the conference’s theme and location in New Orleans, particular interest is given to those papers that explore these ideas in the context of extremes and social justice.
sam smiley, AstroDime Transit Authority
Film and video have the ability to intersect with history and STS through documentary and animation practice. Material culture and historical archives can play a large role in making a video or film visually engaging, even when historical interpretation is not the work’s primary aim. The purpose of this workshop is to have a dialogue about the practices and uses of film-making and animation in and outside of academia, specifically in the context of history, ethnography and STS.
The format of this is in a round table workshop format. It will commence by asking participants what brings them to the workshop, a few short films will be shown and then a guided discussion will center around these questions.
1) Research, and uses of history and /or ethnography. What makes a film academically sound? Where are the sources? How does one cite one’s sources?
2) Storytelling. What strategies are used to tell the story and is the storytelling successful in its own terms? There are many types of digital storytelling and many different story arcs so this session is inclusive of different forms of storytelling.
3) Craft. How is it made and who is the audience? Is it created for a television or mainstream film context, or youtube? Is it archival documentation? Or is it a DIY video made for immediate distribution to specific communities?
Resource sharing, both technical and research related is encouraged.
Jan-Hendrik Passoth, Technische Universität München
Nicholas Rowland, The Pennsylvania State University
Matthew Spaniol, Arhus University
Politics are an essential dimension of nearly every case study and conceptual innovation in STS, although, with rare exception, the future of politics and the politics of the future are rarely the topic of rigorous, sustained discussion. Given the current in/stabilities in our contemporary political context — the rise of nationalisms and the decline of international law, the reinvention of borders and security as technical problems, or the reconfiguration of geopolitics in terms of platforms and infrastructures — we think that it is time to revisit STS’s take on politics, governance, and the ways in which STS can or should interrupt those technoscientific politics of the future and generate alternative practices, tools, and infrastructures. We all know ‘technoscience is politics by other means’ has become a core tenant of contemporary scholarship. While this phrase was a well-spring for research some decades ago, and has become a taken-for-granted assumption no longer in need of even modest verification, it has now little more than a ‘secret handshake’ among STS-insiders. The problem though is that this assumption no longer seems to serve scholars looking to ask difficult questions about the future of politics and the politics of the future, which now seem more important than ever. Whose politics? Which futures? Who or what is actually invited or involved to plan for the future of global and national politics? Submissions about governance, the state, imaginaries, politics, and the future or futures are all welcome in the sessions that populate this panel.
James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Games are flexible epistemic objects, variously constructed as entertainment, military and logistics simulations, communications technologies, scientific apparatuses, cultural artifacts, art, and media. With a few notable exceptions, however, academic analyses of games and game development practices tend to be the domain of media and cultural studies scholars, which produce vibrant—but disciplinary-inflected—research practices, perspectives, and interpretations.
This panel seeks to understand what games and virtual technologies mean from an STS perspective, as well to connect STS’s strengths analyzing knowledge practices, situated knowledges, and the mutual shaping of technology & society to the thriving communities of games studies scholars in media studies, interpretive textual studies, and critical code studies. What does STS have to contribute, and how can STS reconfigure its own boundaries about what counts as scientific and technical practice to better address games, media technologies, and virtual spaces?
This panel track welcomes submissions on games and their interrelated virtual technologies, including VR and simulation systems, game development engines, software/hardware interfaces and platforms, graphics technologies, and real-time code. We especially welcome papers that address games and virtual technologies as political knowledge systems and practices, and papers that adopt feminist/decolonial science studies and critical technology studies stances in their analyses.
Kuan-Hung Lo, Virginia Tech
Hee Rin Lee, Contextual Robotics Institute, UC San Diego
After the advent of the robot Pepper, humanoid robots are now living with us in everyday life. Compared with smart home devices, i.e., Alexa and Google Home, the fully embodied robots are directly registered in society-wise discussion about gender, race and sexuality in the new technoscience. For instance, Pepper wearing a suit in a bank presents a professional bank agent, and skin colors of the sex robot Roxxxy can be customized to cater customer’s preferences. Meanwhile, the bodies of the humanoid robots are shaping discourses of sexuality. For example, the Campaign against Sex Robots in the UK thinks sex robots reinforce male domination and sexual exploitation of women and children, while the sex-robot supporter Dr. David Levy asserts that sex robots can satisfy human’s sexual and emotional needs without hurting real people. In this academic controversy, discourses regarding sex robots’ sexuality are shaping our perception of the normality and abnormality of human’s sexuality. Hence, the bodies of the robots are gendered and racial.
Although the problematic robotic bodies may serve the gender stereotype, they also have the potential to penetrate heteronormativity. These bodies are replaceable and interchangeable, hence deconstructing our normal assumptions about holistic bodies, that is, a whole organic flesh. The bodies of the humanoid robots queer body norms and thus have the potential to reconceptualize heteronormative norms. Therefore, the bodies of the humanoid robots are both hope and despair.
This panel is calling papers discussing gender, bodies, and robots. We hope to evoke sophisticated conversations in order to review and rethink the politics around the bodies of robots.
Gabriel Dorthe, University of Lausanne
Tess Doezema, Arizona State University
Stefan Schäfer, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies
Geneva Smith, University of New Mexico
Kasper Schiølin, Harvard STS Program, Harvard Kennedy School
Hilton Simmet, Harvard University
Madisson Whitman, Purdue University
While collectively imagined futures were thought to have mobilized previous generations’ sense of purpose, today’s worlds-to-come seem geared toward energizing individual pursuits aided by technological advancements. From 1980s postmodernism to recent concerns with post-truth, anxiety over a perceived loss of shared meaning and with it, of shared futures has been at the core of much contemporary discourse. Does this mean the futures promised by modernity must be pronounced dead? Yes and no. We declare them undead, and ask: how do modern futures linger in the present, casting a shadow on the now?
Animated by but not limited to Derrida’s writings on hauntology and Jasanoff’s work on sociotechnical imaginaries, this session aims to convene theoretical explorations, empirical studies, and experimental inquiries into the disjointed time of global capitalism. We invite papers that explore how innovations in science and technology get imagined, taken up, and abandoned; how subjectivities get remade, stretched by allegiances to the past and belief in an inevitable future; how certain bodies get written out of visions of the future based on historical and extant prejudices; and how modernity itself gets experienced as multiple, recursive, and contingent.
While the prefix ‘post’ signals a passage beyond what was before, this panel questions historical compartmentalization and notions of linear time. If we have always already been modern, then how do the ghosts of futures past haunt our uneven present?
Pierre-Marie David, Université de Montréal
Janice Graham, Dalhousie University
Oumy Thiongane, Dalhousie University
A tension between two visions of innovation, one that builds capacity for horizontal public health systems, the other driving high tech vertical technology development, may be impeding global health. Vaccine research and immunization programs might be seen as a sociotechnical assemblage where the public health value of some vaccines is undeniable but their safety, effectiveness and vertical implementation remain wicked problems that divide and prevent progress. Industry demand for fast tracking vaccine development has increased as governments in high, middle and low countries contribute scarce public resources, often laundered to the private sector, to vaccine development and implementation. The confluence of market forces, financialization and weaponization of vaccines for biosecurity in the guise of global and public health has been demonstrated in pandemic threats from, for example, anthrax, dengue, ebola, HIV, influenza, malaria, meningitis to zika. Vaccine technologies and immunization programs continue to face controversy across sectors, propelled by charges of conflict of interest between Big Pharma, interested research science and states, and regulatory institutions. Causal relationships between immunization and serious adverse events, along with security concerns and mandatory vaccination introduce different forms of criticism and challenge than in the past. We invite STS researchers, especially applying ethnographic approaches, to analyze issues of particular and global vaccine innovation and development.
Saul Halfon, Virginia Tech
Christy Spackman, Harvey Mudd College
What and how we eat is governed in many ways. Politics, regulation, markets, culture, individual and group knowledge, engineering and technology all shape what we eat and how we eat it. These governing practices happen at multiple scales, across the micro, the multiple, the macro, and the many bodies in the system (Agard-Jones 2013). Despite the multitude of systems put in place to govern eating, however, bodies, institutions, and materials continually overflow and challenge them. This panel asks what happens when diverse STS approaches come together to tackle questions about food and food-making? We invite papers that approach these broad questions through the capacious, multivalent theoretical lens of government. We welcome a wide range of topics exploring the modes and scales of governing food, with particular emphasis on knowledge practice and technology. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Governing taste
Alcides Peron, University of São Paulo
Marcos Alvarez, University of São Paulo
Since the end of the 1970s, several researches have pointed to the emergence of new conflicts, either so-called urban violence or conflicts between diverse groups motivated by territorial, socioeconomic, postcolonial, or ethnic issues. Given this, authorities have gradually sought to diversify partnerships to access new solutions and technologies, composing sociotechnical assemblages capable of sustaining new forms of security governance. However, these same procedures may be considered responsible for the intensification of these same conflicts, increasing violence among the parties. This panel, then, seeks to problematize issues such as the following: how can approaches between STS and Criminology, Security, Surveillance, or Urban Studies inform understandings of these conflicts? How are private security, police, and military infrastructures, technologies, and other sociotechnical assemblages responsible for intensifying or normalizing violence in these environments? How do public-private assemblages and the introduction of new surveillance, monitoring and investigation technologies reorganize police and military activities? How do government initiatives propose new socio-technical arrangements for public security and conflict management? To what extent do dataveillance practices and discourses of smart cities converge to shape urban insecurity? We welcome critical perspectives of the relationship between these assemblages, and at the endurance and reproduction of contemporary forms of security and order.
Amanda Phillips de Lucas, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Over the past decade, green infrastructure (GI), broadly defined as natural, semi-natural and engineered biological features that perform multiple ecosystem services, have emerged as a favored intervention within cities struggling to resolve issues related to stormwater, pollution, and degraded environmental quality. By mimicking natural functions, GI moves cities away from grey- or strictly engineered techniques of water conveyance. These installations, include, but not limited to, bioswales, pervious pavements, and green roofs, are touted by planners and engineers as the carriers of multiple ecological, health, and social benefits.
Yet, as this new planning priority travels, cities grapple with familiar infrastructural quandaries related to maintenance, repair, and civic interruptions that emerge upon the introduction of new socio-spatial technologies. Additionally, long held professional identities are challenged as the management of stormwater becomes a community, rather than strictly an engineering, concern. This panel, in alliance with the conference theme, looks to explore in what ways GI challenges current disciplinary methodologies of studying infrastructure. Additionally, we look to understand what elements of inquiry might remain the same. Does GI represent an innovation within infrastructural life or is it – in the words of the Talking Heads, the same as it ever was?
This panel seeks to gather together interdisciplinary perspectives related to green infrastructure. We aim to begin to create a scholarly community of those currently studying GI within STS and related fields to craft new methodologies, raise critiques, find commonality amongst our work.
Mirko Guaralda, Queensland University of Technology
Matthew Lamb, The Pennsylvania State University
Benjamin Shirtcliff, Iowa State University
The New Urban Agenda stresses the importance of Public Spaces that are safe, inclusive, and multifunctional to promote social interaction and integration. Considering the original meaning of technology – the systematic treatment of an art or technique, a method, system, or technique of making or doing – we consider the contested space of the city through the lens of Hi and Low Technologies and how these are employed and deployed in city space for the purposes of co-creation of public spaces; whether or not these actions are playful, provocative, blatant, or unconscious.
This panel invites inquiry into and discussion around such questions as: How do modern technologies, communication devices, gaming platforms, urban screens, or digital media innovate, interrupt, regenerate the traditional meaning of urban environments? How does technology afford and foster the co-creation of public spaces? How might technology be used to help challenge ‘rights to the city’ in today’s volatile political, social, and cultural environment?
The panel enlists Foucault’s theories of functional spaces and technologies of the self, along with Giddens’ (and Foucault’s) conceptions regarding the discipline of the body in society in reference to the production and consumption of time and space for play in the city. The purpose is to enquire technology and city space; technology as a medium to co-create meaning, connection, health, enjoyment, and political acts. To do so, our panel centers on the multiple forms of technology used in city space. Hi-Tech, Low-Tech and Self-Tech are considered as tactics and strategies for the production and consumptions of playful social public spaces.
Sandra Bärnreuther, University of Zurich
Nayantara Appleton, Victoria University of Wellington
Contemporary human lives are deeply entangled with hormones – sometimes in disturbing, sometimes in enabling ways. Although hormones have been seminal to our understanding of biology since the beginning of the 20th century, in the contemporary world they also allow an insight into transnational movements and relations. Be it in the form of shared medical technologies and expertise, the travel of pharmaceuticals across boundaries, or the logics of hormonal usage shared online – hormones cross material and imagined borders. In the process of this bleeding, blending, bending, they make us rethink conceptual boundaries such as inside/outside, nature/culture, or sex/gender to name but a few.
In this panel, we employ an interdisciplinary lens to bear on the various ways hormones move human and non-human actors and how, in turn, they are mobilized by them. How do hormones travel in a globally entangled world and how do they intersect with human and nonhuman lives in various contexts? What mechanisms of control and regulatory measures are employed to contain them? What inequalities does the movement of hormones rely on and produce? And how can we follow hormones and their traces across space and time?
We seek papers, that draw on innovative empirical research and make visible various disciplinary and theoretical frameworks to understand the complex, mobile nature of hormones in the everyday. We are interested in case studies from various parts of the world with a focus on transnational entanglements.
Boris Jardine, University of Cambridge
Emma Kowal, Deakin University
Jenny Bangham, University of Cambridge
Collecting is a fundamental human activity. From early childhood, we curate the flow of objects through our lives, honing skills of discrimination, expression, pleasure and self-fashioning. Grander collections hold sway in the academic and popular imagination: national museums and libraries, archives of governance, and digital data. Nations and empires have their own logics of acquisition: objects are as important as territory in establishing authority over a population. In the excitement of creation and expansion, it is easy to overlook the constant work required to stave off erosion, failure and loss.
In fact, collecting and ending often travel together. Since the nineteenth century, the perception that environments, cultures, animals are about to end has prompted collection before it is ‘too late’. Institutional collections are usually intended as an end-point for the objects that fall into their care: further circulation is tightly controlled. Near-obsolete objects find a safe end as ‘collectables’ that illustrate something worth remembering. But little attention has been paid to how collections themselves end. Historians have traced the positive achievements of collectors and curators, but we propose an alternative account of collections that have been diminished or are no longer. To pay attention to ending is to pay attention to the shifting fortunes of things, to the labour of their maintenance, and to dispersal as both a negative and positive force.
This open panel will collect STS scholarship on the ends of collections. We seek work on collections of all kinds: from scientific instruments, books, skulls, blood, flies, seeds, and DNA, to things that might never have been intended for collection but nevertheless are collected.
Iris Bull, Indiana University – Bloomington
While using numbers to quantify and qualify the moral character of work of someone’s work is nothing new, digital platform workers tend to operate under technocratic regimes that change at the drop of a software patch or app update. They develop their trade and craft skills in conversation with metrics that shadow every task—and possibly every keystroke—and often with little or no say in how data about them is collected, represented, and repurposed on the platform they work. This panel solicits research that details ongoing negotiations between workers/users and managers/developers on how data about user accounts should be represented and made meaningful to clients or other platform users. How do metrics and statistics represented on the platform contribute to performances of neoliberal subjectivity? How are assumptions about ‘user psychology’ or ‘player psychology’ imbricated in the design of digital platforms and work surveillance technologies? How and where do users try to intervene in the ongoing development of digitally-platformed services? This panel welcomes ongoing case studies of infrastructural change that in turn shape the transformation of particular sociotechnical ethics. Scholars are particularly encouraged to consider how such changes inform public or popular perceptions of interpersonal or workplace ‘toxicity’ on work distribution platforms and in competitive esports communities.
Stephen Zehr, Univ. Southern Indiana
30+ years after James Hansen’s testimony on climate change before a U.S. Senate Committee in June 1988 and 40 years after Dorothy Nelkin’s early work on scientific expertise in technical controversies presents a good opportunity to raise questions about how climate change has reshaped scientific expertise and the expert. Climate change, perhaps more than any other environmental problem, has brought reflexive attention to the utility and vulnerability of scientific expertise in political and public contexts both within and outside the scientific community. This session invites empirical, theoretical, and thought-provoking papers that analyze such topics as: threats to scientific experts, subversive uses of scientific expertise, scientific expertise and political ideology, changing roles of the scientific expert, diminished authority of scientific expertise, forced or encouraged hybridity within scientific expertise, limits to expertise and their impacts on science, and other topics that fit the session. Contributions might also reflexively examine how STS research may have altered the forms and authority of scientific expertise on climate change or how STS approaches to scientific expertise may have been altered by the climate change problem. Contributions that examine cross-national differences are also encouraged.
Ana Vara, National University of San Martín
David Tyfield, Lancaster University
In technoscientific times of huge and increasing inequalities that involve almost all aspects of social life, both within and between countries, questions regarding inequality seem unavoidable to STS scholars, both from an analytical and an ethical standpoint. Specifically, the roles of technoscience in conditioning how inequality is created and augmented, and the (possibly novel) nature of its impacts on trajectories of innovation and vice versa emerge as central concerns.
STS has a long history of engagement with such issues. Since the early days of the field, the study of controversies (e.g. Nelkin) has highlighted the unequal distribution of risks and benefits in the development and implementation of many technologies, contributing to entire new fields of research such as environmental justice. Other topics related to inequality addressed by STS include working conditions, race, access to health, and gender. The study of the production of knowledge has also taken into account the differential status of knowledge according to its origin. While the study of ignorance is a relatively newer focus, with categories such as undone science by David Hess et al. targeting inequality quite specifically.
However, in spite of its sustained concern, STS has not developed specific theoretical frameworks on inequality. This panel invites discussion of the possibility and desirability of the development of specific theoretical frameworks on inequality in STS, as well as how contributions from other disciplines can be accommodated. From an empirical perspective, this Panel encourages contributions on cases where this problematic issue is central in different ways.
Edward Bankes, UCL STS
Common to many social science disciplines, the topic of humour and comedy has received relatively little attention within STS, though there has been increasing acknowledgement that attending to joking and humour offers a powerful lens onto social worlds and practices. As a mode of speech and thought, humour would appear to have the power to disrupt science, as a moment of (dis)juncture between the serious and the playful, highlighting the incongruous and questioning the taken-for-granted. Similarly, interest in humour in science communication and public engagement suggests a belief that humour, as a form of communication, might provide the means to engage and enthuse the public, as means to transform the public, though undercut by a concern that science might become laughable. Humour, particularly irony, has also been suggested by Steve Woolgar as a potent way of doing STS, employing (derisive) laughter as a way to challenge the narratives and practices of science, using laughter to show that it could be otherwise, though Woolgar’s view has been sharply critiqued by Isabelle Stengers, who questions how far an ironic critique can avoid becoming defined and submerged in terms of the system it seeks to counter. As a nascent topic within STS, the panel encourages submissions from a wide range of perspectives and foci. Papers could consider, for example, case studies of humour within scientific cultures, humour as a topic of discourse, the politics and meta-discourses of humour in relation to science, or humour as a method or methodology of science and STS.
Tiago Duarte, University of Brasília
Claudia Magallanes-Blanco, Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla
Indigenous knowledges and technologies, i.e. knowledge and artifacts produced by native people from around the world, such as Amerindians, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and so on, are still a marginal topic in STS in spite of the array of experiences and approaches from other fields such as media studies, anthropology, telecommunications, human rights, to mention a few. STS appears to still be in need of a process of decolonisation as to a large extent it is still insensible to knowledges, technologies, practices and epistemologies that have arisen from indigenous people around the globe. Nonetheless, we recognize two main bodies of literature on indigenous knowledges and technologies in current STS. Firstly, work by scholars such as Helen Verran, John Law, Mario Blaser, and Marisol de la Cadena, which is at the intersection between the ontological turn in STS and decolonial or postcolonial studies. Secondly, work by indigenous scholars, such as Kyle Whyte and Kim TallBear, which have been particularly important in terms of bringing indigenous standpoints to STS. This panel seeks to bring together researchers interested in addressing topics related to indigenous knowledges, technologies and practices in dialogue with the above mentioned literature and other relevant STS theories. We are interested in works that address (although not exclusively) a) Indigenous knowledges and technologies from a decolonial or postcolonial perspective, b) the circulation of Indigenous knowledges inside and outside the indigenous world, c) the intersection of Indigenous and Western knowledges and technologies, d) the (re)appropriation of Western technologies by Indigenous peoples, d) Indigenous knowledges and technological policymaking, e) the indigeneisation of STS.
Brit Ross Winthereik, IT University of Copenhagen
Anne Beaulieu, University of Groningen
STS and Anthropology have explored infrastructures empirically, theoretically, and conceptually for several decades now, but what, if anything, comes after infrastructure? The times where the internet was considered a space of flows have certainly come to an end, current developments in Europe make many kinds of borders visible, and there certainly are new obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and exchange of thought. Even the diversity of infrastructural forms seems to be diminishing, leading to more uniform set of shared interfaces and platforms. Infrastructure studies have focused attention on how people, things and knowledge circulate, and on the transformations that happen as they do. Infrastructure studies have coined invisible work, installed base, ontological experiment and described blockages to flow. Thus, infrastructure studies are about circulation, formalization, scaling up and flow as well as transformation and obstacles. As such it is a rich tradition that speaks to a host of empirical fields. But given that almost anything can now count as infrastructure, has the concept lost some of its precision? In this panel we will discuss this question and think about what might be the limits to and enduring potential of the concept of infrastructure to speaks to empirical, theoretical and political challenges of today.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Binghamton University
denielle elliott, York University
How we might study that which we cannot see, count, or measure? How might we analyze invisibility? This is especially important in the context of injuries – to bodies, to infrastructures, to populations of humans and non-humans – that are either undetectable (as with minor strokes) or erased (as in political attempts to obscure events), and the aftermaths they produce, which can lead to novel connections and regenerations. In this panel, we reflect on the invisible and unknown, and invite presenters to explore other ways of knowing injuries. We aim to move beyond the typical critical social critique of scientific evidence — that is, accusations of marginalized evidence — to consider how we might approach the invisible? Fantasies, delusions, visions — each is marked by its intimacy and inexpressibility. But might we make them social? We seek to go beyond an inventory of exclusions to consider the invisible, that which we don’t know, and which nonetheless lingers in its effects. We consider other types of evidence, and how novel approaches to evidence might provide ways for articulating anti-epistemologies that destabilize ways of knowing – for scholars as well as our interlocutors. Not simply stating its absence, but asking how we might bring it into focus, make it visible and readable, to include the excluded, as a means to counter what we know, or what think we know, about evidence, interiority, and relationality. How might we interrupt conventional renderings of the injured? How can we render the unknowable knowable for invisible trauma and damaged states?
Rohit Negi, School of Human Ecology, Ambedkar University Delhi
Maka Suarez, Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography
Katie Cox, University of California, Irvine
This open panel brings together scholars studying and participating in innovative forms of air pollution governance. The panel seeks to map the ways in which we can think of these interventions as interrupting or regenerating spaces, practices, and futures in relation to air pollution governance. We invite proposals for presentations that address many modes, stages and styles of air pollution governance, which we understand to include state and non-state actors, complex knowledge politics, and intricate translational challenges. We are interested in ways science has been produced and used in governance, air pollution monitoring design and mitigation programs, and in the collaborations that produce and sustain these. We are also interested in the work of environmental activists and journalists, in innovations within city governments, and in legal strategies to address air pollution. Presentations can focus on technological innovations (artifacts, industries, or spaces of air pollution generation or clean up initiatives); multiscalar approaches to governance (from large greening projects to small scale, bottom-up approaches); or negotiations between scientific knowledges and other forms of knowledge and practice in people’s daily lives. Other topics of interest include science-to-policy pathways, new data collection and visualization practices, air pollution education, and environmental (in)justice. We hope the panel will be deeply transnational, bringing together scholars from different regions, showcasing globally-situated, imaginative ways of engaging with air pollution that pay attention to historical and cultural settings in a world undergoing rapid change.The panel invites a broad range of reflections on air pollution and its interfaces with late-industrialism.
Moira Kyweluk, Northwestern University
Alina Geampana, Queen Mary University of London
Recent years have seen the rising popularity of digital health technologies for women, advances in reproductive genetics, as well as the proliferation of new forms of assisted reproductive technology (ART). Along with innovations, however, come debates about their safety, effectiveness, and broader impact on consumers. In addition, ART has generated complex configurations for family building. Reproduction has been reshaped to include individuals, couples, and groups previously excluded from biological family building. Third party gamete use, embryo adoption, multi-parent embryos, two mother gestation, sperm freezing, and planned oocyte cryopreservation have invited new potential consumers to use these technologies. Critical STS scholarship has attended to the potentiality (Timmermans and Buchbinder 2013) of emerging ART, and the generation of new avenues for family building. Scholars have also drawn attention to social inequalities perpetuated through the use of reproductive health innovations, including fertility treatments, novel forms of contraception, genetic testing, and digital health applications. This panel is meant to further such conversations by exploring the ways in which new artefacts can reinforce/challenge existing power hierarchies and family building practices.
The panel invites submissions from scholars who explore power dynamics as they apply to innovations in reproduction and the reproductive sciences. More specifically, we are looking for papers that discuss ART, prenatal genetic testing, digital health, and contraception, with a critical eye towards inequalities shaped by gender, class, race, and sexuality. Work with a focus on the current or future potential of biotechnologies in LGBTQ+ reproduction is particularly welcome.
Richard Duque, SUNY Polytechnic Institute
This session welcomes interdisciplinary research from an STS lens that critically evaluates and/or is actively involved in developing projects where integrated technologies (sensors, communication, computation, virtual intelligence) are embedded around, on, and in human subjects and the environments they inhabit. Thematic questions this session will explore: How are emerging integrated technologies shaping human behavior and health in relation to natural and built environments? How are they shaping social organizations in relation to natural and built environments? What are the ethical/legal implications of integrated technologies on privacy and security?
Nina María Frahm, Technical University Munich, Munich Center for Technology in Society
Maciej Kuziemski, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex
Kasper Schiølin, Harvard Kennedy School
Fueled by recent shifts towards more techno-pessimist framings of socio-technical futures, Ethics and Society has become a cornerstone of science and technology governance in recent years. The new rise of Ethics and Society is not only visible in emerging national and global policy frameworks (e.g. RRI, Co-Creation), but increasingly also in the private sector, where the creation of ethics boards and guidelines is becoming paramount for legitimizing the interruptions caused by new knowledge and technologies. Yet, discourses and practices around the alignment of innovation and society produce their own logic, in which the integration of societal and ethical ‘concerns’ seems to sit comfortably among ongoing imaginaries of technological fixes. Particularly in governance settings whose core rationale has so long been nourished by techno-optimism (e.g. Silicon Valley, Venture Capital, Tech start-ups, the World Economic Forum), the institutionalization of ethical and societal expertise provides new avenues for regenerating visions of progress mediated by socially aligned innovations.
This panel puts the new rise of Ethics and Society in science and technology governance front and center: Which role do novel discourses and practices for aligning innovation and Society play in generating and regenerating socio-technical futures?
We seek to better understand the cultures, contexts, and institutions that foster the co-production of emerging technologies and normative orders in novel ways, giving rise to new imaginaries of the relationship between innovation and society. We invite empirically grounded papers that explore, discuss and compare the framing and institutionalization of Ethics and Society in public and private, local and global governance settings.
Paul Martin, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield
The pursuit of innovation is increasingly seen as a central goal of healthcare systems as governments and industry seek to create value from tissues, bodies and personal medical information. The development of genomic and post-genomic technoscience in this context is closely entangled with new political economies and forms of biocapital. Associated healthcare futures are dominated by imaginaries in which the development of potentially disruptive technologies, such as gene editing, whole genome sequencing and gene therapy, will drive a ‘revolution’ in biomedicine. How can STS scholars understand and analyse these new discourses of innovation, emerging political economies and novel forms of value creation? How might we link the development of post-genomic technologies and biomedicine to the emergence of personalised medicine and the entrepreneurial and post-austerity state? This panel seeks to bring together papers on the broader shaping of contemporary biomedicine with work on specific new medical technologies, including studies of pharmaceutical and biotechnological innovation. This might include research on public policy, firms and industry networks, clinical practices, and governance regimes. Contributions from non-Western countries and the Global South would be particularly welcome. The panel speaks directly to the conference theme of ‘innovation’ and would stimulate STS scholarship located at the interface of political economy, innovation studies and ethnographies of biomedicine.
Jess Auerbach, Open University of Mauritius
What can an STS approach to technologies in African Higher Education reveal? This panel explores the uses of different platforms of online learning from MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) through PowerPoint, WhatsApp groups, and chalk, to explore the uses and meanings of technologies in the African Higher Education sector. It opens a space for dialogue between experimental and often times messianic technological interventions driven by the global north, and those that have emerged as local solutions to challenges of pedagogy in the context of the higher education sector. It explores dynamics of power, pragmatism, IP generation, profit, and data control, as well as the emergence of new tools that in some cases explicitly move away from coded platforms. The intention is further to probe the notion of ‘knowledge economies’ in the case of the African continent, asking whose knowledge, to what ends, and how does production inform action, reaction, innovation, interruption and resurgence across diverse spaces and forms of learning, thinking, and action.
Maka Suarez, Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography
Jorge Nunez, Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography
Alberto Morales, University of California Irvine
This open panel brings together scholars experimenting with innovative academic infrastructures in the form of digital scholarship and alternative research spaces inside and outside the university. The panel seeks to map novel configurations of knowledge production and distribution through different writing genres, media technologies, data sharing and archiving platforms, funding models, hiring and recruitment processes, publishing initiatives, and collaborative research projects. We are particularly interested in explorations and interventions that transcend or complicate both intellectual extractivism and the perpetuation of academic peripheries in post-colonial settings. We also welcome papers that critically examine o the creation and reproduction of unequal epistemological geographies or those that explore the increasing use of scholarly metrics for career evaluation and job placement. We hope to spark an optimist and honest conversation about diverse academic futures in view of the ongoing corporatization and precarization of Higher-Ed in the global North and the longstanding patron-client bureaucratization of academia in the global South. This panel invites both empirical investigations and policy initiatives that allow us to develop transnational and comparative approaches to the study of academic infrastructures and human capacity building. The panel’s goal is to map ways in which scholars across life cycles and regions have been able to open up spaces for new academic materialities, opportunities, practices, and possibilities.
Beth Semel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Luke Stark, Microsoft Research Montreal
Marisa Brandt, Michigan State University
In Silicon cities across the world, tech companies are pursuing mental health treatment and prevention as a site for innovation, intervention, and profit. They promise that embedding diagnostic, therapeutic and other forms of care in digital products like apps, wearables, and robots will enable access to affordable, anywhere, anytime mental health care, untethered from the clinic.
We seek papers that show how STS can interpret, evaluate, and contest techno-optimistic visions of digital mental health interventions as a site of innovation. We want to foster a conversation about the politics of translating signs of psychic suffering into bits of data, by addressing questions such as:
We encourage submissions exploring how novel modes of research and representation (e.g. SF, graphic arts, performance) can offer insight into the cultural politics of global digital mental health.
Jodyn Platt, University of Michigan Medical School
Melissa Creary, University of Michigan, School of Public Health
Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) research was initially funded by Congress as part of the Human Genome Project as an attempt to change how genomics research is conducted and informs policy. Applying ELSI to the learning health system framework is an opportunity to address other issues we observe with the current healthcare system and infrastructure. Learning health systems are organizations or networks that continuously study themselves and adapt using data and analytics to generate knowledge, engage stakeholders, and implement behavior change to transform practice. These networks are continuously engaging with and against the society in which they are embedded. While learning health systems stand to transform health in significant ways, they also have the potential to strain current ethical, legal and social paradigms for how evidence should be used to change practice. How might feminist, post-colonial, and critical race framings contribute to the futures of consent, algorithmic technology, public engagement, or knowledge production for example? This open panel welcomes empirical and theoretical papers that attend to the radical disruptions available to us in addressing the various components and features of learning health systems-broadly defined and from across the globe.
Maywa Montenegro, University of California, Davis
Jennifer K. Sedell, University of California, Davis
‘New biotechnologies’ including gene editing, RNAi, and gene drive stand to dramatically change prospects for human intervention in areas ranging from agriculture to wildlife conservation to human therapeutics (Doudna and Charpentier 2014). Such technologies promise unprecedented precision, speed, and cost-efficiency; their rapid uptake in basic and applied sciences around the world is reflected in skyrocketing publication rates, patents, and regulatory proposals. This pace requires a pause to reflect upon fundamental questions of science, ethics, and governance. We welcome papers that address any of the following themes:
(1) How will new biotechnologies be governed? Jasanoff and Hurlbut (2018) have called for a new global observatory for gene editing, while Kofler et al. (2018) suggest that global governance must be rooted in local community participation. What kinds of mechanisms, at which scales, and along which ethical guidelines should new biotechnologies be governed? Who gets to decide how, and on whose behalf, new biotechnologies will work?
(2) Dematerializing food, bodies, soil? With new biotechnologies, sequences of DNA and RNA have become vast repositories of digital information. To what extent does dematerialization accelerate capital’s existing tendencies to enclose, commodify, and cheapen nature? Conversely, could digitization open up S&T for transparent access and use? What are the all complications and contradictions that dematerialization brings?
(3) Democratizing science? Lower costs of new techniques raise the possibility of increased access for smaller labs and informal-sector ‘DIY’ users. Is, and how is, new biotechnology enabling access to wider classes and sectors of society? What are we learning about the distinction between democratization of access and democratization of decision-making power?
(4) Political economy & Knowledge regimes. Vanloqueren and Baret (2009) have suggested that current agricultural research systems shape a technological regime that develops genetic engineering but locks out agroecological innovations. More broadly, what are the risks and possibilities of new biotechnology and big data in terms of entrenching industrialization versus opening pathways to regeneration and sustainability? Does, and how does, intellectual property rights shape the terrain of new biotechnologies?
Peter Darch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Irene Pasquetto, UCLA
Seth Erickson, Pennsylvania State University
Use and reuse of research materials such as data and software are central themes in recent open science policy initiatives. Funding agencies, publishers, and researchers increasingly expect research products to be publicly available in order to promote scientific reproducibility and maximize the benefits derived from funded research. Data and code are of particular importance for several reasons: the complexity of workflows and the opacity of analytical tools in computational science often invites skepticism and a corresponding demand for transparency; the perceived softness of data and code suggests appealing opportunities for adaptation and innovation; further, open science practices often treat research data and code as fungible and portable commodities. The underlying assumptions of open science–for example, that reuse is inherently good–are rarely questioned, however. Little attention has been given to the burdens, risks, and failures of open science. This panel invites papers that enrich, complicate, and problematize the values of use and reuse upon which open science initiatives are premised. Potential questions to explore include: Whose interests are served in promoting open science, and at what expense? In what ways is it problematic to repurpose and adapt data and code in new contexts? When does reuse verge on misuse? What does reuse of scientific data and code look like in practice and what forms of value can be expected to emerge from it (and not)? How should the distinction between use and reuse be conceptualized in the first place?
Lina Pinto Garcia, York University
Diana Pardo Pedraza, University Of California Davis
Overcoming war demands an enormous amount of work that heavily relies on narratives and practices of care. But care and violence are not necessarily opposites. Actually, care has often been used as a means of naturalizing violence (Terry, 2017). Care is far from innocent. It has a dark side that unsettles conventional assumptions about realms such as biomedicine, humanitarianism, and peacemaking, drawing attention to asymmetrical relations in practices and sites of care (Martin, Myers, Viseu, 2015: 3). Seeking to interrupt narratives that understand care and violence as exclusive to each other, we examine instances where they operate as two sides of the same coin and are, in fact, mutually constitutive. We are interested in interrogating the violence/care nexus in contexts of war and so-called post-conflict scenarios. How do care and warfare become entangled? In what ways does care serve to make excuses for violence in war (and peace)? How to care in the midst of divergent agendas (Pérez-Bustos, et al., 2014)? What violences rely on care for their perpetration and perpetuation? What care technologies mediate violence and participate in an ever expanding apparatus of networked warfare? (Suchman, 2015: 8) How are practices of care a continuation of war by other means? Because peace inspires our ambitions, we also feel compelled to ask about regenerations of care towards the construction of peaceful societies. How can we, STS scholars, adhere to a politics of care that, recognizing and unraveling its links to war, makes way to imagining and enacting non-violent futures?
Matthew Wisnioski, Virginia Tech
Ellan Spero, MIT & Station1
This panel explores the ambiguous relationship between STS and innovation. Innovation is increasingly contested: it is heralded as a driver of technology, economy, and human empowerment, but it is also maligned as a destructive force that privileges novelty above all. STS has played a key role in the making and unmaking of innovation. STS scholars have challenged the concept of innovation, problematized its association with neoliberal economic and political forces, and posited alternative values for structuring science and technology. STS also has been a source of innovation expertise. From actor-network theory to midstream modulation, STS scholars have asked where knowledge, artifacts, and practices come from and how they travel. Moreover, there is a related tradition of STS scholars who seek to transform the values and practices of innovation from within laboratories, corporations, government agencies, and educational institutions. We invite contributors from these varied approaches to engage in reflective critique of STS itself in order to foster productive exchanges and practical outcomes. We welcome contributions that address (but are not limited to):
Jan-Peter Voss, Berlin University of Technology
Andreas Birkbak, Aalborg University Copenhagen
Mark Brown, California State University, Sacramento
Brice Laurent, Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, Mines ParisTech
Volkan Sayman, Berlin University of Technology
What does STS have to contribute to studies of democracy? What does it have to contribute to public engagements with democracy? Our suggestion is that STS can innovate, interrupt and regenerate the knowing and doing of democracy by bringing into view the practices through which democracy becomes known in one way or another. A key interest is with the generation of epistemic authority on what democracy is and how it works, and with how experts of democracy configure the practical knowing and actual doing of democracy in certain ways: by shaping discourses, subjectivities and material arrangements. We thus invite papers that mobilize concepts and methods from STS to investigate how knowledge is produced on what democracy is and how it works. This may include ‘scientific’ engagements with democracy such as political philosophy and theories of democracy, empirical research on democratic arrangements and processes, performance evaluations, as well as the development of ‘technologies’ such as electoral and voting systems, polling methods, participatory procedures, digital devices, campaigning and protest strategies, education materials, curricula and skills training courses. Underlying this endeavor is a concern for the performativity of producing knowledge on democracy, the ontological politics that are involved, and the ways in which they are explicitly reflected and open for public engagement.
Florian Jaton, Mines ParisTech
Philippe Sormani, Université de Lausanne
Michael Mair, University of Liverpool
Laboratory studies have played an important role in the shaping of STS. Yet, however initially promising, this analytical genre progressively dwindled, becoming the object of recurrent critiques (e.g., Doing 2008; Hess 2001). Those critiques in turn have contributed to an increasing fragmentation, virtually blowing up (Lynch 2018) the category of ethnography in STS, now ranging from large-scale assessments of ailing infrastructures to video-based micro-studies of lab bench interactions. This panel takes stock of the situation and asks which role(s) STS lab studies may come to play in the light of a new development, namely the recent revival of machine learning (ML) and attendant promises of ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI). In particular, the panel addresses three sets of interrelated questions: First, how might the fragmented character of lab studies today be brought to bear on a multifaceted yet cogently articulated ethnography of AI/ML? Second, what difference do ethnographies of AI at work make, as they draw upon participant observation, reverse engineering, or video analysis of its situated practices, in addition to the documentary analysis of textbooks, readymade algorithms, or scientific publications? Third, what might be the critical implications of lab studies reloaded, as renewed empirical studies of AI/ML in situ? How might they contribute to regenerating critical technical practice (Agre 1997) in and across, if not beyond, STS? To tackle these and related questions, the panel invites both empirical and conceptual contributions.
Dara Ivanova, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Hadrien Macq, Université de Liège
Roland Bal, Erasmus university rotterdam
Sabrina Huizenga, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management
Stefan Böschen, RWTH Aachen University
The vocabulary of experiments is increasingly being used outside of scientific settings, describing knowledge production practices formerly taking place in the laboratory and now encompassing the whole of society (Gross and Krohn 2005). Urban laboratization (Guggenheim 2012) landscapes offer new types of experimental spaces – living and urban labs, hackathons, fablabs and test-beds, which fail classification as laboratories in the classical sense. These experimental spaces play with the boundaries of science and governance, developing into new socio-material infrastructures for urban governance. Unpacking this laboratization landscape reveals how these spaces, as new technologies of governing cities, shape urban discourse and policy.
This panel invites papers scrutinizing the emergence of different kinds of labs in urban governance, critically addressing epistemic and institutional boundary conditions of such experimentalization. As the mundane character of most labs is at odds with futuristic notions of high tech ‘smart cities’, we are interested in the imageries of futurity embedded in these spaces and the expectations of urban life they generate. A cosmopolitics (Stengers 2003; Beck 2004) perspective sensitizes to otherness as key factor of experiments, often characterized by an asymmetry that must be negotiated. Contributing to STS analyses of ‘smart city’ governance and scientific citizenship, papers may tackle the following dimensions:
Sandra Harding
Recently Latin American STS has developed an increasing presence both in Latin America and in international contexts. Central to its concerns have been the ways that genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, and class are entangled with each other in Latin America, as elsewhere, and how the history and continuing assumptions of coloniality shape such entanglements. How are these projects shaping innovations, interruptions and regenerations of STS both in Latin America and through new Latin American presences around the globe?
Thus this panel welcomes proposals that focus on distinctively Latin American meanings and references of science and technology, such as indigenous knowledge and popular everyday technologies and uses of them, as well as more familiar uses. How do such innovations, interruptions and regenerations appear in Latin American institutions and practices? It welcomes studies of science, technology and STS differences between Portuguese and Spanish parts of Latin America; between Central American, Caribbean, continental Latin America, and Latin American parts of North America; between different geographical and climatological situations; and between different national and sub-national cultures.
Michael Bouchey
Taylor Dotson, New Mexico Tech
Michael Lachney, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
STS research has traditionally focused on innovation processes—and more recently maintenance—leaving practices of technological dismantling, decommissioning, and refusal under examined and less deeply theorized. This is inspite of the fact that contemporary forms of Luddism are highly visible. Ordinary citizens consciously taking a break from digital devices, demolition of urban infrastructures like elevated highways or trolley systems, opting out of mandated state testing, and Silicon Valley disruption efforts that aim to dismantle an already existing sociotechnical system and replace it with a networked platform under a startup’s control. How could (or should) STS scholars make sense of these seemingly disparate Luddite activities?
This panel builds on recent scholarship on the interrelations between Luddism as epistemology—a process of learning about technologies as legislations—and as politics—an effort to materially realize a certain vision of the good society. Desirable presentations include ones that draw connections between and contrast contemporary and past movements aspiring to dismantle certain technologies, theorize and elucidate the epistemological dimensions of Luddite politics, discern and examine the barriers to democratizing Luddism, and imagine and propose how technological destruction can proceed in an intelligent and just matter. In exploring deeper theorizations and research on technological dismantling, decommissioning, and refusal, this panel also seeks constructive critiques of epistemological and political Luddism: How to ensure that dismantling is an ethically just political project and protect against the reactionary instantiations that are often associated with 20th century neo-Luddites?
Julianne Yip, McGill
Rachel Bergmann, McGill University
Doerte Bemme, McGill University
This panel is concerned with emergent practices of objectivity in contemporary data environments in science and technology, especially those that appear to exceed, interrupt, or displace the quest for truth and facticity. While STS has sought to understand how facts and epistemic objects are stabilized and circulated, this panel interrogates novel knowledge practices that escape the logic of a hardening of facts. Instead, we are interested in emerging modes of verification that present themselves as flexible, iterative, and reflexive; as operating with and through open epistemic horizons. This could take the shape of first responders’ practice of waiting for the facts to emerge as California’s wildfires depart from historical baselines (Petryna 2018: 582), or iterative intervention designs in Global Health that adjust their concepts and measures according to what works (Bemme 2018). At stake in such horizoning epistemic practices are the very boundaries between true or false, success or failure, normal or pathological. In light of such new data practices, we suggest revisiting the question of objectivity. It has been amply shown to be produced, not given (e.g., Harding 1991, Haraway 1989, Daston and Galison 2007); it is a set of rules and attitudes that has been, and can be, otherwise. Machine learning systems, for example, are imagined to outperform human objectivity. As such, efforts to judge machine judgements reconfigure what objectivity is and ought to be. We invite scholars to grapple with the questions: How is objectivity made and re-made in data-centric environments? How is ‘objectivity’ produced and practiced beyond ‘truth’ and ‘facticity’?
Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, University of Texas at Dallas
Alenda Chang, University of California, Santa Barbara
How can media studies interrupt and regenerate the pursuits of science and technology studies? Media scholars working on the peripheries of STS have long expanded the focus of the former to include material infrastructures and medical technologies. Likewise, for STS scholars studying medical forms of imaging or biomaterial technologies, the question of media already matters implicitly. How might an explicit media studies angle on these investigations interrupt existing assumptions and conclusions?
There is, for instance, the emergent concern with bioprocesses in mediation and with theories of media attuned to the processual flow of life. Media objects such as climate change games and psychiatric films address issues central to STS; scholars thinking through these objects’ textual and technical features can regenerate the interdisciplinary discussions on such issues. Media studies remains invested in and cautious of the politics of representation, whether in virtual climate models or animal forms of perception. Environmental media studies press us to think of our research archives as extending to the natural world. The potential for scholarly inquiry at the intersection of both fields are numerous and ripe for innovative interventions.
Submissions to this open panel could tackle any topic broadly in the field of media studies, but the project should make clear its stakes in operating at the intersection of media studies and STS. That intersection could be within the project’s objects of study, methodologies, or theoretical frameworks. Projects with a transnational scope and informed by postcolonial critiques of both media studies and STS are encouraged.
Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh
Marlee Tichenor, University of Edinburgh
Health modeling has a long history. Historian Theodore Porter (2002) has highlighted a 1766 mathematical model of smallpox mortality by Daniel Bernoulli as a precursor to contemporary policy-oriented forms of projecting health outcomes. Bernoulli’s model incorporated estimates to argue for inoculation to prolong children’s life in order to bring prosperity and power (275). Since then, models of health have structured sanitary strategies, quarantine protocols, vaccination programs and have shaped medical practice as well as public perception of health and risk. As Ian Hacking (1990) observed, making up people through models has a looping effect. Disease taxonomies, formalized etiologies and stochastic approximation of contact, produce and reify identities of people and populations. As population-based health interventions have risen in influence from the 19th century to contemporary data-driven medicine, dependence on modelled assumptions and estimations of risk have continuously increased to conduct successful near-future forecasting.
In this panel, we hope to gather scholars investigating the histories and ramifications of health modeling practices. In what ways have mathematical models of health incorporated particular economic ideologies and understandings of what it means to be human? How do global health organizations, insurance companies, government entities, and users value – or discard – models? What work does the increased comfort with modelled assumption do within the management of population health, and how are uncertainty and error conceived within such a framework? How do we make sense of failed models (like Bernoulli’s) and what happens to other models of health futures when one becomes dominant?
David Ribes, Universty of Washington
Stephen Slota, University of California, Irvine
From waterproof field notebooks, petabyte-scale databases and repositories, surveys, the lighting of fires on beaches to indicate distance and mass spectrometers, to sensor-equipped drones, IoT enabled personal quantification, geosynchronous satellites and LIDAR mapping, accounts of instrumentation are vital to the constitution, interpretation and capacity of scientific practice and knowledge work. The design and implementation of particular instruments not only elucidates significant negotiations that occur within the scientific community but also impacts and embodies epistemology and daily practice, while novel instrumentation disrupts extant practice and spurs innovative work, resource management and research. Instrumentation potentially enables movement from the complex to the complicated, from local to global, and from observation into productive data. Scientific instrumentation fundamentally informs the work, capacity, and potential outcomes of knowledge production, while a variety of forms of instrumentation characterize the infrastructure of evidence-based policy interventions. And yet, discussions around scientific practice have largely focused on instruments’ more favorable counterpart — data. The ongoing focus on the re-use, sharing and deployment of data itself has recently been a focus of work in science studies, but often leaves instrumentation itself ill-considered or occluded in practice. In this open panel, we foreground instrumentation in its diversity of implementations in order to refocus our attention to the heterogeneous and varied instruments through which we parse, interpret, and translate observations of the world and pre-existing data. We welcome papers discussing the sociotechnical, interpretive, and innovative aspects of instrumentation, broadly conceived, that often remain unconsidered in studies of data, its practices, and analyses.
Salla Sariola, University of Turku, Finland
Jose Cañada, University of Helsinki
During the past decade, microbes have come to occupy new and central spaces in scientific enquiry as well as their social analysis. As microbes mutate, adapt and evolve towards resistance to antibiotics, there is mounting pressure to search for new ways of preventing illness. While antibiotics are no longer readily available to do their ‘magic’, new social forms that enable peaceful coexistence with microbes are emerging, instead of a war against microbes that Pasteur established and Latour documented in Pasteurisation of France. Societies are rethinking relationships between humans, animals, and environment in radically new ways, e.g. by building immunity through fermentation or enhancement of gut microbiota; development of vaccines, phage therapy or novel antibiotics; and promotion of sustainable food production. In this process, drug resistance is not only framed as a medical concern but also social, economic and political.
Re-situation of microbes is present in biomedical research and care, policy and governance, and everyday practices. STS offers tools to regenerate understanding of microbes; interruptions caused by the absence of efficient medical countermeasures; and innovative practices that emerge as a result. This panel puts microbes at the centre of social analysis and opens up new avenues for thinking about microbial knowledge, governance, and more-than-human relations.
We welcome presentations focusing on, among others:
Vernelle Noel, Georgia Institute Of Technology
Lisa Marks, Georgia Institute of Technology
Our panel seeks to create a space to examine situated hand-making practices occurring within social, cultural, and physical environments, alongside current trends in computation, digitization, and automation. Our purpose is to examine craft practices (hand, mind, and material), computation, and technology through intersecting STS lenses of feminism, post-colonialism, and indigeneity (Banu Subramaniam et al. n.d., 407–33). In conversation with the 2019 4S theme of Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations, we hope to engage in critical discourse around casting analog making practices as, dirty, [messy], and repetitive, while casting automation as an innovative means to better knowledge, insights, and outcomes (Autodesk University 2018 n.d.) We ask: How might automation interrupt knowledge, participation, and sociality when it comes to craft practices, and the historically marginalized? What methods and conceptual frameworks might we and marginalized communities employ in design and technology to avoid stripping clean [the] history and culture of these vulnerable groups? How might these making practices inform new conceptions of feminism, post-colonialism, and indigeneity? We invite works that explore theories, histories and projects around craft, computation, and technology – from education to practice (Risatti 2007; Sennett 2012; Dormer 1997). How might situated practices be a form of resistance against colonialism, automation, their ordering, and their violence toward vulnerable communities? What unique challenges and opportunities do we face as we imagine co-production between craft and automation such that their intertwined histories of power and violence are acknowledged and repaired? Our goal is to develop new perspectives and re-conceptualizations of craft, computation, and automation.
Brad Bolman, Harvard University
As STS scholars, historians, and anthropologists of science have shown, numerous fields of science and technology owe some of their most spectacular inventions to the study of nonhuman organisms. Whether in the creation of new technologies based on animal forms and movements or the discovery of pharmaceuticals from microbial bioprospecting, in fields like genetics, biotechnology, or weapons design, nonhuman life forms have been central to the innovations of science and technology in the last few centuries.
At the same time, however, nonhuman organisms have never simply been passive entities in these research projects. By becoming, rather than remaining stable and identical, these mut(e)able mobiles have troubled scientific and technological aspirations for sameness and repetition. Nonhuman beings have escaped cages, polluted pure substances, transmuted from expected forms, or otherwise disrupted the smooth flow of human scientific and technological work.
Building on last year’s discussions of global or transnational animals in science at 4S Sydney, this open panel will look at projects of science and technology that have constructed innovations in/with/as nonhuman organisms, while paying attention as well to forms of disruption (resistance, fugitivity, friction) that emerge in more-than-human technoscientific assemblages (Haraway).
Jacob Weger, University of Georgia
Walker DePuy, University of Georgia
Suneel Kumar, University of Georgia
Environmental governance as practiced today spans diverse arenas of engagement, policy agendas, governance scales, and actor groups. Such governance regimes, however, operate in an increasingly neoliberal world that not only defines problem and solution spaces in particular terms but closes off avenues for envisioning possible alternatives. This panel is aimed both at interrogating the ontological assumptions behind current environmental governance arrangements and, more critically, asking how ontological scholarship can contribute to reconceptualizing the theory, practice, and very concept of environmental governance. Along with anthropology and geography, STS has been crucial to unpacking an understanding of reality that de-centers the human, breaks apart dominant dualisms, and takes assemblages of humans and non-humans seriously (Blaser 2009, 2014; Jensen 2017; Mol 1999). This can be seen in contributions ranging from Latour’s parliament of things (1991) to Haraway’s Chthulucene (2016) to Tsing’s explorations of patchiness, eruption, freedom, and ruin (2015). We welcome a range of theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic case study-based papers that analyze the ontological politics and political ontologies of environmental governance as practiced today or envisioned for the future. Potential questions to focus on include:
Ignace Schoot, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Alex Zahara
Caitlynn Beckett, Memorial University of Newfoundland
In this session, we will make strange practices of containment. Questions of containment are particularly relevant today as people, animals, toxicants, natural disasters, ideologies, water, and land are enclosed within (or escape) walls, fences, nets, policies, rhetoric, and other ‘containers’. Yet containment as a hermetic closing off of a definite space does not seem suitable in a world that is as much characterized by indeterminacy, leakages, overflows, excesses, and movements. In this session, we draw on the work of postructructuralist geographers, feminist STS scholars, and Indigenous and queer theorists that have long since challenged a view of bodies and spaces as individual, closed off, and containable– notions that are often rooted in racist, sexist, colonial histories and objectives. Rather, we view ‘containment’ as the result of highly relational, situated and contingent sets of practices that are amenable to scrutiny and change. Rather than doing away with containment entirely, in this session, we seek case studies that rethink what it means to contain. In particular, we are soliciting papers that investigate:
In complicating containment we seek to answer the question ‘what does it mean to do containment well?’. We aim to interrogate how different versions of containment always make possible particular spaces, trajectories, ways of living– ones that are not given but, crucially, might be done otherwise.
Kean Birch, York University
John Gardner, Monash University, Australia
Jane Bjørn Vedel, Copenhagen Business School
Capitalism is increasingly technoscientific, by which we mean that it is increasingly configured by the development and distribution of technoscientific products, services, platforms, and activities; in turn, technoscience is increasingly configured by the accounting, management, and performativity of profit-oriented organizational logics. Technoscientific capitalism is, in this sense, underpinned by organizational dynamics and inter-organizational relationships that often get obscured within STS debates about the supposed neoliberalization of society and science. A key question to ask, then, is how is technoscientific capitalism organized? What are the epistemic values, practices, and assets that are deployed in the entanglement of capitalism and technoscience? There are many possible answers here, not only aimed at these questions but also raising further questions for debate. Of particular interest to this Open Panel are the range of analytical and/or empirical takes on (1) epistemic and economic valuations, (2) academic values and practices, (3) organizational assets, relationships, and management, and (4) public-private frameworks that configure science, technology, and innovation.
Questions
Alev Kuruoglu, University of Southern Denmark
This panel delves into the performative dimensions of socio-technical imaginaries (STI). These include, but are not limited to, the circulation of STIs in/across popular (consumer) culture, public policy, commercial organizations, etc.; the materialization of STIs into systems and artefacts; as well as the tricky translation of STIs into everyday practices and performative scripts. We are interested both in specific performances of imaginaries, and in the effects these imaginaries exert in highly-affected areas of life, such as transport and communication, health and biomedicine, homes and workplaces. The panel questions how different actors – including industry, trade organizations, governments, end users, and citizens – partake in the production, circulation, negotiation, translation of and resistance towards STIs related to eagerly awaited, while at the same time contentious, technologies (e.g., AI, robots and drones, self-trackinging, genetic bioengineering, 3D printing, smart home technology).
Some topics that may be addressed include:
Tess Lea, University of Sydney
Liam Grealy, University of Sydney
Aron Chang, The Blue House Civic Studio
Gilad Meron, The Blue House Civic Studio
Lilith Winkler At their most elemental, houses regulate relations between internal and external environments, providing a carapace for soft tissue residents from water, atmospheres, and vermin. But houses not only shelter bodies, they mimic them, with their exoskeletons less box than living membrane: permeable, porous, pervious, and absorbent. Arterial pipes, wires, and cable networks intersect with housing to distribute water, energy, and waste; while matter penetrates the house itself, searching out cracks, refusing expulsion, and exposing bodies to diseases and reactants. Repair and maintenance regimes stave off this entropy, both for housing and the municipal infrastructures that make houses functional, safe, and enduring. Such attention, as with the geographies of infrastructural provisioning, are matters of both bureaucratic banality and major public conflict.
This open panel is a collaboration between the Housing for Health Incubator and the Blue House Civic Studio, comparing and contrasting examples from Australia, the Louisiana Gulf Coast, and like environments. It asks: what infrastructures are required, and what work is needed to maintain them, to make housing habitable? What can STS insights on past, present, and future housing and infrastructural challenges (such as water supply and management) offer? What innovations are required to face these challenges – in architecture, urban design, governance, and community-engagement – and what battles are being fought to implement proven methods against neglect, erratic attention, and abandonment? Panel organizers welcome contributions drawing connections between the permeability of housing and water, waste, energy, paper, and other infrastructures, attuned to questions of infrastructural inequality.
See: http://www.hfhincubator.org; http://thebluehousenola.com
Inka Greusing, Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies, TU Berlin
Hanna Meißner, Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies, TU Berlin
As an engineer and a sociologist team-teaching and researching at a center for feminist studies at a university of technology, we understand our work as intervention and critical participation. Our research and teaching interests are epistemological as well as political. In this context we ask how the claim for decolonizing can be successfully implemented in universities.
We addressed this question to a research seminar with students from various disciplines. In this panel we want to invite colleagues to present and discuss experiences with decolonization in teaching in different fields, especially in science and engineering. What is taught as basic knowledge and what does it mean to look at this in a decolonial critical way? How can epistemological un/learning work as a strategy of decolonizing? How can teachers and students with experiences of discrimination be protected within decolonial teaching projects? We want to open a space to discuss our teaching experiences and ideas.
Leah Horgan, University of California, Irvine
Angela Okune, University of California, Irvine
Jess Auerbach, Open University of Mauritius
Leonida Mutuku, inteliPro
This session examines how data cultures (including norms, policies, processes, and worries) travel globally, and how they inform data collaboratives. Here we look at who is involved in data-driven collaborations, and how data economies affect ways of working and underlying infrastructures. In thinking about data cultures and collaborations, academics, practitioners, and funders have largely focused on government and private industry—e.g. governmental open data initiatives, access to the black box of private industry data, and the alignment of government and private sector data policies. These far-reaching data collaborations and infrastructures have prompted concerns about surveillance, privacy, and prejudice, especially in light of algorithmic bias, the Facebook data debacle, and new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations. Thus far, however, these inquiries have largely laid in Western contexts, and focus on particular kinds of data actors: government and private industry.
We invite papers and projects that question predominant cultures and politics of data from the vantage of everyday, situated data practices. We seek to garner insight into the range of stakeholders involved in data collaboratives, and the social dynamics comprised of gathering, storing, and communicating with data in varied contexts and configurations. Here we ask: Who is doing ethnographic studies of data and what are they finding? How do cultures of data in government, academia, and industry compare? What are the complications in studying ecosystems of data? We are interested in rich and diverse examples that expand present perspectives of how data is understood in the field of STS.
Saurabh Biswas, Arizona State University
Carlo Altamirano-Allende, Arizona State University
As energy transitions are happening everywhere, two dominant and competing narratives are shaping policies, markets, and public imaginations. On the one hand, post-Paris climate action appears to be the driving force behind energy-related efforts in the global North; while rapid access to modern energy services dominates the landscape of actions in the global South. These visions of sociotechnical futures are significantly different from the energy systems of today, as current practices are still being shaped by principles rooted in the 20th-century idea of the electric grid. This mismatch between practices and ambitions are giving rise to unresolved tensions between policy framings and energy action.
Furthermore, these overpowering global narratives are masking sociotechnical realities of exclusion and disenfranchisement of historically marginalized actors (indigenous and rural populations, the urban poor), that undermine principles of social and environmental justice. Consequently, alternative visions of inclusive energy futures cannot find a place within the dominant narratives of sustainable energy transitions.
We seek contribution that utilizes an STS approach to study the conflicting nature of clean energy transition narratives, uneven power dynamics, and trade-offs that undermine human and environmental rights. We encourage perspectives from the Global South and post-colonial STS frameworks and methodologies that demonstrate the inherent contradiction of the political economy of the global energy systems. We also welcome critical perspectives and case studies on place-based knowledge and innovation systems that demonstrate such conflicts and provide alternative pathways and imaginations.
Steve Sturdy
Sarah Cunningham-Burley, University Of Edinburgh
Jeremy Greene, Johns Hopkins University
Canay Özden-Schillig, Johns Hopkins University
Naveeda Khan, Johns Hopkins University
Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University
Sarah Chan, University of Edinburgh
Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data brings the varied disciplines of STS to bear on the variegated nature of uncertainty produced within a data saturated environment. Our aim is to examine how past and present invocations of big data, which hold out the promise of precision and certainty, also proliferate uncertainties within many domains of practice: from medicine to marketing, criminal law to news media, and across almost all scientific fields. We seek new lines of inquiry into the challenges posed to scientific inquiry and social institutions by the consolidation of computational analysis, machine learning and the generation of big data. Papers should cohere around the dialectic of certainty and uncertainty produced by big data and algorithms in practice, with particular interest in four themes: (1) the computational turn in the sciences (what new logics of uncertainty within contemporary data practices will govern scientific inquiry in the future?) (2) shared reality and mis-information (how do presumptions of errors, mistakes, mis-information secrete into everyday life, and manifest as rumors, fears of falsity, and data theft, and raise questions as to whether we partake in a shared reality or live in alternate ones?) (3) the speculative imagination (how do data driven fields of study and analysis, consciously or unconsciously draw upon traditions of futurology in imagining threats and promise of the datafication of self and society?) and (4) citizens and publics (how are new subjectivities and novel spaces for engagement/disengagement articulated as data driven practices in everyday life?).
Nikki Brand, TU Delft
Bee (Baukje) Kothuis, TU Delft
This panel intends to identify and discuss promises and shortcomings of innovative design-based multi- and transdisciplinary research collaboration for complex problems in urbanized deltas. An array of academic disciplines (like STEM, Social and Environmental sciences) and practitioner knowledge specializations addresses the multi-faceted challenge of sustainable development of flood prone urbanized deltas. However, an explicit distinction in approaches might influence collaborative readiness and effective outcomes: some disciplines mainly focus on identifying the problem at hand, the so-called problem-seeking design approach, while others mainly aim to find solutions for a problem, the problem-solving design approach. An early integration of approaches in these collaborative endeavors seems to benefit both effective design-processes and integrated designs that resonate well with end-users.
We invite scholars, preferably joined by practitioners and/or other stakeholders!, to join the panel and share experiences of multi- and trans-disciplinary knowledge integration and other lessons learned in design-based research projects dealing with flood risk; thus contributing to the emerging body of literature and examples in STS Studies for comparative research on this urgent topic. After all, we gather in New Orleans: multiple integrated design-solutions to cope with flood risk have sprouted here, while many more need to be developed for the numerous flood prone urban areas around the globe.
An interactive field trip is intended to be part of the panel, to be designed and executed as an collaborative effort by all panel participants (after papers are accepted), thus contributing to building shared experience, and a trusted network in this specific field.
Maria Cristina Cardoso, UFRJ – HCTE
Eduardo Paiva, EDUARDO NAZARETH PAIVA
Claudia Turco, HCTE-UFRJ / FIOCRUZ
This panel seeks to explore the translation processes of lab created non-human organisms, such as attenuated virus, OGM plants and animals. Humans have been manipulating nature in many ways for a long time, through the domestication of animals and the use of plants as medicines. However, recently, there have been changes in the scale and form of this manipulation. First, it was affected by the development of microbiology, immunology, biochemistry and genetics, as new fields of research and new ways of applying knowledge. Secondly,, biotechnology is increasingly used to make useful products or solve problems, and these products are no longer predominantly used in laboratories but are entering the production lines and into our lives.
The manipulation of living beings in the environment and in individual bodies – be it dissemination, extermination or recreation – are been used in several initiatives, especially in public health and in agriculture. These practices create, by translation, completely new beings which are hibrids of nature and society (LATOUR, 1994), such as attenuated viruses, transgenic insects and others.
In this panel we would like to receive papers which think about these products of biotechnoscience and their translation processes from the moment they gain materiality in laboratories, to their movements into other areas – such as surveillance services, health posts, hospitals, factories, offices of politicians and public managers and regulation commitees – as well as the possibilities of participation of emergent concerned groups in these processes – social movements, patient associations among others (CALLON; RABEHARISOA, 2008).
Juno Parrenas, The Ohio State University
Queerness in recent scholarship has exceeded identities and human sexual behaviors to now include ecologies (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erikson 2010; Seymour 2013), animals (Govindrajan 2018; Hayward 2010), and elements (Agard-Jones 2012; Roberts 2017; Zee 2017). Meanwhile, feminist and queer scholarship within STS continues to expand ideas of kinship, reproduction, gender, and sexuality (Clark and Haraway 2018; Thompson 2005; Willey 2016). Inspired by works on queer entanglements with and beyond human bodies such as poet Tamiko Beyer’s (2013) We Come Elemental and feminist STS scholars Cyd Cipola et. Al’s (2017) Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader, this open panel asks, what does attention to queer forms and queer critiques bring to STS? When queerness signifies subversive sexual practices or transgressively sensual corporealities and when queerness no longer necessarily centers human experience, what is lost or gained? The panel invites papers that engage queerness as expressed through wildly diverse bodily forms and relations.
Agard-Jones. 2012. What the Sands Remember. GLQ. 18(2-3):325-346.; Beyers, Tamiko. 2013. We Come Elemental. Framington, Maine: Alice James Press.; Cepola, Cyd et al. 2017. Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader. Seattle: University of Washington Press.; Clark, Adele and Donna Haraway. 2018. Making Kin not Population. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018.; Govindrajan, Radhika. 2018. Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.; Hayward, Eva. 2010. Fingereyes: Impressions of Cup Corals. Cultural Anthropology 25(4)577-599.; Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Bruce Erikson. 2010. Queer Ecologies. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press.; Roberts, Elizabeth. 2018. What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City. Cultural Anthropology. 32(4):592-619.; Seymour, Nicole. 2013. Strange Natures. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.; Thompson, Charis. 2005. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge: MIT Press.; Willey, Angela. 2016. Undoing Monogamy: the Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology. Durham: Duke University Press.; Zee, Jerry C. 2017. Holding Patterns: Sand and Political Time at China’s Desert Shores. Cultural Anthropology 32(2): 215–241.
Annette-Carina van der Zaag, Birkbeck
Rory Crath, Smith College,
Paul Boyce, University of Sussex
There has been a growing STS interest in exploring stigma not only as an attribute affixing to persons, but as a phenomenon extending to places and technologies. Following Goffman’s seminal work stigma is often made to signify perceived threats to the common good, understood to engender social and psychological effects such as avoidance of negatively marked people, places and other entities. In much literature, emphasis is often placed on managing or eradicating the predominantly socio-economic vulnerabilities induced by stigma while simultaneously addressing associated risks.
This panel invites reconsideration of stigma – not as a force needing removal or management but rather as generative of political openings and possibilities. Drawing on queer theories that re-narrate spoiled subjectivities as sites of political and intimate potential, we seek papers that explore the psycho-social material relations, capacities and debilities that the phenomena of stigma can generate. Key questions include: What new analytical and policy/practice pathways are opened up by exploring the entanglements of psychical life worlds, social economies of power, and the techno-scientific production of stigmatized bodies and contexts? How might we think of such entanglements across global infrastructures and post-colonial trajectories, for instance global health programmes aimed at improving the lives of people stigmatized by HIV? What might it mean politically, social scientifically and ethically to think of stigma in respect of its generative capacities even as it might be envisaged as pernicious and undesirable?
Scott Knowles
[TEMP] Tyson Vaughan
This open panel will bring together researchers engaged with what Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan have called the quotidian Anthropocene — enactments of the Anthropocene in different places, shaped by geophysical, eco-atmospheric, sociotechnical, political-economic and cultural processes that produce local particularities. We hope to receive proposals for papers that examine how people have lived with/are living with and guarding against the Anthropocene, and building sciences, technologies and social programs turned to it. We also hope to learn how people are developing novel modes of analysis, communication and governance to address anthropocenics. One thread of papers will focus on the Mississippi River as site of the Anthropocene, sharing research developed in 2019 by a collective in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Mississippi: An Anthropocene River project. Another thread will examine disaster memorial projects as Anthropocene politics. A third will ask for comparative approaches (in method and/or geography) to Anthropocene work.
Thao Phan, University of Melbourne, Australia
Scott Wark, University of Warwick
In her seminal essay, Race and/as Technology, Wendy H. K. Chun proposed that race could be understood as a technology—that is, as neither biological nor cultural, human nor machine, mediated nor environmental, visible nor invisible, but as a category that organises all of these dualisms and many more. Race, she argued, can be thought of as a technique that one uses, even as one is used by it (38). Using this essay and its concerns as a touchstone, this panel will ask how we might understand race and/as technology in the present. What is the relationship between visibility/invisibility and race and how is it mediated? How are emergent technologies of control, such as facial recognition, racialised? How might we think categories—like race, person, or population—after Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and big data? How might these technologies be understood historically? What is the relationship to related categories, such as gender, class or ability, in the technologisation of race? How might analyses of culture help us to understand race and/as technology? If we adopt Chun’s idea that this approach displaces ontological questions of race (56), what different things might race be made to do, in the present? We want to bring together scholars working in any discipline touched by these questions to think through what it might mean to consider race and/as technology today.
Barbara Allen, Virginia Tech-National Capital Region Campus
Matthias Gross, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ
Meredith Sattler, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
This theme session furthers examination of ‘Real-World Experimentation’ as recursive, reflexive, and refractive processes that may produce more relevant and useful domains of scientific knowledge for different publics. We hope to engender conversations surrounding practices that may supplant spaces of ignorance with forms of deeply situated knowledges that resonate within the public sector in novel ways. These in-vivo spaces, co-created by humans and/or others, expand kinds of expertise, specifically, who can be an experimenter and who assigns validity and value to experimental results, opening the arena to creative ideas not conceptualized in more disciplinarily defined spaces. Additionally, the process of expanding the experimental method on-the-ground has the potential to inform theories and practices of doing social science in the public domain.
We seek empirically-grounded research and case-studies that intentionally engage public arenas such as field trials, community based participatory studies, citizen science, urban laboratories, and other inclusive and ‘open’ or ‘experimental’ domains of knowledge production through the exploration of new approaches to understanding ‘real-world’ complexities. We welcome presentations that consider questions such as: how can a variety of modes of applied experimentation be more clearly understood within the shaping of evolving knowledges? How do more contextually driven models of intervention produce, validate, and communicate technoscientific knowledge as public knowledge? What are expanding roles of co-designers, users, and other communities of practice within these complex and contextualized practices? How might modes of STS research re-define experimental criteria and engage iterative knowledge production to re-imagine outcomes as well as alternative social dynamics?
Andreas Folkers, Justus Liebig-University Gießen
Sven Opitz, Philipps-University Marburg
Research on the microbiome suggests that symbiosis is not just a curiosity but rather a rule in biology. Humans and non-human animals depend on symbiosis with microbes that outnumber their hosts in terms of cells and genetic material. Correspondingly, new modes of biotechnological intervention emerged trying to intervene into symbiotic relationships. This panel seeks to investigate scientific and technological practices associated with symbioses: How does the turn toward mutualist arts of living challenge long-held assumptions in the life sciences, for instance about individualistic competition in evolutionary biology or the identification of microbes with pathogens? What about new kinds of symbiopolitics (Stefan Helmreich) aiming at optimizing, creating or dissociating symbiotic bonds to improve human health, increase agricultural production or repair disrupted ecosystems? At the same time, symbiosis has already been adopted as a concept in STS-research: Donna Haraway’s thought on sympoiesis, Anna Tsing’s notion of encounter, and Isabelle Stengers’ understanding of reciprocal capture are cases in point. The panel seeks to advance this conceptual debate: How does symbiosis provide the opportunity for (re)-thinking natureculture relationalities? How does it help in re-conceiving the global in terrestrial terms as a symbiotic planet (Lynn Margulis)? In dealing with symbiosis, reciprocal capture also designates the mode in which the conceptual is folded into the phenomenal and vice versa. We are looking for talks that:
Jason Delborne, North Carolina State University
Dalton George, North Carolina State University
Adam Kokotovich, North Carolina State University
As a central idea within the responsible research and innovation and engagement literatures, reflexivity is widely cited and pursued, yet it holds many potential meanings and takes many forms. Often defined as holding a mirror up to one’s commitments, assumptions, and worldview, reflexivity emphasizes the significance of these factors and the need to call them into question at a variety of decision making scales (Stilgoe et al. 2013). The host of potential meanings of reflexivity and the variety of methods available to achieve it call attention to the importance of context and how reflexivity is pursued in practice (Kinsella 2012; Wynne 2011; Schuurbiers 2011). As Lynch (2000) argues, what reflexivity does, what it threatens to expose, what it reveals and who it empowers depends upon who does it and how they go about it (p.36). This session seeks to explore the contextual nature of reflexivity and how it is being pursued within science, technology, and environmental governance. For example, what types of reflexivity are pursued in different contexts and at different scales? What specific methods are utilized to foster reflexivity? What factors influence what is called into question and what goes unquestioned? What tensions and paradoxes are encountered when pursuing reflexivity and how can they be navigated? While we welcome presentations on a wide range of topics, we are particularly interested in how reflexivity is pursued in the context of stakeholder and public engagement. For example, how is reflexivity envisioned and pursued within engagement and how is engagement, itself, used as a means to achieve reflexivity?
Kalindi Vora, University of California Davis
How can we interrupt and regenerate the culture of research in STEM to expand its possibilities in the face of anti-science discourse, and anti-women, and anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ cultural politics? Research in STEM education suggests that integrating socio-cultural context and communal values into STEM education can increase recruitment and retention of women, under-represented minorities (URMs), and first-generation students in STEM, while also enhancing all students’ commitment to the social good. Feminist approaches to STS are well-positioned to shift the culture of research in STEM to produce better and broader results, as well as to increase equity and retention of diverse talent. 4S provides a unique forum for discussing the integration of feminist approaches in STEM. How can feminist STS move STEM graduates toward greater engagement with social justice, as well as deep collaboration with social sciences and humanities? What sort of curricular changes could lead to a transformation of STEM research and the diversity of researchers conducting it?
This panel discussion of STEM graduate training brings together insights from feminist theory with social studies of science to address deep bias in scientific research to suggest methods and frameworks that produce more accountable, accurate and responsible scientific research. This panel is interested in talking about how feminist STS (fSTS) scholars are using, or exploring the use of, the critique of objectivity to address biases in science. How are we engaging with STEM graduate education to teach a more nuanced situatedness (Haraway 1988) in culture and history to produce more responsible and accountable science?
Alastair Iles, UC Berkeley
Miller and Bennett (2008) suggested: New socio-literary techniques, inspired by science fiction, could offer significant contributions to the governance of new and emerging technologies by improving the capacity to reflexively assess the social dynamics of socio-technical systems. Through making narratives about the future, science fiction can open new cognitive territory for readers. Such fiction allows readers to experiment with different scenarios of change and thereby appreciate better how world-making may happen. Readers can be introduced to unfamiliar social and technical innovations. Critically, science fiction can also enable readers to begin questioning key assumptions, values, and choices inherent in the organization of a society, whether existing or imaginary. It can perform STS work and reach audiences with whom academic writing may be less capable of connecting.
Much science fiction takes a dystopic approach, notably climate fiction which explores what might happen to societies when confronted by rapid, unpredictable climate destabilization. Other fiction traces what happens if genetic engineering and biomedical technologies are used to reshape human bodies and to control agriculture. By contrast, some science fiction looks at how societies could be regenerated through the use of S&T, rethinking what S&T mean, and moving beyond Western-style scientific cosmovisions. This panel encourages papers that explore themes such as: What can STS scholars learn about the possibilities and limits of ‘regeneration’ through studying science fiction? How might science fiction provide guidance for regeneration work? What sorts of imagined futures and possible pathways are being narrated? Whose viewpoints are being articulated – elite scientists, indigenous peoples, or farmers? How might challenges to an anthropocentric standpoint open new possibilities for regeneration? What are the processes through which science fiction may influence people? Contributions could focus on individual novels, book series, or on themes that cross between a number of books by different authors.
Pierre Delvenne, Université de Liège (SPIRAL)
Kean Birch, York University
Kristin Asdal, TIK, Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture
Béatrice Cointe, Universityof Oslo
In recent years, there has been a growing interest, both in STS and policy circles, in the so-called bioeconomy: an economy that would rely on biological resources, knowledge and technologies to fuel sustained and sustainable growth. The bioeconomy prompts us to reconsider the relations between economic and biological life and, more broadly, the articulation of politics, economic growth, science and nature. Indeed, it enacts a specific vision of this articulation: the promise of an economy that is at the same time innovative, transformative, regenerative, sustainable, responsible and environmentally friendly.
Policy and academic notions capturing such attempts at imagining and engineering economies that would grow within environmental limits and make good use of innovation abound: e.g. sustainable development, green growth, blue economy Despite a wealth of conceptual propositions to make sense of these attempts, few detailed empirical studies so far have explicitly engaged with this conceptual work. How can we open up these promissory economies and trace the relations that constitute them?
This panel welcomes empirically and conceptually grounded contributions that interrogate the transformations in the way the economy relates to nature but also politics. In particular, contributions may address the following topics:
Sebastian Ureta, Universidad Alberto Hurtado
Arn Keeling, Department of Geography, Memorial University
Environmental remediation, or the myriad processes and schemes through which a certain damaged ecology or species is looked to be restored to a more functional or sustainable state, faces a serious paradox. On the one hand, in the face of climate change, environmental contamination, and widespread biodiversity depletion, to enact successful and comprehensive remediation schemes appears more urgent than ever. On the other hand, the common failure of most actual remediation schemes to really achieve their stated aims has caused a growing sense of skepticism among practitioners and analysts alike about the capacity of such interventions to truly help to heal damaged landscapes (or indeed, the planet as a whole). STS scholars have so far importantly contributed to enact such a paradox, mainly through developing case studies critically assessing the multiple shortcomings of current remediation schemes, especially those undertaken as technical, expert-driven processes.
This open panel aims at challenging such state of affairs. Without denying the multiple shortcomings of actual remediation schemes, it looks to go beyond critique and instead explore novel ways to enact remediation through experimental renderings of both the damaged environment and the possible paths for its transformation. Following the conference theme, we solicit interventions that seek to innovate, interrupt, or regenerate remediation practices. Explicitly avoiding modernist dreams of purity, such novel remediations would fully embrace the messy and intermingled character of life on earth, practicing remediation as a socio-technical ensemble involving a heterogeneous array of entities – certainly experts and publics, but also nonhuman agents.
J Britt Holbrook, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Sarah Rijcke, Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS)
Bart Penders, Maastricht University
Fueled by growing concerns about the reproducibility of well-known scientific studies, and exacerbated by a number of high-profile misconduct cases, the sciences seem to be undergoing an epistemological crisis. In response, many involved have doubled down on traditional criteria for objectivity, culminating in the ambition that all science ought to be replicable. Some salient characteristics of this normative discourse are formalization of methods and of reporting, delayed attribution of credit, renewed struggles over the boundaries of science and the explicit devaluation of epistemic variation. More recently, the call for replicability has been extended across all sciences and humanities, positioning replicability as a universal goal. While loud and very dominant, such calls for replicability (or reproducibility) as the decisive criterion for research quality across the sciences and humanities are not without opposition.
In this panel, we seek to discuss how to establish value and quality in the sciences and the humanities and which role(s) should be reserved for reproducibility and replicability on institutional, organizational, and career levels. We seek to discuss how the replication drive interrupts and innovates knowledge making, across diverse epistemic practices. How does replicability, as a universal requirement, influence the situated character of research and the local character of volunteer, participant or patient expertises? Which institutional, organizational, and career narratives are conducive to emergent norms and which are not? Which other conceptualizations of ‘good’ research compete with replicable research? How plural and local are replication (attempts)? What counts as a successful replication and how can it be known?
Aaron Panofsky, University of California, Los Angeles
David Peterson, UCLA
There is an emerging sense that science writ large is facing an unprecedented set of crises and pressures. Oft mentioned is the politicization and public contestation of climate science, nutrition research, vaccines, and the like. But there is another set of crises, less about the politicization of science and much more about doubts among scientists about the credibility of their research. At least since biomathematician John Ioannidis’s 2005 paper, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, there has been widespread anxiety about the epistemological reliability of science. Since then scientists have raised the alarm about a range of crises across a variety of fields: the reproducibility crisis, the ubiquity of questionable research practices, rising rates of retraction, high profile revelations of scientific fraud, predatory publishing, rampant conflicts of interest, and the general inadequacy of peer review. Scientists and scientific institutions have launched an array of responses: Metascientific research, mass replication experiments, new journal standards, open science frameworks aiming to enhance research transparency and data sharing, post publication peer review systems and misconduct clearinghouses like PubPeer and Retraction Watch, and even blogs and tweetstorms publicizing supposed scientific transgressions in real time. This panel invites papers probing the history, development, dimensions, and boundaries of this scientific crisis or crises; formal and informal efforts to respond; and the epistemic, practical, and institutional implications for scientific organization and especially the dilemmas and contradictions that emerge.
Jody Roberts, Institute for Research
Emmanuel Henry, Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL University
In chemical residues we encounter environmental phenomena that are at once voluminous and miniscule, regulated yet unruly. They are as difficult to theorize and study as they are to control or clean up. Yet reasons for doing so are ever more urgent: residues are remaking the biosphere, altering evolution, and laying claim to the Anthropocene (through carbon synthesis rather than combustion). This panel invites new thinking about chemical residues as material, political, and social objects. We are interested in bringing together STS scholars whose engagement with chemicals-in-society goes beyond more traditional segmented approaches that focus, for example, on a piece of regulation, a local environmental conflict, or a particular molecule. Instead, we seek papers that build deeper connections to the complicated, shape-shifting lives of residues. Our goal is a reimagined vocabulary and program for research that nudges academic and public discussion of chemical production and regulation beyond the cul-de-sacs of exasperation, complacency, and despair and towards critical, action-oriented frameworks that simultaneously grapple with, and thoughtfully engage, the chemical residual. In keeping with the themes of the conference, we are particularly interested in theoretical and empirical contributions that explore the possible participatory elements of individuals and institutions in disrupting residual flows and opening spaces and opportunities for innovation and regeneration.
A framing essay that inspires this panel is Soraya Boudia, Angela N.H. Creager, Scott Frickel, Emmanuel Henry, Nathalie Jas, Carsten Reinhardt, and Jody A. Roberts. 2018. Residues: Rethinking Chemical Environments. Engaging Science, Technology and Society 4:165-178. DOI:10.17351/ests2018.245
Alexandra Vinson, University of Michigan
Kelly Underman, Drexel University
During the ‘Golden Age of Doctoring’ in the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists and anthropologists worked collaboratively in health professions schools to study training and education (Becker, 1962; Bucher and Strauss, 1961; Olesen and Wittaker, 1969). That interest waned over the next few decades, with limited moments of reemergence (Bloom, 1988). However, with the tremendous transformations that have occurred in the health professions in the past two decades, studies of health professions training and education have experienced a renaissance. From research on the role of embodiment and the senses in clinical skills training (Prentice, 2005; Johnson, 2008; Harris, 2016) to new tensions about professional values and standards (Cech, et al, 2017), scholars in STS and related fields are bringing novel theories and methodologies to the study of health professions education. The study of health professions education represents an important avenue of research for STS, given the health professions’ dynamic relationship with science and technology. This panel will trace innovations and regenerations in scholarship in this area, as well as analyze interruptions in its trajectory. We welcome submissions from a range of scholars working at the intersections of STS and health professions education whose research examines these innovations, interruptions, and regenerations. Topics may include standardization of clinical skills training and licensing; studies of knowledge and nonknowledge in health professions education; the historical factors shaping the rise of interprofessional education; the role of emotions, bodies and the senses in clinical training; the measurement and assessment of clinical skills and professional attributes; and other similar themes.
Anastassija Kostan, University of Mainz/ University of Frankfurt Germany
Feminist Neomaterialisms have become a heterogeneous but meaningful stream of scholarship for feminist STS over the past ten years. Much work of feminist STS drives productively on a feminist-neomaterialist methodological framework that allows to constantly interrupt hegemonic epistemologies, to innovate ontologies and to regenerate modes of critique. Neomaterialist feminists emphasize the importance to go beyond idealistic and solely discursive approaches in feminist theory. Still, critics point out that feminist-neomaterialist theories are forgetful of the insights of some modes of feminist theories and critiques like Marxist and deconstructive feminisms. These bipolar stances are currently dominating the field of feminist neomaterialist theories while there is an urgent need to get beyond their contrasted pros and cons. This panel aims at better understanding the various assumptions, premises and limits of feminist neomaterialisms through approaches to their histories of theory, their combats and their promises. Which aspects of feminist neomaterialisms have been fruitful for feminist STS and where are their limits that have to be evolved towards a more comprehensive mode of feminist knowledge production? Concurrently, it aims to foreground new theoretical entanglements between new and old feminist materialisms that put forward the explicitly political, critical and subversive aspects of neomaterialist feminist approaches.
Mathieu Baudrin, CSI-Ecole Des Mines De Paris
valentin thomas, INRA – IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine
Public policies governing economic activities involving health and environmental risks bear a major contradiction. They are supposed to protect human health and the environment without hindering economic development. This panel seeks to analyze the production of these policies from below. It focuses on the development and implementation of science-based regulatory tools aiming at managing these risks. The panel considers that regulatory tools are both technical and social devices, and that they convey a certain representation of the world and the problems deemed important to deal with. It builds on STS scholarship on expertise, and aims to extend it, in particular by examining the relationships between the making of expert advice and the construction of markets. Far from being mere instruments of constraint, regulatory tools may constitute a resource for industries to compete against each other and shape new markets. Thus, the panel seeks to highlight the struggles that health and environmental regulations generate within industries, and how industries participate in their construction and use. The panel is especially interested in two sets of analytical questions:
1 What is the career of regulatory instruments, the logic of their development, their links with certain scientific and regulatory communities, their use and circulation in different national and transnational spaces?
2 What is the role economic actors in the construction of regulatory instruments? How do they use them? What are the effects of these instruments in terms of market transformation and innovation?
Carlos Cuevas Garcia, Technical University of Munich
Meiken Hansen, Technical University of Denmark
Kyriaki Papageorgiou, ESADE Business & Law School
Cian O’Donovan, University College London
Gunter Bombaerts, Eindhoven University of Technology
Initiatives to stimulate innovation through co-creation among diverse actors are proliferating, spearheaded by a wave of new participatory policy instruments such as public procurement of innovation, co-creation facilities, or living labs, among others. Proponents argue that these instruments can include diverse knowledges and help steer innovation in socially beneficial directions. However, STS research has shown that participatory instruments do not merely engage, but performatively create publics, raising questions about representativeness, legitimacy, and power. Moreover, the mainstreaming of co-creation instruments in an increasingly standardized, ready-to-deploy fashion runs counter to the foundational premise of co-creation – i.e. that the goals, practices, and outcomes of innovation are highly situated and cannot be standardized across cultural, organizational, and regulatory contexts.
This panel aims to wrestle with the politics and practices of this new wave of mainstreamed co-creation instruments in innovation. We invite theoretical and empirical contributions on:
Winifred Poster, Washington University, St. Louis
Julia Ticona, Data & Society
Scams are a pervasive feature of online experiences: phone calls from fake IRS agents, fraudulent emails asking for advance fee payment, bogus postings on marketplaces for jobs, etc. Often scamming involves an identity component, as scammers manipulate their personas through digital tools of spoofing, identity theft, etc. Fraudsters pose as employers on Care.com, seeking payments from nannies, cleaners, and other workers (Ticona, Mateescu, and Rosenblat 2018). Scams are taking place transnationally, through Indian call centers, Jamaican cottage industries for lottery prizes, and Nigerian 419 email writers. Scams may be read in multiple ways – as criminality and exploitation, but also as survival and coping within broader systems of inequality (Burrell 2008).
Building off of STS discussions of underground and illicit forms of digital agency, this session explores what scams illuminate about the online economy. We seek papers that inform questions like: How should we theorize scams in digital economies? What settings, resources, and technologies shape the contours of scams? How do participants create and adopt false personas? How do digital scams challenge our understandings of targets and scammers? What are the lines of continuity and change between older forms of fraud and newer ones? How are online actors responding to scammers, for instance, in vigilante scambaiting (Nakamura 2014)? How are systems of nation, race, gender, sexuality, and class intertwined with these dynamics? How do transnational scamming practices affect relations between countries? What are the institutional practices that support and limit online scamming, from states, legal systems, platforms, etc.?
Olivier Pilmis, CNRS – Centre de Sociologie des Organisations
Valerie Arnhold, Sciences Po
This open panel aims at jointly discussing recent advances from both economic sociology and STS regarding anticipation through scenario-planning and its confrontation to unforeseen events. Several policy areas, such as finance or environmental and health risks rely on scenarios to act on potentially disastrous consequences of socio-technical systems. Breakdown scenarios reduce uncertainty around potential outcomes of economic and governmental activities that are considered unacceptable and come at high political costs. What happens if such worst-case scenarios actually occur?
A first line of inquiry deals with decision making in the present according to possible future breakdown. Cases such as the 2008 Great Recession or the 2011 Fukushima accident show that although experts, scientists and practitioners work on worst-case scenarios, their real occurrence is often considered highly improbable or even excluded. How can we understand the elaboration and imagination of worst-case scenarios in face of promises of safe and stable futures? How do their advocates attempt to render their threat credible and shape action?
A second interrogation concerns the consequences of real-world breakdowns on anticipation devices. Rather than being considered as failures or generating far-reaching innovation, crises often do not profoundly question their use. For instance, the European stress-tests in both the financial and nuclear crises transformed real-world events into a reality test for scenario-planning and led to complement and improve scenarios. Their adjustment based on the integration of unexpected events in turn contributes to restoring confidence and regenerating promises of government and economic activities in the face of crises.
Empirical contributions in the following areas of research in STS or economic sociology are particularly welcome (although contributions exploring other related questions will be considered): national and international politics, finance and economy, as well as health, food and agriculture, environment, transport, and (digital) technologies.
Amelia Acker, The University of Texas at Austin
Andrew Iliadis, Temple University
Since Google declared, in a 2012 blog post, that they would begin focusing on things, not strings there has been increasing talk in the media about the value of semantically enhancing data for reuse and sharing. As vast amounts of unstructured data grow thanks to the resources of media technology companies and governments, there is a push to structure those data to produce semantic interoperability and thus improve understanding. Various information infrastructures like metadata schemas, knowledge graphs, and applied ontologies are experiencing a resurgence as the limitations of statistical algorithms and relational databases become clearer and researchers argue for training data that must be made understandable and structured in such a way as to provide value. Yet, along with increasing our ability to make sense of heterogeneous data through semanticization, there are identifiable problems related to data interoperability that may negatively impact people, practices, and places. This panel will explore the idea of schemas, graphs, and ontologies through their use by media technology companies and scientific researchers by asking if these methods are appropriate for modeling all kinds of knowledge, how such modeling affects access and control, what risks of misrepresentation and error exit, and what potential there is of transforming or appropriating knowledge. This panel seeks empirically grounded papers or novel theoretical approaches to understanding how semantically constraining technologies are operationalized in practices across domains, including scientific, governmental, and business contexts. Papers that focus on single case studies, introduce new methods, or propose ethical and policy frameworks are encouraged.
Anthony Nairn, University of Toronto
The dialogue between science and religion, in the popular mind, is one of incompatibility and conflict. While much of the scholarship in this field has moved past the conflict thesis, tensions remain in the wider context of society. The social studies of science has much to offer the field of science and religion, especially in today’s populist political environment, by offering a broader understanding of how these two foundational pillars of society interact via social methodologies that may reveal what history and philosophy cannot. The aim of this session is to understand from a multidisciplinary position how the global societies of the present and past have interacted with, and mediated, their relationship between science and religion, and what this means for our future. Much of the discourse in the field of science and religion comes from theologians and scientists of faith, while more conventional approaches have come primarily from history and philosophy. My aim with this session is to draw out those scholars in the social science and humanities who are engaged in the field of science and religion, but feel that they do not have an outlet from which to openly discuss their work and findings. In doing so, my hope is that this would bring forth a greater emphasis on the social conditions that permeates the dialogue between science and religion. I would like to bring together scholars with diverse backgrounds and interests who will contribute to demonstrating the value of STS approaches to the field of science and religion.
Noriko Hara, Indiana University
Sarah Davies, University of Copenhagen
Public communication of science is a key mechanism by which scientific knowledge is mediated, negotiated, and transformed. Over the past decades, STS research has outlined the ways in which science and society are coproduced through communication activities, catalysed a shift towards dialogue and engagement in science communication practice, and itself been opened up to public audiences through experimental forms of making and doing.
This open stream invites paper proposals that analyse or reflect upon public science communication. We understand this broadly, as organized, explicit, and intended actions that aim to communicate scientific knowledge, methodology, processes, or practices in settings where non-scientists are a recognized part of the audiences (Horst et al 2016, 883). Science communication therefore includes, for instance, science in museums, science fairs, events, and festivals, popular science writing, science blogging, sciart activities, university and lab open days, news media, digital and social media, and science comedy. We invite critical analysis of these activities. For example, papers might offer reflections on the role science communication plays in the democratisation of science, analyses of the constitution of publics and knowledges within particular science communication activities, discussion of the affective regimes of science in public, or accounts of experimental practice. In particular, any analysis that showcases how science communication is innovated, interrupted, and regenerated is welcomed. The panel will thus use the methodologies and concerns of STS to reflect upon the problems, potential and practice of contemporary science communication.
Matthew Weinstein, Univ. Of Washington-Tacoma
Larry Bencze, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
This panel explores the intersections of one critical site of science/technology regeneration, schools, and the way they are being shaped, impacted, and creatively responding to the rise of Right Wing Populist (RWP) politics. From Brazil, to Poland, to the USA, right wing parties and figures have come to power oppose seemingly settled scientific truths of global warming, evolution, and even air quality (and a variety of other environmental) standards. These same actants (leaders/parties) also have made neo-nationalism, racism, and rebuttressing of patriarchal relations the center of their political visions, in ways resonant with fascism. They have also portrayed themselves as ‘saviors’ for large fractions of populations who have struggled economically and/or are concerned about movements of people of different races and cultures across borders—often blaming many such problems on elites, whom they claim have adversely affected governments. How has science education broadly construed responded (at whatever level, from policy to classroom practice) to these emergent, reactionary forces (Robin, 2011)? How do these proto/quasi/neo fascist/reactionary governmentalities shape the meaning of science education writ broad? How do these reactionary actors engage in their own public pedagogies (Giroux, 2003) of science and technology? And how do educators innovate their own resistances to what are often direct attacks on their subject matter and their profession? We invite STS scholars to join us in exploring these questions of how various and emergent politics of reaction shape, contest, re-enact, appropriate and are resisted by those who reproduce through teaching scientific labor and understanding.
Laura Meek, University of California, Davis
Julia Morales Fontanilla, University of California, Davis
Does it matter from where we do and think science? How might the conditions of our em/placement inform what we mean by science? How does where we do and think affect how and what we do and think? We welcome submissions that engage with minority and/or non-western STS practices and their specificity of place. We aim to make place affective and disruptive in our thinking (Stewart 2017). Topics might include questions of scientific legitimacy and legibility; speculative onto-epistemic openings that make us think with other beings, entities, and forces which may not be legible as science in all places; or improvisations and innovations for doing science and/or STS under conditions of scarcity, uncertainty, or precarity. In these questions, the stakes are both (cosmo)political and scholarly: they demand a rethinking of not only what we do and think, but how we do and think, and with whom/what (de la Cadena 2017). We recognize that our knowledge practices are inseparable from their entanglement with states, post/colonial histories, political-economic conditions, and the ways these cohere in bodies, including our bodies as STS scholars. We seek papers that are troubled by that which exceeds science and yet resides at its limit, and that play with other forms of speculative thinking (Haraway 2016, McLean 2017, Perez Bustos 2015, Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, Stengers 2003). This panel engages themes of the 4S 2019 NOLA conference by asking how science and STS from elsewhere interrupt both science-as-usual and STS-as-usual.
Emmanuel Ejim-Eze, Institute of Engineering, technology and innovation Management
No Africa country met the recent past MDGs. Development is path dependent; Africa has lagged behind. Should African countries be allowed to carry over failures of MDGs to current SDGs? There are ranges of interactions among SDGs. The nature, strengths and potential impact of these interactions are largely context-specific, and depend on policy options and strategies chosen to pursue SDGs. Since SDGs are linked, achieving one goal could enhance opportunities and capability to meet others. The achievement of the SDGs will need scientific approach. The United Nations Secretary-General has asked the global scientific community to put in place the scientific basis for evidence-based implementation of SDGs. Science, technology and innovation are critical means for the implementation of the SDGs. The global community is obliged to integrate STI into SDGs agenda by emphasising its significant roles in poverty eradication and for sustainable development. Comparison of national STI policies will help elicit challenges and serve as benchmark. African governments have continued to invest poorly in STI. The per cent of GDP invested on R&D in African has remained below 1% despite recommendations. STI policies look quite similar and not country specific with the exception of South Africa. Why have Africa dwelled on sectoral policies rather than adopt mix approaches to drive innovation across sectors? They pick the winners and losers. Focus will be on how STI policies can help in achievement of the SDGs in Africa. What are the roles of scientists and/or STI indicators on implementation and monitoring of SDGs?
Juan Salazar, Western Sydney University
Paola A Castano, Cardiff University School of Social Sciences
Outer space is a domain of human experience and knowledge production that is constantly transforming how we understand life on Earth. New institutions, industries and technologies are currently changing the way Low Earth Orbit, the Moon and Mars are imagined, reached and used for scientific, economic and national interest purposes. This panel invites contributions that use STS and related approaches to investigate the complex dimensions of emerging understandings of outer space and of space on Earth. Embracing a space-inclusive STS, we invite contributions in the form of empirical studies, theoretical considerations, questions of method, artistic interventions, and experimental work that examine how outer space: is co-produced as an object of knowledge within intersecting socio-technical imaginaries; is a site for problematizing and speculating about future modes of existence on this planet; and is a platform to theorize co-emerging socio-natures from terrestrial analogue sites to planetary environments beyond Earth. The panel welcomes a range of perspectives that elucidate how STS can interrupt entrenched ideas about outer space: critical accounts on ideas, practices and infrastructures of outer space; analyses of the ways in which venture capitalism mobilizes understandings of space exploration and reshapes space as an expanded environment that can be calculated and valued; ethnographies that illuminate what a cosmopolitics of outer space might look like by paying attention to how things, organisms, devices, discourses, practices provide a sense of what’s knowable about outer space; or creative works and art-science collaborations that engage diverse audiences with space activities.
Mary McDonald, Georgia Institute of Technology
Jennifer Sterling, University of Iowa
While sport studies scholars have established sport as a key site of cultural meanings and social relations, fewer scholars have engaged these issues within technology and science studies frameworks. This panel invites papers broadly concerned with social and cultural inquiry into the intersection of science, technology, and sport. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: sport technologies and technologies of the active body; issues related to medicine, risk and sport; performance enhancement and bioethics; (dis)ability, gender, race, class, and sexuality, technology and sport; sporting labs and scientific practices; representations of science and sport; sport analytics, data visualization, and the quantified self; professional gaming and eSports; and, infrastructure, sustainability, and sport.
Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, George Mason University
Kathleen Vogel, Prof.
Science and technology remain central to contemporary national and international security. New scientific and technological developments and innovations, such as drones, 3-D printing, AI, genome editing, and self-tracking devices are creating new public and governmental concerns about security. There also remain on-going international concerns about the threat posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and related delivery systems. We seek papers that: describe the processes of knowledge making that are important in constructing and analyzing potential security threats and the broader implications of security mechanisms (such as regimes, frameworks, technologies, practices, and materialities); and that help to feed critical discussions about the way science and technology governance around security issues is designed, developed, implemented, and diffused in different contexts.
This panel seeks to bring together transnational STS scholars interested in the following questions: What are the various security narratives, discourses, institutions, and actors that surround these technologies? How can we understand the knowledge production behind these technologies and how they may (or may not) pose new kinds of security threats. How is this knowledge shaped by particular social, economic, and political contexts? How is information about security issues ignored, marginalized, or obscured? How do STS-informed scholars participate in expert and private deliberations about the risks and benefits of these technologies? We welcome papers that undertake topics historically, as well as in contemporary times, and call for projects that use a variety of methodically and theoretic approaches.
Sabrina Peric, University of Calgary
Emily Boak, University of Calgary
Visual representations of scientific objects have long gained their meaning from societal contextualizations (Woolgar and Lynch 1990). Over the past 20 years, new technologies of visualization have reshaped scientific and public knowledge of the world around us (Coopmans, Vertesi et al 2014). Nanoparticle tracking analysis, climate modelling, remote sensing, functional MRIs and new 3D imaging, for example, often work by rendering visible what was previously invisible, by manipulating spatial and temporal scales. This panel will critically examine the politics of new visualizations, which are increasingly designed to convey specific narratives.
Regardless of the type, visualizations are anchored in the notion that seeing bestowsan accent of truth (Amann and Knorr-Cetina 1988, 134). New collaborative and crowdsourced visualizations further emphasize claims to authority. And while visualization processes are often obscured by the final object that is publically circulated, visualizations are always an act of interpretation. The technological process of rendering objects visible brings together multiple parties: implicating author, illustrator, production, and reader (Daston and Gallison 2007, 18).
New technologies of visualization have innovated the way that we interact with objects, but also how objects are produced/produce themselves. STS has also engaged with how visualizations can create broader societal and political innovations – whether in terms of governance, political engagement, science education, citizen science, participatory mapping etc. This panel hopes to engage this porous border between visualization, technology, and STS. We highly encourage submissions that diverge from the conference paper format, whether through video, audio, artistic or other formats.
Thomas De Pree, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Settler colonialism has been recognized as a persistent kind of logic, discourse, and practice through which foreign settlers displace and dispossess Indigenous peoples. A key task for the scholarship of settler colonialism is dispelling settler origin stories and founding myths by attending to what Audra Simpson calls scenes of apprehension (2014:70). This work focuses on the fabrication of fantastic ideas and images that reify structures of categorical and spatial incarceration of Indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism can be thought of as a peculiar epistemological style that emerges from the exploitation of Indigenous knowledge, and the application of such knowledge in order to exploit Indigenous lands and labor, in a process where those impacted most are made responsible for the disaster and poverty wrought by outside developers (West 2012). This panel considers possibilities of studying up in order to critically analyze innovations in settler techniques and technologies of displacement and dispossession. How can the scholarship of science and technology studies (STS) nuance studies of settler colonialism? This panel welcomes papers that address technopolitical regimes (Hecht 2009) and anthropological interventions in emerging sciences and technologies (Downey and Dumit 1997). The panel will contribute to STS by opening our purview to broader forms of epistemological pluralism (Keller 2002) and attempting to traverse discursive gaps (Fortun 2012). We encourage contributions to what Gary Downey calls scalable scholarship (2009)—careful consideration of the possibility of scaling up forms of knowledge that have been marginalized and minoritized by the dominant epistemological paradigm.
Doris Lydahl, University of Gothenburg
Science and technology studies have recurrently discussed questions of norms and normativity. Following the innovative rationale of an empirical ethics (Pols 2015) this panel take as its entrance point empirical work to discuss questions of ethics and norms in knowledge making and communities of practice. This means focusing on the doings in practice, scrutinizing the various notions of good that may exist within the same practice. The panel welcomes contributions analyzing for example conflicts of different notions of what is good within the same practice, or comparisons between similar modes of doing good in different practices. The panel is also interested in what Puig de La Bellacasa has called situated ethics. Attending to permaculture ethics as situated ethics she contends that The actualization of principles of caring are always created in an interrelated doing with the needs of a place, a land, a neighborhood, a city, even when a particular action is considered with regards to its extended global connections (Puig De La Bellacasa 2017: 150). In situated ethics it is therefore not the principles governing the action but rather the action makes them relevant or not (Hennion et al 2017: 742). The panel asks what is considered good for example in new forms of organizing healthcare and in scientific knowledge making practices such as the lab. (How) are these goods in conflict? What principles of doing good are made relevant?
Tania Pérez-Bustos, National University of Colombia
Sandra Gonzalez-Santos, Independent Researcher
To affirm that methods are practices that build realities is nowadays a phrase that any STS scholar would agree with. However, we should not take this statement for granted. Therefore, we invite panelist to reflect on how our research contexts are affecting the methodologies we use. For example, how do realities which have been crosscut by colonial legacies, configure responsible base methodologies? How can we incorporate a postcolonial and decolonial feminist perspective to the design of our research project? If we consider that knowledge is situated, then the methods used to create this knowledge should be situated as well. But what does situating methods mean? How do we situate methods? Why do we need to do this and how can we do it without falling into relativity traps? We invite panelists who wish to share their experiences and reflexions on the different methods they have used (arts-based methods, participatory methods, experimental methods, etc.) to an open discussion on the situatedness and enmeshedness of the practices we use to explore social problems, on how methodologies are susceptible of being coopted in contexts of alternative facts, the uprise of new Sokal controversies, and on the will and need to invent decolonial research practices.
Sean Ferguson, Engineering and Society, University of Virginia
Sharon Ku, University of Virginia
Caitlin Wylie, University of Virginia
Smartness is becoming a new characteristic of urban living. Integration of sensing technologies, cloud data services and Internet of Things (IoT) turns mundane infrastructures into smart information networks, in which local information can be remotely collected and processed. These digital platforms have been promoted as the standard building blocks of future urban planning by powerful public sectors such as China Central Government, or by multinational private sectors like IBM’s Smarter Cities® to strategic partnership with city governments worldwide. However, the national- municipal-corporate discourse assumes many unverified claims such as economic growth, citizen engagement, sustainability and operational efficiency. It further raises important ontological, epistemic and political challenges regarding the roles and relationships of citizens, communities, cities, nations, and corporations in framing and constructing smartness.
This panel investigates smart infrastructure as a critical discursive/operational space, to unfold the tangled relational encounters among local communities, state/national government, multinational corporations and transnational institutions. We invite papers that offer theoretical, methodological or empirical considerations to address the multi-sited, multi-faceted qualities, socio-economic alliance and geopolitics of smart infrastructure design, maintenance and operation in local and global contexts. Issues include (but not limited to):
William Morgan, UC Berkeley
In October of 2017, Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, released its proposal for smart city development in Quayside, Toronto’s East Bayfront neighborhood. Sidewalk Toronto is envisioned as the frontier of a new type of total connectivity, a testing site for the next generation of urban digital technologies. In particular, Sidewalk Labs is interested in technologies that attempt to facilitate climate positive living. At the same time in Inner Mongolia, at the Bayan Obo mining district, lakes are still filling with toxic waste. This is waste that is created by the rare earth element mining, which is necessitated by the functioning of ubiquitous technological devices and spurred on by the imagination of places like Sidewalk Toronto in Quayside. To what extent do seemingly innovative green technologies like those planned for Sidewalk Toronto contribute to wastefulness or hide wastefulness from view, displacing that waste into sites like Bayan Obo dispersed around the globe? This panel investigates relationships like these, between technological innovations and the material sources that make them possible. Papers are invited that concern the location, treatment and relation of waste and innovative technology in the digital age. Especially encouraged are papers that consider waste globalization or global waste management in relation to climate positivity and green technology. Historical, philosophical and post-colonial perspectives are welcomed, as well as less traditional formats such as science fiction, performance art, poetry and other mutations.
Richard Fadok, MIT
What is design? In 1969, the organizational theorist Herbert Simon demarcated the natural sciences from design, or what he called the sciences of the artificial—a capacious concept that encompassed engineering, management, and urban planning, among others—on the basis of the latter’s capacity to realize contingent human-made futures. His vision for a unified approach to design, presented in The Sciences of the Artificial, inspired and catalyzed the rise of design science and design methods, and while Simon neither invented design nor went without resistance from subsequent theorists like Christopher Alexander and Nigel Cross, his work nevertheless remains an important touchstone for the disciplines, techniques, and meanings of design, a term, which, as Bruno Latour (2008) and Keith Murphy (2015) have recognized, has come to signify so much more than Simon had originally intended. Indeed, within science and technology studies, design may refer specifically to institutionalized communities of design practice, such as industrial design or user experience design, more generally to the allied fields of engineering and architecture, and most expansively as a synonym for any process of making, tinkering, or innovating, or product thereof, including, most notably, experimental design. On the 50th anniversary of Simon’s genre-defining text, this panel seeks to interrupt and interrogate the received obviousness of design, within both the social worlds of our research subjects and our own analytic conventions as scholars. What is design? What does design mean? Echoing Lucy Suchman’s (2008) call to investigate the cultural imaginaries and micropolitics that delineate design’s promises and practices, it invites papers from a range of theoretical, methodological, and topical perspectives that critically reflect on the grammar and pragmatics of design, which include but are not limited to the following:
Naomi Schoenfeld, UCSF
This panel explores the relations between socialism, science fiction and science. The relationship between science fiction and socialism can be considered from multiple perspectives: 1) as a relation to futurity; 2) as social critique; 3) as an otherwise, either utopian or dystopian. As world-making endeavors, socialism and science fiction generated their vision through the language of science. The promise of socialism as an ideal type was arguably itself a form of speculative fiction. We propose following this relationship further. We welcome scholars interested in exploring the imprint of (post)socialism and science fiction on science practice. In particular, we invite contributions exploring the bidirectional relationship between socialist-influenced science fiction and scientific praxis. From Cold War science agendas to utopian visionary science, the speculative and fictive worlds engaged or generated within socialism did so in multiple and contested ways. Socialism was and is a future-oriented projection the realization of which is always already a foreclosed possibility. From Aldous Huxley to China Mievillle, Star Trek to The Matrix, science fiction’s social critique is often positioned either implicitly or explicitly relative to the socialist project. How does socialist science fiction reflect, inspire, redirect or generate science praxis in socialist, post-socialist or non-socialist contexts?
Urvashi Aneja, Tandem Research
Vikrom Mathur, Tandem Research
In recent years, numerous books, articles, and conferences discuss the likely impacts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution or 4IR for the ‘Future of Work’. Most accounts locate 4IR within a linear trajectory, from the first to the fourth industrial revolution, following a logic that is technologically deterministic: i.e. in such accounts, technological advancement is both inevitable and progressive, and the role of societal institutions is primarily to adapt. These visions of future developments in technology inevitably bring with them wider visions of social futures, risks, and benefits, and need to be understood as ‘socio-technical imaginaries’.
The imaginaries of 4IR will continue to shape future trajectories in the world of work – from the type of technological innovation to ways of technological production and governance. There is limited research that unpacks the ideologies, interests, and broader visions of social futures that 4IR encompasses. 4IR imaginaries will also be translated, re-cast, and gain meaning differently across national contexts.
This panels call for papers that deconstruct the constituent features, components, ideas, and controversies of 4IR as a global imaginary, and who or what are the actors, formal and informal institutions, networks, values, and cultures shaping contemporary imaginaries around 4IR. We will examine how 4IR is likely to be re-cast across national contexts and reconfigured by local ideas and interests and socio-technical processes.
Ipshita Ghosh, Syracuse University
Kadija Ferryman, Data & Society
Mikaela Pitcan, Fordham University
From mobile health applications used at home and on the go, to the increasing use of predictive analytics in biomedicine, innovations in digital health technology offer myriad ways to document, predict, and manage health risk. Simultaneously, digital health start-ups such as Fitbit are built on profit-making models even as they attempt to redefine practices of care. These changes are occurring in a landscape where access to affordable healthcare is a dominant political question and the idea of right to healthcare as a public good has come center stage. This panel will analyze the social and ethical implications of digital health given the intersection of speculative logic and entrepreneurial capitalism. Firstly, it will examine the ways these technologies use speculative logics to not only manage risk, but create new categories of risk and reshape our existing conceptions of the landscape of health risk. Secondly, as several economies struggle with providing affordable public healthcare, this panel examines how digital health embeds itself in the ethic of neoliberal self-governance as individuals are encouraged to track bodily measures, observe changes and manage themselves. Lastly, this panel will discuss the emergence of new actors in healthcare and how that can be understood within the context of both neoliberal capitalism and discourses of health as a public good. Papers can examine the creation of entrepreneurial actors within digital health, the ways in which these developments create categories of health risk and shape who is responsible for mitigating that risk. Papers should be grounded in theory that accounts for neoliberal shaping of healthcare practices and how the ethos or both spoken and unspoken priorities (e.g., profit, efficiency, etc.) underlying these developments impacts the idea of healthcare as a public good.
Alex Rewegan, MIT
Gabrielle Robbins, MIT HASTS
Spitballing is the act of dishing out inchoate ideas that can work against a norm; spitballing is also the youthful middle-school act of pelting one’s adversaries with tissue balls of spit. This panel offers a rambunctious space for graduate students at any level who are working to develop disruptive theoretical and methodological pathways that epistemically refuse classical STS and its popular canons. We seek both papers and non-conventional presentations which explore unruly forms of STS, offering ways and means of doing and knowing beyond the North Atlantic academy and its norms. These might include pieces on science, technology, and innovation from the global South; Indigenous futures; settler colonialism; challenges to the white, colonial, able-bodied, and heteronormative spaces of the academy; place-based, action-oriented, applied, interdisciplinary, and responsive forms of STS; theories and methods that privilege love, care, rage, and refusal; non- or speculative- fictions; and alternative/experimental pedagogy. This is a whimsical, mischievous, yet serious panel for the open and collaborative sharing of millennial tactics in STS: strategies and practices for doing STS otherwise by challenging the generations before us and by advancing new modes of taking contemporary local and global challenges seriously. Depending on the range and breadth of submissions, we propose to expand the Spitballing series across multiple panels, grouped thematically. Ultimately, we seek to make space for troublemaking that (re)generates approaches to millennial STS.
Maja Horst, University of Copenhagen
Julie Sommerlund, University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Humanities
Lise Tjørring, University of Copenhagen
Mikka Nielsen, University of Copenhagen
Martina Mahnke, University of Copenhagen
Internationally, the need for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) disciplines when combining research and innovation is well acknowledged. In EU s H2020 programme Social Sciences and Humanities is described as a cross-cutting facilitator essential to maximise the returns to society from investment in innovation, science and technology. Developing strong capacities in university-business collaboration within the SSH area are thus considered crucial to innovation. This panel focuses on the specificities of coproduction and collaboration between industry and SSH research.
Although the need for SSH disciplines to contribute to industry innovation is well-known, there is no national or international state-of-the-art in the field of co-creative, two-way knowledge exchange that is not technological, and there is a growing awareness of the need to improve the business-relevance of SSH research, and that such an endeavor needs creative and critical thinking compared to the traditional formats of technology transfer.
STS researchers have been at the forefront in studying coproduction and shared knowledge production within fields such as technological, digital and medical innovation. This panel builds on this foundation, and invites papers that integrate SSH disciplines into analyses of the university-industry relations. We welcome papers that present empirical analyses of how SSH-researchers have collaborated with industry; methodological takes on analyzing coproduction and collaboration between SSH and industry; and papers theorizing the complex relations at play in coproduction processes between SSH and industry.
Jannick Schou, IT University of Copenhagen
Baki Cakici, IT University of Copenhagen
Counting practices have formed the foundations for state power for centuries: tax surveys, censuses, population registers, and personal identification numbers are just some of the ways in which states have counted and numbered people in and beyond their territories. These technologies rely on certain methods and assumptions, such as conceptualising personhood as divisible, that is, as simultaneously a discrete entity (the citizen) and as part of a larger aggregated whole (the population). Far from being universal ideas, however, counting bodies as discrete entities presupposes a notion of personhood and subjectivity that is deeply tied to particular historical and geographical contexts.
We are interested in interrogating state numerology by attending to issues of personhood, countability, and ontology. How are numbers used to build wholes from parts, or infer parts from wholes in diverse settings and contexts? What assumptions do governmental counting techniques rely on to identify individuals and aggregate populations? And through what conceptual vocabularies can we attend to issues of ontology and counting? The panel focuses on the production, circulation and deployment of specific numbering practices, as well as the underlying forms of personhood that makes them possible.
We welcome papers that present ethnographic engagements, theoretical contributions, as well as investigations combining a range of experimental methods. We envision a panel that addresses both historical and contemporary counting practices and technologies. We are especially interested in conceptual work on state numbers and numbering; whether by reinterpreting concepts familiar to STS or by creatively appropriating concepts from other disciplines.
Laura Foster
Toluwalogo Odumosu, University of Virginia
This panel is an opportunity to deepen the scholarly conversation about STS in and of Africa. We hope to build on the conversations begun last year in Sydney around the question – What are the boundaries of Science and Technology in Africa and how should we recognize and address both the uniqueness of African knowledge production and innovation on the one hand, and the potential that STS work in Africa has to offer to the field as a whole on the other?(www.stsafrica2018.com)
Taking seriously the theme for this year’s meeting, we seek submissions that wrestle with historical and contemporary cases of African science and technology and, associated innovations. What are the social, political, economic and historical interruptions that we must be attentive to in our study of science and technology in Africa? As the continent undergoes an uneven economic regeneration, what are the challenges and problematics of modernity, democracy and civic governance in relation to science and technology from and of Africa?
We are interested in submissions that relate to one of the core areas of inquiry, i.e., Information and Communication Technologies, Biomedicine, the Environment and Critical Infrastructure Studies.
Jens Hälterlein, University of Freiburg
Thomas Linder, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
Nikolaus Pöchhacker, MCTS, Technical University of Munich
Simon Egbert, Universität Hamburg
Fieke Jansen, Cardiff University
Recent innovations in technologies and processes of data analysis and computational science – mainly in reference to terms (and myths) like big data, algorithmic decision making and artificial intelligence – have transformed many processes of knowledge production in the fields of policing and criminal justice. With predictive policing as one of its earliest and most prominent representatives (Perry et al. 2013; Bennett Moses & Chan, 2018), the algorithmic mediated production of (prospective) knowledge has now also affected the criminal justice system at every level. Different predictive models include generating risky spaces – PredPol (Mohler et al., 2015); risky individuals – Chicago’s ‘strategic subject list’ (Saunders/Hunt/Hollywood, 2016) and US’ Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System; or calculating the recidivism risk of convicted offenders in order to inform the sentence decision (predictive prosecution) (Ferguson, 2016). This development has gone hand-in-hand with a rapid technological expansion from the frontline to the back office. Thus, regardless of whether suspects or spaces are objects of (predictive) knowledge production, or if recidivism risk scores for convicted offenders are generated, in the end, policing and justice are increasingly characterized by socio-technical interwovenness with digital data production and algorithmic technologies. This calls for a thorough STS analysis to get at the innovations, interruptions, regenerations, successes and failures herein involved in the co-construction of policing practices and technological development. Correspondingly, this panel seeks to ask how STS can provide analytical tools for grasping the entanglement of technology and society involved in the development and implementation of computational knowledge production in policing and criminal justice.
Kim Fortun, University of California Irvine
Jorge Nunez, Kaleidos – Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography
This open panel will bring together researchers focused on the intersection between STS and Security Studies. We hope to receive proposals that explore modes of expertise, prison/police/military infrastructures, and security-related practices in different regions and at various scales. Relevant topics include but are not limited to: the carceral state and detention centers; the criminalization of migration and race; land, aerial and maritime policing; militarized geopolitical interventions; environmental insecurity; chemical security and warfare; illegal entrepreneurialism and crime economies; environmental justice and green criminology; cyber security and security expertise; technosecurity and innovation; financial crime and money laundering; police and military intelligence; transit security and emergency policing; police architecture and securitized urban designs; military engineering and the defense industrial complex; the animalization of military and police strategies; military/police – animal relationships and histories; national security and global/regional security cooperation; and citizen security and law enforcement. Through this panel we’d like to build an intellectual community with shared concerns and with transnational and comparative interests. In the spirit of the 2019 4S conference, the panel seeks to interrogate how STS may be both a source and a site for innovation, interruptions, and regenerations within the field of security studies and by way of doing so attempts to bring security studies into greater prominence in STS. We are interested in ways science and technology is used in security interventions and policy on the one hand, and how security agencies are generating scientific and technological developments on the other.
Sharon Traweek, UCLA
Knut H Sørensen, NTNU, Dept. Of Interdisciplinary Studies Of Culture
Universities now occupy a strategic place in the so-called knowledge society or information-based political economy, supplying a rapidly growing demand for new kinds of expertise in nearly all areas of modern life, especially in wealthy countries. At the same time, universities are under considerable pressure to adapt to global ideas and practices about neo-liberalism and new public management, along with the quest for ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’ with respect to teaching, research, and outreach. Consequently, universities increasingly are expected to make themselves accountable and auditable by producing quantitative information on certain activities that enable the formation of metrics, rankings, and other new forms of control, including the management of branding, incomes, and outcomes. What is counted then counts, defining new criteria for evaluating admission, hiring, advancement, worthy subjects of inquiry, and modes of circulating knowledge. STS has considerable potential to study universities as political economic actors, institutions, enterprises, and places of work, study, and the making of knowledge. We invite contributions that address how universities have engaged with these changing political economies of research and higher education. Papers that address how these demands are reshaping the interrelationship between research and teaching, departmental cultures, academic life, and ethnicity, gender/sexuality, class, disability, and migration issues in universities are also welcome.
Emily York, James Madison University
Shannon Conley, James Madison University
Marisa Brandt, Michigan State University
One way of conceptualizing STS engagement is in terms of ‘experiments in participation,’or projects that ‘formulate, enact, and reflexively learn from novel, STS-inspired practices
within their fields of study’ (Downey and Zuiderent-Jerak 2017, p. 239.) Sites of undergraduate teaching and learning provide opportunities for critical participation in STS. Whether helping STS students to understand the discipline sufficiently to further their their education or career path, or STEM students to critically reflect on their assumptions about technological progress, or social science and humanities students to interrogate information, media, and knowledge production, STS has to be made fun, engaging, and accessible if it is to really work as critical pedagogy.
In this open panel, we seek contributions that demonstrate and reflect on STS in the undergraduate educational experience. We invite STS educators to share their own experiments in undergraduate education, and reflections on what it means to engage undergraduates in STS in meaningful ways. In addition to traditional talks, we invite playfully novel forms of interactive presentation, such as teaching demos (worksheets, activities, etc.), interdisciplinary learning experiments and research, and overviews of innovative course syllabi. We welcome collaborative presentations with students.
Contributions could:
Iris Bull, Indiana University – Bloomington
Jennifer Terrell, Indiana University
Writing and contributing research in the science and technology studies community can often look very different from institutional and informal practices that govern teaching this knowledge in modern universities. For our students, the jargon researchers play with can be as alien as an ‘STS perspective’ of reality itself. And yet, STS scholars are often well-situated to prepare students for difficult conversations about design bias, systematized inequalities, and moral values. Students need—and often want—to ask questions about algorithmic decision-making, artificial intelligence, and other complex sociotechnical systems. Scholars and professional industry stakeholders increasingly recognize that someone should hold technology companies ethically responsible for their products and services—sometimes calling for employees, consumers, and regulatory agencies to assume those duties. Funding institutions like the NSF also help legitimate the call for institutionalizing ethics by both granting funding for projects specifically oriented towards cultivating ethical cultures in STEM, and working to broaden participation in computing fields. This panel discussion intends to platform a conversation about teaching STS concepts and theory in undergraduate courses, with a particular emphasis on pedagogy related to sociotechnical or computer ethics. Given the interdisciplinary genealogy of science and technology studies, how do you and your colleagues approach the teaching of STS in a formal curriculum? Have you or your colleagues developed informal codes, frameworks, words and phrases in your department to help undergraduates engage with STS literature in novel ways? What are some of the unique challenges you face given the department your courses are listed in? Postmortems and reflections on experimental courses are particularly encouraged. More generally, we also welcome papers that seek to address how STS perspectives shape ethics practices within STEM industries.
Beza Merid, Department of Communication Studies, University of Michigan
For millions of people in the United States, access to comprehensive health insurance is limited by factors that include the high cost of care and policy-based exclusions of coverage. Given how situated these concerns can be within lived illness experiences, this panel seeks to explore the innovations, interruptions, and regenerations patients and caregivers employ to negotiate these inequities.
Patients and caregivers often find innovative ways to interrupt entrenched practices that shape access to health insurance. They may engage in health activism that unites disease constituencies across the diagnostic spectrum, or share intimate illness narratives on social media sites and in online patient communities. They do so to generate alternative possibilities that promote equitable access to health insurance as a cultural ideal and an attainable health policy. For STS scholars, analyzing these phenomena involves an examination of how patients and caregivers break expertise barriers, how they understand the politics of knowledge production, and how they form networked publics that serve patients’ and caregivers’ health-related needs. Papers included in this panel might address, but are not limited to, the following questions: What media practices do these populations engage to interrupt and regenerate health insurance policy discourses? How do patients with pre-existing conditions or those who live in states that have not expanded Medicaid coverage organize to promote health equity? How do patients and caregivers negotiate concerns around health insurers’ expansive collection of personal health data?
Roopali Phadke, Macalester College
Abby Kinchy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Jessica Smith, Colorado School of Mines
The panel aims to bring together international scholars whose work addresses technologies, practices, and forms of knowledge related to the mining of minerals, groundwater and fossil fuels. Recent technological developments such as high-volume hydraulic fracturing to extract oil and gas from shale, solar technologies that require rare earth metals, and even the pursuit of minerals found in asteroids have all been of interest to STS scholars, but have not typically been treated as an identifiable domain of research. This panel will seek to highlight the theoretical and topical commonalities as well as disagreements and debates that make the study of the underground a vibrant, emerging subfield of STS. Researchers are encouraged to submit abstracts on a wide range of topics, including: research and development on extractive technologies, environmental health and grassroots activism, extraction and indigenous communities, climate change and the Anthropocene, historical perspectives on extractive industries, labor and workers’ rights, and mining and extraction infrastructures. Given the conference location in New Orleans, we also welcome papers that consider the underground through engagement with the petrochemical industry.
Vivian Lagesen, NTNU
Atsushi Akera, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Cyrus Mody, Maastricht University
Alice Clifton, Georgia Tech
Amy Bix, Iowa State University
Engineers and engineering practices are crucial in the development of technology, the development of innovative and sustainable solutions and their applications. Moreover, given the instrumental conception of engineering knowledge, engineering, perhaps unlike the hard sciences, is subject to more systematic efforts to adapt its knowledge systems to changing times and needs. Whether for reasons of national building, economic globalization, environmental sustainability, diversity and inclusion, or the professional aspirations of the engineers themselves, various initiatives in engineering and engineering education occur on a routine basis, across the globe, both in the past and present.
This open panel gives attention to the construction of engineering expertise and practices within engineering and engineering education. How do engineers engage with contemporary social and national issues? What are the diverse and innovative practices exercised and employed by engineers? Relatedly, what does it take to construct new STEM education programs designed to meet a perceived national deficiency or need? How does the global rhetoric surrounding innovation, disruption, and transformation come to express itself through new programs, curricula, and facilities investments in engineering education and practices? How have engineering educators addressed calls for extending diversity and inclusions, or professionalism and creativity within engineering education? To what extent and in what ways are professional interests expressed through these (proposed) transformations?
We also invite papers that weave in the 4S 2019 NOLA theme of innovation, interruption, and regeneration into the paper. This open panel proposal is sponsored by the International Network of Engineering Studies (INES).
Svetlana Borodina, Rice University
Charlie Lotterman, Rice University
This panel asks how trust and trustworthiness emerge from, and move through, bodies, and to what effect?
In the abstract ideal, technoscience distrusts subjectivity and raises practical and conceptual boundaries to keep it from corrupting the prospects for objective knowledge. However, this panel asks through what practices the coordinates of the body, the phenomenologies of researchers, and embodied histories are rendered as a corporeal reality. Trust is difficult to define. Nonetheless, given its centrality to the ways that scientific knowledge is produced and circulated, this panel asks how, exactly, trust and trustworthiness might be ethnographically conceptualized by attending to the ways that they are enacted. Moreover, as STS attends to the ways that knowledge produces social effects, this panel considers the ways that conceptions of trust give knowledge its grip on bodies. By attending to the role of trust within technoscientific practices that absorb elements that are generally viewed with suspicion – the body, the subjective, and the senses – this panel hopes to highlight the multiple and integral ways that trust figures into the production and circulation of knowledge.
We invite submissions of papers concerning the embodied processes and features of sensing trust, probing reliability, intuiting trustworthiness, and translating affects into prescriptions and acts of knowledge making, and more, through ethnographic work centering on:
Renee Shelby, Georgia Institute of Technology
Technologies serve as the handmaiden for racial dominations, yet also create opportunities to upend existing racial hierarchies. Racial formations are the social and historical processes by which racial categories are created, transformed, and destroyed, processes that implicate technologies in the material cutting of categories. Race constitutes a global social structure that has unique articulations within national contexts with respect to the ways in which human populations are conceptualized, racialized and subordinated on the basis of racial distinction. The production of scientific knowledge needs to be understood within this broader global racial context that structures cultural processes of racialization and material process of racial inequality. Science and technology studies (STS) scholarship has interrogated racial knowledge within a broad range of sciences from genomics and biomedicine to engineering and computer science. And yet, how do technologies continue to facilitate and challenge racial formations that produce and maintain racial hierarchy? Are there histories of technologies, yet to be unearthed, that were central to the establishment of racism? What future-oriented technologies can we reasonably expect to structure racial formations going forward? This open session calls for papers that broadly examine the relationships between technologies and racial formations, specifically in ways that illuminate the role of technology in innovating, interrupting, and or generating racisms and/or anti-racisms.
Shobita Parthasarathy, University of Michigan
Heidi Morefield, Johns Hopkins University
Technologies, from pharmaceuticals to malaria nets, are invariably characterized as tools to achieve societal betterment, but we know that their impacts are much more complicated. In this panel, we focus on the relationships between technology, inequality, and social justice in historical and international perspective. First, we explore how technologies mediate, ameliorate, and exacerbate social inequality. What are the impacts of technology on inequality? How do technologies, and the ideologies that motivate them, shape concepts of social justice? How has the push towards innovation affected technology selection and the sustainability of social justice programs? How have these technologies been interpreted differently by policymakers and those they are intended to serve? Are there broad similarities across technologies explicitly designed to achieve social justice goals? Second, we are interested in how societal imaginaries regarding inequity and its amelioration are reflected in technological development, implementation, and promotion. How do technologies oriented towards social justice compare historically, and across countries? How do different understandings of social inequality and justice affect international development interventions, for example, where ideologies must travel? Third, we seek to analyze institutions—both public and private—engaged in developing and marketing technology to achieve social justice. How do they understand this goal, and how is it embodied in practices and policies? How do social enterprises, for example, attempt to achieve social justice goals while making a profit? What kinds of knowledge and expertise are seen as relevant? We especially welcome papers which focus on regions outside of Europe and North America.
Firuzeh Shokooh-Valle, Franklin and Marshall College
Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Tecnológico de Monterrey
Joana Varon, Coding Rights (Brazil)
Sasha Costanza-Chock, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Technological systems amplify historical forms of colonization in a complex arrangement of practices, materialities, territories, bodies, and subjectivities. This new epistemological order based on data extractivism and the capture of social life (Couldry and Mejias 2018) reproduces exclusion, violence, and threatens life. This panel will address the connections between structural and technological violence–from design and infrastructure, big data, code and algorithms, surveillance and data extraction, to intimate forms of online violence such as non-consensual dissemination of intimate images, trolling, and stalking. These forms of violence increasingly affect marginalized communities-women, LGBTQ+ and gender non-conforming individuals, low-income communities, people of color-as they integrate the datafied society, as well as becoming the focus of activism. Following this year’s theme, this transdisciplinary panel aims to explore the different forms of technology-related violence, as well as the ways in which communities interrupt violence and create regenerative strategies of resistance that imagine other futures in the spirit of a Feminist STS that hopes for transformations of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing (Haraway 1988). Thus, we invite papers that focus on the possibilities of rethinking technologies to design for the pluriverse: a world where many worlds fit (Escobar 2018). We welcome papers that analyze configurations of oppression and resistance at the personal, community or systemic level, as well as the politics of violence embedded throughout technologies. We are especially interested in papers that employ feminist, decolonial, and intersectional perspectives, focusing on the Global South as well as on marginalized communities in the Global North.
Christopher Hesselbein, Cornell University STS
STS has thus far not developed a cohesive position on the role of aesthetic sensibilities in our engagement with facts and artefacts. Although subjective considerations of style, taste, and fashion and their embodied discernment are clearly relevant in the practices of natural scientists, engineers, doctors, and industrial designers, the role of such judgements in technoscience remains undertheorised. Subjectivity has, nevertheless, long been mobilised in STS as a means of problematizing notions of objectivity, rationality, and functionality. A number of studies in STS have recently begun to empirically examine the role of intersubjectivity in oenology (Shapin, 2016), aesthetic publics (Michael, 2018), and artistic practices in synthetic biology (Calvert and Schyfter, 2017), but the relationship between technoscientific innovation, sensory skills, and aesthetic judgment remains elusive.
This panel seeks to understand the co-construction of technoscientific practices and aesthetic sensibilities. How might the reciprocal relationship between technoscience and the traditionally recognised senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) as well as other sensory modalities such as, among others, proprioception, balance, pain, and hunger be understood? How does, for example, the visual language of digital technologies shape what is considered a beautiful face or delicious food; how are algorithms used to capture and reproduce new aesthetic categories in online media; how are notions of aesthetic craft involved in practices as diverse as software coding, reconstructive surgery, restaurant menus, as well as numerous other everyday practices and tasks.
This panel encourages experimental forms of presentation that go beyond the conventional paper and PowerPoint format.
Charles Gomez, Stanford University
Sebastian Munoz-Najar Galvez, Stanford University
Social scientists studying science and technology are eager to exploit the availability of large-scale metadata of scientific publications (i.e., citation networks, authorships, etc.) and corpora (i.e., text as data). The correlate of interest in big data is the development of machine learning techniques. Among the more popular of these techniques is topic modeling, which was originally developed in computational linguistics to explore intellectual currents and structures latent within large-scale text corpora from disparate fields over time and place. Computational linguistics has been variously employed in reconstructing the history of a field (Anderson, McFarland & Jurafsky, 2012; Hall, Jurafsky & Manning, 2008); explaining scientists’ choice of research strategy (Foster, Rzhetsky & Evans, 2015); and modeling scientific discovery (Shi, Foster & Evans, 2015; Rzhetsky, Foster, Foster & Evans, 2015). These approaches remain grounded in steadfast social theories of science and scientific practice. As such, we have the opportunity to corroborate and to complement common approaches in the social study of science, like ethnographies and archival studies. This panel calls for papers that use text-based machine learning techniques to explore the dynamics of knowledge generation, integration, and diffusion in science or technology. It also welcomes related approaches, such as social network analysis and machine learning, or studies that leverage big data in the study of knowledge, science, or technology. Here, we qualify big data as satisfying one of the 3Vs criteria: Volume (e.g., size), Variety (e.g., combined from multiple, disparate sources), and Velocity (e.g., highly granular temporal data).
Marius Korsnes, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
David Tyfield, Lancaster University
Andrew Chubb, Lancaster University
The Belt Road Initiative (BRI), aka the New Silk Roads, is often feted as the largest infrastructural programme not just in the world today, but ever. First announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, it has garnered increasing commentary and scrutiny, but focusing overwhelmingly on high-level geo-political issues, largely defined by existing ‘common-senses’. Meanwhile, in STS and critical geographies, an ‘infrastructural turn’ (Graham 2010) has illuminated questions of infrastructure – its in/visibility & blackboxing, disruption, maintenance, complexity and networked interconnection – as a key issue for contemporary politics; and, indeed, for the contemporary redefinition of ‘politics’ itself regarding onto-politics, materiality, virtuality, embodiment and liveliness. Booming discussions (largely Western) of the Anthropocene and technosphere, in which issues of infrastructure are central if often overlooked, are also of relevance here, not least in terms of how these will be shaped by the increasing, but unfamiliar and uncertain, global influence of China. In this context, the emergence of an infrastructure programme that would not just be unprecedented in scale, but also a vehicle for the geopolitical ascendancy of the first non-trans-Atlantic global hegemon, presents arguably the key arena to test and develop further the conceptual and theoretical innovations of the infrastructural turn. Yet the BRI remains largely ignored from this perspective. This panel thus invites papers that will explore how the BRI and STS can illuminate and develop each other, and the key question of infrastructural global futures amidst the Anthropocene and/or China’s concept of ‘Ecological Civilization’.
Matthias Wienroth, Policy, Ethics & Life Sciences Research Centre, Newcastle University
Victor Toom, Goethe University
The last decade has seen a rapid expansion of claims and possibilities offered for human identification via new biometric patterns and technologies, including in genetics and genomics, face and voice recognition and comparison, and remote sensing of body responses. In the social studies of science, technology and innovation, lively debates about associations between human features and social identity have emerged. More recently, technological capabilities and political desires have added questions around, both, automation of human identification technologies, and the expansion of biometric pattern use across very diverse societal domains. At the heart of these questions lie the insufficiently explored scientific, ethical and political complexities of biometric technologies, including a lack of knowledge about the social impact of applying new biometric data patterns, novel computing, and data distribution capacities, for forensic and surveillance purposes in security and justice contexts. This panel invites contributions exploring discourses and practices of legitimation and valuation in human identification practices in criminal investigation, migration and border regimes, disaster victim identification, and cognate fields. Contributions are invited to explore diverse substantial and methodological issues, e.g. how ethical regimes might align or conflict in emerging practices and attempts to govern collections of samples and data, and what STS can bring to the ‘policy room’ here. Overall, this panel attends to the empirical study of valuation—processes of imbuing value—and legitimacy in science and technology development and use, within the normative exploration of ‘bigger picture’ questions of being human and being social, towards developing value-informed policy and practice.
Theresa MacPhail, Stevens Institute of Technology
This session will examine the body and its various senses in relationship to its varied environments. Presentations should seek to explore the connections and disconnections of the body to the changing world, broadly imaged. Recent STS and other scholarly literature on the environment has focused on how scientific knowledge about the world is constructed and contested, how humans cope with the effects of the Anthropocene, interspecies interactions and decentering of the human, and public science. These papers will extend these lines of inquiry by looping the human body back into the scientific and technological conversations about things like climate change, pollution, toxicities, etc. Possible questions this session will seek to answer are: How does the body witness the world – how is the body itself a sensor that produces data about the environment? How does the body as a sensor respond and react to its environments in productive and nonproductive ways? How are science and technology used to enhance or replace human senses and to what effect? How role do wearables, apps, and other mobile technologies play in extending human senses or changing how we sense the world around us? Submissions for this session are encouraged to think creatively about their delivery. Sounds, visuals, touch, taste, and movement are encouraged and traditional presentations are discouraged. How can we use our various senses to help make our arguments and present our own research?
Niranjana Ramesh, University of Cambridge
The organicist conceptualisation of cities, particularly urban infrastructural networks, through metabolic flows has been influential in enabling engagement with socio-natural relationships and the hybrid urban forms they produce in their circulation of resources. This has, however, posed a problem for research on the global south, or for that matter ‘smart’ cities anywhere, with infrastructures found to be ‘fragmented’, emergent or incomplete in their metabolic circulations.
This stream draws attention to the increasing use of discrete technological installations like desalination plants or air quality monitoring kits in urban environments as points of socio-material interactions at the molecular level. How can attending to material exchanges at the molecular level – the chemistry of matter rather than its systemic metabolisation – help in grappling with urban change and indeed the fragments of infrastructure that make up cities?
This stream proposes an STS-driven interruption in the study of cities, to rethink urban socio-natural relationships as a chemical geography – of discrete interactions between matter, often technologically mediated, that together constitute its lived infrastructure. It invites papers that critically consider a wide range of material exchanges, from the very biophysical make up of cities to household appliances, that can offer insight into the negotiated and contingent processes that shape urban life. While philosophers of science have pointed to the value in engaging with chemical processes and practice towards understanding the politics of a technological society (Barry 2015, Stengers 2010), this stream invites empirical accounts of participating in these debates.
Jim Collier, Virginia Tech
STS and social epistemology once traveled the same path. As a fellow traveler, social epistemology heralded both the coming of and a new beginning for STS. STS, in potential collaboration with social epistemology, held the bright promise of a synthesis among interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. However, the path to epistemic accord led through the Science Wars. In the war’s aftermath, the promise of collaboration hardened into criticisms about methods and aims. Receding into a general indifference regarding epistemology, STS would yet again turn—this time to ontology. In keeping with conference themes, this open panel seeks participants interested both in examining the interruption of the relationship among STS, social epistemology, and analytic epistemology, and wishing to regenerate this relationship. Innovative paths that might be explored include—field philosophy; the narrative capture produced by potted disciplinary histories; the idea of science as a game; the concept of post-truth; issues related to the extend mind/extended cognition thesis; the ecology and governance of scholarly publication; and interpretations and applications of David Bloor’s symmetry principle. In addition, as analytic epistemology has undergone something of a renaissance given developments related to epistemic justice, we welcome participants who want to take up the future conduct of epistemology and, so, a potential rapprochement among the factions comprising social epistemology.
Ranjit Singh, Cornell University
Joan Donovan, Harvard Kennedy
How could tomorrow possibly be worse than today? In this session, we will conduct a thought experiment on techno-dystopias.
Here are the rules.
You are pitching a new technology to a group of angel investors. You have to be convincing that this new technology is profitable.
While much of science and technology studies involves critiques of applied science and technology, the goal of a session like this is to think creatively, and destructively about future use cases. The second half of the session will involve audience participation in debugging these applications and imagining new strategies for resisting dystopia.
Javier Guerrero-C, Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano de Medellín
ós Moreno-Martíenz, University of Edinburgh
Usually considered as ‘backyards’, the grey zones, the borderlands and peripheries in the global south are a truly breeding grounds for innovation and invention; very often captivating practices emerge in these chaotic and dim zones. In such geographies’ actors deploy solutions to problems, often driven by local forms of cunning and slyness. What matters in such locales is the creative, sly combinations of materials and designs. Despite the many instances, styles and places in which innovation and creativity in these grey zones take shape, and the different uses, subsistence, resistances or antagonisms, there are few serious attempts to analyse them.
Research in STS and beyond has begun exploring the development of technologies and practices in those areas. This panel will seek to highlight the theoretical and topical commonalities as well as disagreements and debates that make the study of innovation in such grey, illegal or dim areas such a vibrant topic, especially in the global south. The panel will explore issues such as: what kind of knowledge, designs, techniques and technologies pass through these grey areas? How are they connected, exchanged and taught? How does the informal or illegal nature influence for innovating? What type of cunning, recursions or tricks are required? How to overcome malevolent, disdained or tropical vision of those technologies and forms of knowledge? Which social actors and epistemic cultures have been playing the leading role in the development, implementation and regulation of the technologies?
Amelia Fiske, Kiel University
Alena Buyx, Technical University Munich
Barbara Prainsack, University of Vienna
In the age of big data, ever wider domains of people’s lives are datafied, which renders more and more information—at least in principle—usable for healthcare purposes. Yet, deriving insights for clinical practice and individual life choices, and deciding what data or information should be used for this purpose, poses new challenges. Often the quality, meaning, and actionability of diverse forms of molecular, genetic, lifestyle, and digital data is unclear. Interpretation requires tremendous time, resources, and skill, and raises urgent ethical, political, and practical questions. STS scholarship has shown how data does not speak for itself, how all knowledge is socially and temporally situated, and how data is never produced in isolation from other socio-political processes. Drawing on scholarship from critical data studies, social studies of science and medicine, medical ethics, and feminist approaches to data and justice, this panel invites contributions that explore emerging challenges surrounding the interpretive, affective, and ethical work of big data in healthcare and medicine. What forms of labor are emerging along within personalized medicine and big data, and for whom? What challenges and interruptions arise when deriving insights for clinical practice and individual life choices? What ethical and social justice concerns are embedded in, or emerge from, practices of datafication and data innovations? In particular, we welcome explorations of alternative practices of data collection and analysis, proposals for a more reflexive, accountable negotiation of the role of big data in health care and medicine, and accounts which follow how these questions are being negotiated in practice both in and outside of homes, clinics, and laboratory settings.
Margaret Lemay, University of Toronto
David Kaldewey, University of Bonn
Tim Flink, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin
We live at a time in which aspirations for a better future are sought predominantly through science, technology and innovation (STI). STI policies have been elevated to key strategies for most nations’ economic growth and social progress. Against this background, scholars and policy actors continue to struggle to understand, navigate and engineer the complex science-society nexus. Over the past several decades various conceptualizations and models of ideal STI policies have been proposed that claim to explain the science-society relationship. At the same time, many scholars agree that the conceptual language of the 20th century, such as the linear model or the basic/applied-distinction, no longer matches the complexities of late modern societies. Recently, a new avenue of STI policy scholarship has demonstrated the power of discourse in defining, framing, and shaping not only STI policy, but also the identities, interests, agency and actions of STI policy actors (as discursive agents) at all scales: individual, organizational, national, transnational, and, not least, in various epistemic communities. Moreover, discursive approaches have proven fruitful for examining the temporal legacies of STI policy; that is how discourses of the past, present and future co-evolve with STI policies and how the present can be understood through both the past and the future. The objective of this panel is to bring together scholars who are using a variety theoretical, analytical and methodological approaches to explore the role and dynamics of discourse and conceptual language in the complex interplay among STI policy, science and society.
Grace Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Chitra Ramalingam, Yale University
To the chagrin of the people invested in their immutability, photographs are objects of active and unruly matter. This panel interrogates past and present practices for (and against!) the archiving and conservation of photographs, paying particular attention to the photograph’s development as a technoscientific object as well as the technoscientific practices that have been brought to bear on its maintenance. What are the material conditions of the representational work that photographs are made to do? How do institutional practices of preservation and use produce ontologies of the photograph—and who shapes those ontologies, while working in industrial, laboratory, museological, colonial, postcolonial, and indigenous settings? Taking the concepts of deterioration and evanescence as analytical categories, we invite inventive and open-minded approaches to the materials that mark photographs as temporal and temperamental entities—from the silver of a daguerreotype to the light that transforms it, from the synthetic dyes to the AI software that produce photographs’ colors, from the refrigerators to the digital scanners that are used to preserve photographs. We also ask after the bounds of the photograph: where does the photograph end and its material and technical infrastructure begin? Where do ghosts of the photograph regenerate in other documentary and creative practices, and for what purposes? We hope that thinking through the afterlives of the photograph’s materiality will engender additional perspectives on what makes photographs matter—to scientific and nonscientific communities. We welcome papers from a wide range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, art, museum studies, and critical heritage studies.
Meg Stalcup, University of Ottawa
Laura-Zoë Humphreys, Tulane University
From a spate of elections of right-wing populist leaders who instrumentalize rumors and conspiracy theories, to the transnational success of new media industries thanks to digital technologies, recent events have demonstrated that media ecologies around the world are both transforming at a rapid rate and are rapidly transforming the world. Yet in contexts where access to the internet remains limited, participation in the online environment often continues to depend on face-to-face interactions and exchanges. Meanwhile, in more connected environments, individuals and social groups are actively attempting to mobilize digital technologies to cultivate face-to-face socialities. In the United States, community-based art practices are flourishing, including Fluid Movement in Baltimore, Forklift Dance Work in Austin, Wise Fool in New Mexico, Bread and Puppet in Vermont, and the New Orleans Aqua Mob. This panel seeks to contribute to STS by investigating the social and political effects of ongoing changes in media ecologies around the world as well as community-based attempts to respond to and interrupt these changes. We welcome presentations from scholars and art practitioners that explore the aesthetics and politics of new and newly generative mediated practices.
Hugh Gusterson, George Washington University
Algorithms play a central role in allocating resources (financial trading programs, credit scores); regulating movement through space (speed cameras, automated flight control systems and, maybe in the future, self-driving cars); sorting and ranking people (university rankings, college admission algorithms, resume judging software); policing and surveillance (facial recognition software, police crime prediction protocols, polygraph scoring software); military strikes (target acquisition codes, initiatives to create autonomous drones); forming mediascapes (Facebook feeds, Twitter trollbots); and shaping leisure (online dating sites, Spotify algorithms, and the production of deep fakes).
The key mediating, bridging, and shaping role of algorithms in all their multiplicity demands empirical mapping and theoretical explication. Questions of interest include: how are algorithms deployed in such a way as to erase the agency of their designers? How do their designers understand their work? How are cultural assumptions secreted and naturalized within algorithms? How do algorithms often fortify pre-existing relations of power and how might they be architected to subvert them? How are algorithms used to manage risk and how might they create new unseen risks? How does the deployment and understanding of algorithms vary across cultures? How do algorithms get internalized and produce new subjectivities? How might algorithms be contested in the service of democratizing processes? Answers to these questions and suggestions of further questions are welcome.
britt paris, UCLA Department of Information Studies
Roderic Crooks, UCLA Department of Information Studies
Temporality, the way one perceives passage through time and the constitutive beliefs from which such perception arises, sits at the core of what it means to be human. In the phenomenological tradition, the apprehension and conception of time is central to the formation of subjectivity. Temporality, although experienced differently by individual persons, relies on a shared way of ordering a person’s passage through time, an intersubjective temporality that forms a shared repertoire of temporal performances. Yet even as we imagine time to be infinite and universal, temporality emerges from social hierarchies as a fundamental difference that unfolds in the register of the spatiotemporal. Despite its centrality to forms of human experience, passing through time correctly depends almost entirely on machinic intermediaries: on clocks, alerts, notifications, bells, and other sentries that nudge a person to take up a specific part of a quotidian routine, to wake up, to work, to sleep. The assemblages that standardize, shape, measure, enable, and capture temporality enact commitments about the scope and possibilities of human relations, the role of technology in everyday life, and the intermingling of scientific and state power. This panel turns to these entanglements of temporality, machines, and political economy to question the use of temporality as a way to understand technological change. If temporality is fractured, multiple, and socially differentiated, how might its exploration enrich studies of technologies and techniques increasingly valued for their ability to execute judgements in real-time?
Rajiv Kumar Mishra, Centre for Studies in Science Policy, School of Social Sciences, JNU, New Delhi, India
Khetrimayum Monish Singh, The Centre for Internet and Society
Mohammad Javed Alam, Centre for Studies in Science Policy, School of Social Sciences, JNU, New Delhi, India
Enterprise 3.0, as an emerging concept, reflects the way ongoing innovations within the participatory web have helped digital business enterprises further (re)create, innovate and capitalize newer markets (Blank & Reisdorf, 2012; Drucker, 2014). Enterprise 2.0 had begun to signal this change from how initial business innovations was done, and how new participative methods and techniques for business and user based innovation were beginning to change the dynamics (Cook, 2017; Mcafee, 2006). Today, technology innovation in the digital business enterprises have acquired new ways and tools for data intensive innovations with the rise of advanced data analytics (Carbone et al., 2012; Drucker, 1968, 1985; Kitchin, 2014). This change shows the innovative way enterprises develop new socially connected and inclusive products with people’s participation. However, the promise of inclusivity has given rise to new paradoxes and (un)promise of inclusivity where plethora of avenues for digital business enterprises have developed. Through these technology platforms (devices, softwares, services), business enterprises are data mining online behavior and patterns contributing to the growth of data intensive innovations (Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger, 2009; Lyon, 1994) . Based on the conceptual approach of social dimensions of technology innovations, the panel specifically seeks to explore the rapid growth of data analytics based business innovations and understand the socio-technical imaginaries tied to the rapidly growing Asian digital markets. The panel invites papers which seek to discuss these innovations and the social and economic recalibration in the Global South.
Shunnan Chiang, University of California, Santa Cruz
Development projects are still prevalent in the global South, not only carried out by international development agencies but also by different levels of local governments, different types of NGOs, and local academia. These projects are normally seen as the pilot test for further scaling-up, designed as one important channel to generate new evidence and knowledge, and promoted as technically- or socially-innovative. Through the analytical lens of the will to improve (Li 2007) and different versions of scientific imaginaries of future (Brown and Michael 2003; Jasanoff and Kim 2005; (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013; Haraway 2016; Ghimire 2018), this panel aims to explore the role of development projects as the constellation of the situated power relations in the local context, the confidence on the efficacy of various kinds of science and technology, and the imaginaries and impulse of a better future. We welcome papers focused on projects both in the global South and North, investigating different aspects of the project world (Li 2007), and engaging with the rationale of the will to improve and the vision of future-making. Potential topics may include the designing process of the project, the socio-technical imaginaries underlying the project, problematization of issues at stake, the implementation procedure, the role of expertise in these projects, politics around monitoring and evaluation, innovations driven by the idea of solutionism, the knowledge production and mobilization of development agencies, and different conceptualizations of development project. We are especially interested in papers that work on projects that are facilitated by regional and local governments, NGOs, or academia.
Santiago Garrido, IESCT-UNQ (Institute of Science and Technology Studies – Universidad Nacional de Quilmes) / CONICET
Gabriela Bortz, IESCT-UNQ (Institute of Science and Technology Studies – Universidad Nacional de Quilmes) / CONICET
The first decades of this 21st century have presented a series of urgent problems: climate change, biodiversity loss, decrease of natural resources (clean water, oil, forests, fishing stocks), waste accumulation. These problems pose a challenge to unsustainable technology development, production and consumption patterns developed in socio-technical systems such as energy, mobility and infrastructure, agriculture, food production, and waste management. These issues reinforce the questions about the governance of scientific-technological decisions, the design of models and policies, of new regulatory sets, and the orientation of available capacities towards solving current global challenges.
In the STS studies, the issue of sustainability gained relevance, especially within the ‘transitions to sustainability’ research agenda. Some theoretical approaches have even influenced policy agendas of different governments. However, knowledge production on this topic has been relatively uneven between the Global North and South, and the exchange between main challenges, knowledge production, and experiences has been seldom.
How these transitions towards sustainability differ across countries, cultures, productive and technical domains? How different actors are brought together in these processes of socio-technical change?
This panel aims to generate an exchange space on three main levels:
Alli Morgan
Declared the 2018 Word of the Year by Oxford English Dictionary, toxics increasingly circulate—both physically and discursively—across various locales, traditions of thought, and communities of practice. From toxic exposure to toxic masculinity, this panel seeks to examine the expansive reach of toxicity. While many scholars of Science and Technology Studies have described the ways in which toxics trouble existing categories, this panel aims to expand theorization on how toxicity is mobilized across legal, scientific, and clinical domains as a source of injury. From courts of law, to the laboratory, to the clinic, how are toxic subjects rendered (il)legible? What are the affordances and complications of claiming toxic injury?
Topics of papers might include:
Marie Sautier, University of Lausanne
Nicky Le Feuvre, University of Lausanne
Marie-Pierre Moreau, Anglia Ruskin University
A significant research corpus has examined academic career paths; more recently, attention has been paid to the increasing globalisation of research institutions and to its effects on the lives of early career researchers (ERCs), a group often working in precarious conditions (Murgia and Poggio, 2018; Bataille et al., 2017).
Across many countries, the globalisation of the academic labour market is associated with the growing prevalence of fixed-term (often part-time) academic positions and the emergence of a PhD and postdoctoral bubble in the academic workforce. These changes have brought challenges, for individuals and their academic institutions.
In this panel, we would like to explore how these shifts in the traditional academic career path interact with parallel transformations in the life-courses of individuals. We are particularly interested in analysing the reproduction or reconfiguration of gender norms and practices that are associated with the experiences of ECRs. How does the long work hours culture and the requirement to be geographically mobile interact with the intimate relationships and family formation patterns of ECRs? What are the effects of care responsibilities on their capacity to meet the requirements of an early academic career? How does expatriation impact on the access of ECRs to support networks and social welfare across the life-course?
We are interested in papers that address these issues from an empirical or theoretical perspective and welcome original formats—from short films to digital media or comics—that explore how individuals, policy-makers and national research agencies address these challenges.
David Nemer, University Of Virginia
Austin Toombs, Purdue University
The gig-economy is typically understood to comprise two forms of work: crowdwork, e.g., Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower, and work-on-demand via app, e.g. Airbnb and Uber. These platforms connect an indefinite number of organizations, individuals, clients, and workers both locally and globally. While workers are compensated for the services they provide, these platforms also profit from the immaterial labor that workers must engage in, uncompensated and often undefined, in order to provide their customers with a high standard of service and receive commensurate ratings. This immaterial labor—that is, all those aspects of labor relations that go beyond the material aspects of work and production—is obfuscated by the platforms and the sociotechnical systems in which those platforms are embedded. In this panel we focus on two feminist interpretations of immaterial labor that have attracted the interest of the STS community: Emotional Labor, which is the management of personal feeling that requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the proper outward countenance for others’ sake; and Care Work, which in gig-economy settings can include the often-unrecognized work related to providing or facilitating others’ comfort, such as through offering amenities, recommendations, unique experiences, cleaning, and more. We invite papers that explore such approaches on gig-economy platforms and help us understand how emotional labor and care work are entangled with the successes of these platforms, while also necessarily downplayed or made hidden within the surrounding sociotechnical system.
Luciana de Souza Leao, Columbia University
Paige Sweet, Harvard University
The study of expertise brings together scholars from diverse disciplines to ask questions about who does expertise, how experts define themselves, what kinds of social and cultural things expertise can accomplish, and whether we should define expertise in terms of boundaries, networks, fields, alliances, objects, cultural work, or jurisdictions. Long a central topic of the STS literature, especially as expertise pertains to expert practice, the study of expertise has also transformed the sociology of professions, the history of science, and medical anthropology, forcing scholars to grapple with questions about politics and science, performance and assemblage, and state and governance. Further, the rise of populism around the globe has forced commentators from the left and right to ask if we are undergoing a crisis of expertise and to ask new and old questions about who has the right to produce knowledge, to make normative judgments, and to distinguish between lay and expert knowledge. This panel seeks papers that respond to these broad and provocative issues. Theoretical and empirical works are both welcomed. We are especially interested in pushing beyond existing theoretical frameworks and engaging with new empirical questions related to the global south and to the relationship between expertise and race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. This panel therefore seeks to both interrupt existing literature on expertise and regenerate the interdisciplinary field in new directions, in line with the 2019 conference theme.
Pierre-Marie David, Université de Montréal
Laurence Monnais, Université de Montréal
Pandemic preparedness, especially since Ebola crisis in 2013-2016, has regenerated vaccines as innovative biotechnologies and almost necessary tools for anticipation in global health. Anticipation is the material effect of a speculative future in the present (Adams, Murphy and Clarke, 2009), a fundamental concept of biomedicine in general and vaccination in particular which embodies future epidemic in a present preparation. Indeed, biomedical technologies and vaccines in particular have the potential to materialize anticipation in multiple ways by incorporating it at the individual and population levels. The presentations in this panel will display both anticipatory policies and the diversity of biological futures they invent (Radin, 2017), and their very social and political implications, from singular adventures (Moulin, 1996) to projects with universal pretensions (Rees, 2014). Participants working on vaccines or biomedical anticipations in colonial and postcolonial contexts, their materialization and the practices involved in their implementation and imagination are especially welcome. The papers could explore more broadly: biomedical anticipation practices, institutional reconfigurations organized around anticipated biomedical or vaccine promises, imaginary and temporalities related to these anticipations, anticipation policies shaped by vaccine or biomedical technologies and their social consequences in terms of capacity, protection and infrastructure. This panel will contribute to the global reflection on innovations through an historical perspective to better understand the current regeneration of anticipation.
Zoe Nyssa, Purdue University
Biology has its doctors, physics its engineers, sociology its social workers. What about STS? In a time of ethical lapses, replication crises, and unintended consequences on the one hand and fake news, mistrust of expertise, and politically motivated attacks on science on the other, the need for public, practicing STS(s) has never been greater. STS programs historically carved their niche in the academy by occupying a liminal space as provider of service or breadth requirement courses to undergraduate STEM majors while adopting more critical modes in research and graduating teaching. STS training has been seen variously as: i) an off-ramp providing safe harbor for intellectual refugees from STEM disciplines; ii) an on-ramp to professional degrees in medicine, law, and policy; and iii) an all-purpose safety-valve for consideration of social impacts through the training of future ethicists, program managers, public educators, and the like.
STS is clearly much more than this. Still, as an interdisciplinary and often anti-disciplinary field that questions the very distinction of pure and applied, we have relatively few conversations about professional training in STS. This session invites theoretical and empirical analyses, case studies, and visionary proposals for applied and practicing STS as it already exists and as we imagine it might look in near and long-term futures. Taking a best practices approach, this session also welcomes analyses informed by the experiences of adjacent fields (e.g. applied, public, and practicing anthropology, sociology, communications, philosophy, education etc.) Papers may be invited to special journal issue on this topic.
Anne Dippel, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena
Arne Harms, Institute of Anthropology – University of Leipzig
Lukas Mairhofer, Institute of Physics, University of Vienna
Infrastructures have become key concerns in STS (Vertesi 2014, Harvey et al 2017), especially those that are ripe with interruptions and break downs (Anand 2017) of all kind. Experimental systems are plagued with extended moments of suspension (Galison 1997). Travelling technologies come to a halt as frictions emerge on unfamiliar grounds (Behrends et al 2014). More importantly, relationalities through which knowledge is produced are widely dismissed and black-boxed (Mol 2002).
This panel contributes to recent debates on built-in imaginaries (Tutton 2018), their temporality, politics, media or their agency in the anthropocene by interrogating interruptions (Braidotti 2013, Kirby 2011). We aim to rethink cuts and ruptures as two moments of interruption, and to think them together. While a cut in the apparatus (Barad 2007) marks the subject’s distinction from the object, a rupture exhibits the fragility of the setup itself with its multitudes of contributing agencies.
We call for contributions that re-examine the significance of interruptions along three dimensions:
We are keen to discuss material gathered amidst desks, laboratories and open-air, real-life experiments, spanning the usage of handheld devices to extremely expensive apparatuses mobilized by large research collaborations. Last but not least, we would like to ask how interruptions affect things and what their situational specificities are.
Gerhard Fuchs, Stuttgart University
In the discussion about global transitions and future challenges, activities related to climate adaptation loom large. Meanwhile there is an established body of research, which on the one hand is often normative oriented and deals with the question what should be done and why are people not doing what is supposedly best for them. On the other hand, there is a lot of research dealing with the question of how processes of climate mitigation are guided by governments or international treaties.
The proposed panel invites papers, who are analyzing what real people (Scharpf 2000) are doing, when developing new structures to deal with climate related issues especially in the field of electricity generation and distribution. In other words the panel is interested in discussing, how new structures and organizations come into existence (cp. Padgett/Powell 2012), combining an analytical with an empirical interest.
As Harrison White (2008) has argued, social organization has two faces: blockage and allowance of fresh action. Insofar if we are interest in transformation, the following questions need to be addressed: By what means, and when, does it become possible to break through rigidity in social organization to get fresh action at large scale and small? How can one effect action by intention despite social context and technological rigidities?
Ravi Shukla, Jawaharlal Nehru University
A significant portion of the work force in most countries falls under the informal sector.
The governmental perspective sees this as unskilled work. Efforts are directed towards formalizing skills and incomes bringing them under the organized umbrella to add to the market economy. From the perspective of private enterprise, resource optimization and maximizing returns are the main motivations.
The informal nature of the work, though it often involves some degree of knowledge and skill, keeps it low paying and (generally) under the tax radar, helping to sustain profit margins.
Interestingly, the physicality and face-to-face nature of informal work translates to a more embodied sense of identity that contrasts with the way that the governmental and private enterprise tend to see worker identity –as a set of descriptive attributes and behaviors encapsulated in information abstractions.
Typically, governmental and private sector agencies use information systems that integrate internet based databases with mobile phone applications to identify and tag individuals and to optimize resources and work processes. Workers use distinct applications of the same (internet and mobile) technologies to stay connected, seek new work, and gather information to negotiate with current and potential employers, often in interesting and innovative ways.
How is the seeming contradiction between maintaining profit margins and the effort to train and transform informal workers to join the formal work force, reconciled? Is the shift from an embodied, informal worker identity to a depersonalized one, unavoidable or are there other possibilities?
This panel invites STS engagements with these and related questions.