Ways to Participate

There are three ways how to take part in EASST/4S Prague 2020: Presenting individual paper, organizing Closed Panel, organizing and/or engaging in Making & Doing

Please consult the focus and themes of the conference program as well as the participation guidelines (sidebar) before submitting. 

We also recommend that submitters read about presentation logistics, which includes information about remote presentation.

Presenting Individual Paper

Individual 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 you submit your paper, you will be asked to designate one or more STS Research Areas using a drop-down menu.

When submitting your paper, we urge you to consider submitting it to an Open Panel. This method of crowd-sourcing panel composition has proven successful in stimulating the formation of new networks and collaborations around topics of interest to the 4S community. Open Panels have been proposed by scholars working on nearly every continent and relating to just about every major STS theme. You can read summaries of all the accepted Open Panels here. When you submit your paper to an Open Panel and up to two alternates.

Single papers unassigned to an Open Panel(s) will be added into suitable panels (both Open and Closed) by the program committee.

Closed Panel

(Closed panel simply means a panel that is submitted complete with presenters. The presentation is public.)

Closed Panel proposals should contain a summary and rationale of up to 250 words, including a brief discussion of its contribution to STS.

A Closed Panel can extend across a maximum of two sessions and  may contain between 3-10 paper abstracts. 

For a discussion or fishbowl format, such as for Author Meets Critics panels, please submit a Closed Panel proposal. You can simply add participants as discussants rather than adding papers.

The proposals for Authors Meets Critics panels will be thoroughly considered by the Programme Committee and only a limited number will be accepted.

Note that the Program Committee will take the final decision about panel composition. If your proposal contains fewer than five papers, the Committee may (in consultation with organizers(s)) assign additional papers to your panel to optimize scheduling and participation.

Submitting a panel involves some extra steps. Panel organizers are responsible for assigning roles to each presenter and entering the titles and abstracts for all presentations in their panels. You may want to watch this screencast video before beginning (Please note that it was created for the last year NOLA meeting and some details may not apply, such as the Twitter handle).

Organizing and/or engaging in Making & Doing

The STS Making & Doing program invites 4S members to present experimental works and innovative practices in any medium that engage speculative, empirical, reflexive and/or aesthetic approaches to the study of science and technology, broadly defined. Making & Doing encourages the participants to move beyond the printed page and share projects that consider what it might mean to make do in the merging worlds.

We strongly recommend the organizers read more about Making and Doing and view examples from past meetings before submitting your proposal.

How to Submit

Deadline: The submission system will be open to the end of 29 Feb, no matter where you are. No submissions will be accepted after the site closes. 

To submit any of the above types of proposals, visit the program website and log in with your 4S credentials. If you have submitted a paper to any recent 4S meeting, you already have an account. Please exercise due diligence and look for an existing account before creating a new one. Creating a duplicate account is likely to cause complications. The same caveats apply to entering co-authors and session participants.

For help with accounts and logging in, contact webmaster@4sonline.org.

Participation guidelines

In order to maximize participation across the conference, the program committee will be following a set of guidelines in reviewing paper submissions and panel abstracts.

In general terms participants will be limited to One ‘Presenter Role’ and Two additional ‘Non-Presenter Roles’ in the conference.

Presenter Roles will include:

• Presentation of a research paper (first author);
• Participation in a panel discussion.

Non-Presenter Roles will include:

• Panel organizers and;
• Panel discussants and;
• Organisation or participation in a Making and Doing session;
• Co-author (2nd, 3rd author) of a research paper.

Panel chairing is not counted towards a role.

Some example combinations:
Some possible combinations of these role limits might include, the presentation of a research paper (Presenter Role), together with chairing a panel (Non-Presenter Role).

Alternatively, you might like to combine a role as a panel discussant (Non-Presenter Role) with presenting a paper (Presenter Role) and participating in a team in the Making and Doing Session (Non-Presenter Role).