New Orleans, Louisiana, September 4-7, 2019
Deadline: Feb 1, 2019
There are many ways to participate in the 2019 4S Annual Meeting: presenting a paper, organizing and/or chairing a panel, serving as a discussant, presenting a Making and Doing session, presenting an Innovating STS exhibit, attending a pre-conference event, and taking part in the range of social and collegial events across the conference.
Theme
Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations invites presentations, panels and other events that are innovative in form and content, conveying and examining insights from science and technology studies (STS) into innovation itself, innovations in STS, and ways STS can be both a source and site of regenerations of many kinds. Conference sessions will also examine how STS can interrupt and provide critical perspectives on entrenched ideas, helping innovate alternative pathways. Read the full theme here.
Participation guidelines
In order to maximize participation across the conference, the program committee will be following a set of guidelines in reviewing paper and panel submissions.
In general terms, each participant will be limited to One ‘Presenter Role’ and Two additional ‘Non-Presenter Roles’ in the conference.
Presenter Roles will include:
Non-Presenter Roles will include:
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 organizing a panel (Non-Presenter Role) and presenting in the Innovating STS Exhibit (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).
Childcare
4S is committed to supporting the participation of parents and carers of children. Information on finding suitable childcare services near the conference venue will be made available as the meeting approaches.
Twitter, photos and online presence
We hope that 4S New Orleans will have a lively participation across a range of online formats with some participants wishing to live-Tweet or upload photos to social media. If you do NOT want live tweeting during your presentations or photos taken of you or your slides, please let the audience know at the start of the panel and/or the start of your paper.
Present a paper
Single 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 topical STS Research Areas using a drop-down menu.
When submitting your paper, we urge you to consider submitting 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 in nearly every continent and relating to just about every major STS theme. You can read summaries here and then submit your paper to an open panel and up to two alternates.
Single papers not associated with closed or open panels will be organized into panels by the program committee.
Organize a Traditional Panel
Traditional or Closed Panel proposals should contain a summary and rationale of up to 250 words, including a brief discussion of its contribution to STS. A panel proposal must contain a minimum of three paper abstracts conforming to the criteria above. A maximum of six time slots are available per 90-minute session (e.g. 5 papers plus 1 discussant). A panel can extend over more than one session and up to a maximum of two. Note: the Program Committee has final determination of panel composition. If your proposal contains fewer than five papers, the Committee may (in consultation with you) assign additional papers to your panel to optimize scheduling and participation.
The Program Committee will consider proposals for a limited number of Author Meets Critics panels. Due to space constraints, Author Meets Critics panels must discuss two books per panel, both of which are first books for their respective authors. The panel discussion should address both books together and should reflect the diversity of work and scholarship of 4S. Please submit Author Meets Critics proposals as Closed Panels.
Submitting a panel involved 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.
Engage 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 STS practitioners, interdisciplinary and decolonial artists-scholars, indigenous and queer participants, and assemblage thinkers-activists to move beyond the printed page and share projects that consider what it might mean to make do in times of massive environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change, particularly from a site like New Orleans.
We strongly suggest you read more about Making and Doing and view examples from past meetings before submitting your proposal.
Participate in the Innovating STS Exhibit
The New Orleans meeting will include a special exhibit, Innovating STS, that showcases different ways in which innovation as an organizing rubric has been contested yet also extremely generative for STS scholarship. We encourage exhibitors to explore innovations in empirics, theory, method, pedagogy, and praxis as STS scholars and practitioners seek to confront daunting new challenges, such as those of sustainability, that are inescapably conditioned and mediated by technoscience. Exhibits in Innovating STS will be presented gallery-style in New Orleans, and also as curated digital collections that can be preserved, elaborated, and accessed over time in a new STS and 4S archive, infraStrucTureS.
Please read the participation and submission guidelines for Innovating STS.
Participating as an Undergraduate Student
The 4S 2019 program will include three special sessions for undergraduates to attend (and that graduate students and faculty will be encouraged to attend as well): 1) a welcome session to introduce students to the 4S meeting; 2) the Undergraduate Forum, a platform for discussing the needs and agendas of undergraduate students working in the field of STS; and 3) a student debrief session at the end of the meeting. More information about this can be found here. In addition, undergraduates will have the opportunity to present their own papers in the main conference program. To do so, please submit abstracts to the submission system’s Undergraduate Papers unit.
To submit any of the above types of proposals, visit the 4S program site 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 later. The same caveats apply to entering co-authors and session participants. For help with accounts and logging in, contact webmaster@4sonline.org.
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