Hope that you are keeping well in these uneasy times!
I am writing with an important update to the planning for the 4S Meeting in Seattle in September: in a change of course, we are planning to enable hybrid participation.
From the local Co-Chairs:
“This support for hybrid participation reflects our work and conversations with disability justice and environmental justice scholars and activists. It also comes on the heels of political shifts that have made travel to the U.S. more tenuous for many STS contributors. It is with this hope of supporting technoscience reverberations, the transcontinental ripples of local activism and engaged scholarship, that we seek to enhance access in 2025.”
And I would add that we will do our best to ensure that hybridity will be balanced with 4S’s endeavour to make the conference as accessible as possible along many vectors. Enabling hybridity will lead to an increase in the cost running the conference, and thus to registration fees, because the AV and technical support costs involved in these venues and at this scale are significant. We will strive to keep that increase as low as possible, and to ensure that it is borne predominantly by those at the higher end of the sliding scale of registration fees, to ensure that the increased access that hybridity allows does adversely impact the accessibility of the conference for participants from the global south.
Sharing this news with an extra email as submissions to the conference are due one week from today, on Friday January 31st: https://www.4sonline.org/meeting.php
