Collage con distintos momentos de la conferencia [Crédito: Autora]
 

De estas discusiones se desprenden varias lecciones que, considero, seguirán marcando el camino de los estudios CTS en América Latina. El futuro de la región sigue siendo, en parte, una pregunta que los mismos estudios de ciencia y tecnología se plantean a sí mismos, pero imaginarlo desde la innovación, el diseño y la tecnología desde el hacer, además de cuestionar la soberanía y el poder detrás de las tecnologías existentes, abre conversaciones propias desde Latinoamérica, poniendo la mirada sobre formas de fricción y fenómenos propios de la región, como la informalidad, entendida como un espacio legítimo de innovación científica y tecnológica. ESOCITE 2026 demostró, además, que métodos muy distintos entre sí pueden combinarse y trascender las formas tradicionales de generar conocimiento, tejiendo puentes entre disciplinas. Los estudios y colaboraciones interespecie, en particular, ofrecen una vía prometedora para pensar más allá de lo humano y ampliar lo que entendemos por conocimiento situado. Para la comunidad CTS global, ESOCITE deja una invitación clara: dejarse afectar por otras formas de hacer ciencia y tecnología, y reconocer en la fragmentación y la crisis no solo un obstáculo, sino también una ventana de posibilidad. Como el tejido que atravesó cada sede y cada conversación, lo que queda de esta conferencia es la certeza de que sostenernos y sostener el conocimiento requiere de puntos que se encuentren y se acompañen entre sí.


Isabella Jaimes Rodríguez es investigadora de doctorado en la Escuela de Información de la Universidad de Toronto, Canadá, y tiene una maestría en Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología de York University. Su investigación se centra en el diseño de tecnologías para la resistencia y la construcción de solidaridad, con un enfoque particular en el codiseño de tecnologías junto a trabajadoras domésticas migrantes.


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What sciences and technologies are possible amid crises? This is the question posed by ESOCITE 2026, a question that opens windows of possibility for imagining and creating futures and presents in the midst of a world facing fragmentation, growing polarization, and inequality. What are the crises, and what paths do science and technology studies from Latin America offer? I believe there are many, and the conference showed that, often, academia in these moments of crisis "must find ways to humanize technique and democratize knowledge" amid multiple frictions, as Sigrid Falla said, Director of Experience Architecture at Maloka Center on the second day of the conference.

This conference had an interesting twist compared to traditional conferences: it was multi-venue, meaning that each day the panels, conversations, fairs, and other activities took place at different venues across the city of Bogotá, Colombia. On the first day we were at the Rogelio Salmona building of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the space where the conference was inaugurated. After the opening, the keynote conversation "Methods between Science and the Arts for Multispecies/Multi-entity Studies" took place (Figure 1), moderated by Santiago Martínez Medina and Adela Parra, where the central point running through it — and present in every space of the conference — was "learning to be affected" by more-than-human beings and entities, as well as by the materials around us and the practices that emerge from experimenting with them.

I found it striking to place these more-than-human relationships at the center of the lens, telling bovine stories from an anthropological register all the way to letting oneself be affected, letting oneself be spoken to by those cattle being observed, and letting oneself be accompanied by the beyond-the-human offered by openings to imagine ways of working between science and the arts. Every bovine movement or silence was followed by an appreciation for contemplation — not for immediate recording, but for letting oneself be affected by what lies outside us. This connecting thread was also accompanied by a multimodal format — stories, voices, videos, and poems — that existed in tune with it. In our keepsake there was a page and a poem connecting to all these experiences, aiming to give an account of the complex and changing worlds proper to encounters with more-than-human beings, entities, and existences on a planet in crisis.
 

The second day took place at the Maloka Interactive Center, where the lens turned to very different spaces, such as keynote conversation 3, "Labor Informality and the Digitalization of Work," moderated by Carlos Andrés Arroyave Bernal, with Oscar Maldonado and Manuela Fernández Pinto as guests (Figure 2). There, the role of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and digital platforms, in the current precarization of labor was put up for debate. Another great innovation was the Fair, a recurring exhibition space to visit. There, innovation in contexts of scarcity manifested frequently through material practices of repair, reuse, and hybridization, as in the work of Nicolás Gaitán Albarracín and Manuel Franco Avellaneda with Wikimedia Colombia and Wikipaquera, and also in proposals like that of Klaudia Cárdenas Botero, Laura Castellanos, Darío Pérez, Mónica Flórez, and Natalia Norden, from the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Research on Biological Resources, on culinary ecosystems for socioecological restoration in Montes de María, which shifted the gaze toward the sustainability of food systems and local livelihoods. These spaces connected with debates that ran through all of ESOCITE about technological sovereignty: who holds power over the creation of technology, and what can be said from Latin America.
 

On the third day, at Universidad del Rosario, I had the great opportunity to attend the panel "Research Practices as Creative Doings: Methodological Conversations between STS Studies and Research-Creation," coordinated by Andrea Botero, Tania Pérez-Bustos, and Blanca Callén Moreu (Figure 3). It was a space that moved between different registers of what it means to research-by-creating: research through design, relational ontologies, letting the word circulate by letting oneself be taught, the multiple forms of interspecies collaboration, and the task of thinking about how to speak from one's craft, how to weave and sustain oneself in times of crisis, how to keep hope alive. This panel turned out to be particularly enriching, as the idea of weaving runs through much of the conference: the commitment to experimentation and to an academia that distances itself from its own bubble to draw closer to the more-than-human, to other species, but also to art, to creation, and to design, with the aim of looking beyond what is already established. The notion of weaving and of the circulation of the word ultimately points to a willingness to let oneself be taught by the other, and to seek forms of weaving that sustain: points that meet, that are reciprocal, that accompany one another.
 

Several lessons emerge from these discussions that, I believe, will continue to shape the path of STS studies in Latin America. The future of the region remains, in part, a question that science and technology studies themselves keep posing, but imagining it through innovation, design, and hands-on technology, alongside questioning the sovereignty and power behind existing technologies, opens up conversations of its own from Latin America, turning the gaze toward forms of friction and phenomena specific to the region, such as informality, understood as a legitimate space for scientific and technological innovation. ESOCITE 2026 also showed that very different methods can be combined and can transcend traditional ways of generating knowledge, weaving bridges between disciplines. Interspecies studies and collaborations, in particular, offer a promising path for thinking beyond the human and expanding what we understand by situated knowledge. For the global STS community, ESOCITE leaves a clear invitation: to let ourselves be affected by other ways of doing science and technology, and to recognize in fragmentation and crisis not only an obstacle, but also a window of possibility. Like the weaving that ran through every venue and every conversation, what remains from this conference is the certainty that sustaining ourselves — and sustaining knowledge — requires points that meet and accompany one another.


Isabella Jaimes Rodríguez is a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada, and holds a Master's degree in Science and Technology Studies from York University. Her research focuses on the design of technologies for resistance and solidarity-building, with a particular focus on co-designing technologies alongside migrant domestic workers.