Jan 5 2026
This blog post welcomes Bri Matusovsky as a new assistant editor to the 4S Backchannels Global North team. Bri is a PhD Candidate in Medical Anthropology at UC San Francisco - UC Berkeley.
This post is the first in a 4-part series on Sex and Gender in Primate Worlds, following up on a panel of the same name at the 4S 2025 convening in Seattle, Washington. The following post in the series will be released on January 19th.
Oct 27 2025
A report from the panel “Creating, Crafting, Designing, Fashioning, Moulding, Shaping, Fixing. Aesthetic Practices as Instaurative Practices: How to Account for Them and for the Good they Produce?” at the 10th STS Italia Conference, “Technoscience for Good,” Milano, 11–13 June 2025
Nov 10 2025
In this report from the 10th STS Italia conference in Milan, Benedetta Catanzariti (University of Edinburgh) and Natalia Rozalia Avlona (University of Copenhagen) share the central interventions presented by scholars contributing to discussions on “Re-ordering Care: Algorithmic Transformations of Medical Knowledge, Practice, and Governance”. Troubling the techno-optimist promises of algorithmic efficiency and expediency that increasingly shape the healthcare industry, the authors and...
Dec 1 2025
“Beheaded” STS? This report from the joint Tsinghua and Harvard-Yenching Institute program explores how scholars are using dialogue to move beyond "theoretical stress" and build a generative future for Asian STS.
Nov 20 2025
The climate emergency took the main stage at the 11th edition of the Brazilian Association for the Social Studies of Science and Technology (ESOCITE.BR), organized shortly before COP30 in Belém
Oct 13 2025
In this multi-media report, Holly O'Neil shared drawings and reflections from AusSTS 2025 to consider not how signal and noise might be separated, but how they are continually redefined. This report invites the reader to explore the knowledge systems that determine these categorical registers, and how noise might in fact provide productive understandings through which to work creatively with the flotsam and jetsam of signals.
Sep 8 2025
This report shares insights drawn from the panel “Navigating the Grey: Assemblage Thinking and Digital Artifacts” conducted during the 10th Annual STS Italia Conference hosted in Milano (11–13 June 2025). The panelists and authors of this post investigate the ways in which assemblage thinking might assist STS analyses of digital artifacts.
Sep 5 2025
Click along if you wish to know more about the Taiwanese STS scholarship.
May 19 2025
In this bilingual post (English and Brazilian Portuguese), Thais Valim, Isadora Valle and Mariana Petruceli present the content and launch of the “Mixtures: Research Stories on the Zika Virus” book, an invitation to read about scientific production on the emblematic Zika virus epidemic in Brazil, through STS lenses.
Apr 21 2025
Ola Michalec Ph.D. considers the collective excitement surrounding AI and the ways in which the 'hype machine' mobilises resources, enrols new actors, creates pressure to accelerate responses, clouds judgement, conceals power dynamics or detracts from crucial infrastructural work. How might we situate the buzz and buzzwords AI as integral to the hype machine of promotion, exaggerated claims, collective frenzy, leadership and strong emotional responses influencing economic trends, political agend...