Apr 21 2026
This report reflects on the panel “Simondon and AI,” held at the 10th STS Italia Conference in Milan in June 2025. Across eleven presentations, the panel explored how Gilbert Simondon’s thought can help interrogate contemporary AI systems and contribute to the development of a technical culture adequate to our technological present.
Apr 20 2026
This post reports on the symposium “Cultures of Platformization in Africa,” held on March 13, 2026, which brought together scholars from across Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States to examine platformization through a range of perspectives and empirical contexts. It highlights how Africa’s digital landscape is rapidly expanding, with platforms playing an increasingly central role in economic and social life.
Feb 16 2026
This post is the fourth in a four-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, held on September 6th, 2025. This post reflects on the conference paper, “Toward a Hybrid Primatology: Purity and Knowledge in the Anthropocene."
Feb 2 2026
This post is the third in a four-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, held on September 6th, 2025. The following post in the series will be released on February 16th, 2026.
Jan 19 2026
This post is the second 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, held on September 6th, 2025. The following post in the series will be released on February 2nd, 2026.
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.
