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The 4S Infrastructure Award recognizes exemplary, often behind-the-scenes initiatives that build and maintain the fundamental infrastructure supporting the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). This honor recognizes Red Chilena de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad (Red CTS-Chile, STS-Chile Network) extraordinary, 14-year long dedication to building, sustaining, and nurturing a vibrant, collaborative ecosystem for Science and Technology Studies across Chile and the broader Latin American region. CTS-Chile has developed governance capacity (including annual meetings attended by more than 200), an array of creative initiatives, and is now taking steps to become a formal association under Chilean law.
CTS Chile has taken on a number of challenges:
These sustained and imaginative efforts have made CTS-Chile a vital force in building inclusive, resilient, and globally engaged STS infrastructures. By cultivating community across regions, fostering locally grounded scholarship, and creating durable institutional and digital supports, CTS-Chile exemplifies the collaborative vision this prize recognizes. They have demonstrated what it means to build academic infrastructure with care, solidarity, and vision. For innovation, commitment and lasting impact, we congratulate CTS-Chile as a most deserving recipient of the 2026 4S Infrastructure Prize.
On behalf of the Red CTS-Chile community, we are profoundly honoured to receive the 2026 STS Infrastructure Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). For over a decade, our network has functioned as a self-sustained infrastructure aimed at nurturing, decentralising, and consolidating STS scholarship in Latin America. This international recognition validates the voluntary work that has allowed us to think critically from our own geopolitical context through upheavals and systemic crises, flourishing in persistence. The award belongs to the members who have given their time, affection, and commitment to creating a scaffolding for the network, making it their intellectual home. From our annual conference’s organising committees, whose efforts reach across mountains, deserts, and valleys over 14 versions; through the passionate team weaving intergenerational care in our mentorship programme, to those who safeguard our memory in digital archives and discuss bylaws in assemblies or through email: this is for you. Standing at the end of the world, we accept this award as a spark to keep building situated STS infrastructures that exemplify the values at the heart of our field: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and care.
Red CTS-Chile is an interdisciplinary network dedicated to nurturing, decentralising, and consolidating STS scholarship across Chile. Since 2012, the organisation has created spaces of collaboration under the shared conviction that technoscience cannot be understood without attending to its cultural, political, and everyday dimensions, especially in a region marked by inequalities. By 2026, Red CTS-Chile has become one of the largest and most vibrant STS communities in Latin America. It welcomes scholars and practitioners at different stages of their careers, all committed to its core initiatives: the Encuentros CTS-Chile, the itinerant annual conference that activates academic ecosystems across the national territories, and the pioneering Programa de Mentorías, an infrastructure of intergenerational care designed to counteract the isolation of early career researchers. This trajectory of self-sustained continuous growth is animated by a distributed governance with volunteer coordination, rotating leaderships and adaptability across institutions, showing how the network thrives because members choose, year after year, to create its futures.
The 2026 STS Infrastructure Prize Committee included Melissa Creary (Chair), Kim Fortun, Cathy Herbrand, Zhaopeng Li, Sonja Van Wichelen, and Amanda Windle (ex-officio / non-voting).
The CTS-Chile Network, after the general assembly in the XIII Encuentro CTS-Chile in the city of Concepción (January 14, 15 and 16 of 2026).
2020: Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
2018: East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (EASTS)
2017: Editors of the Handbooks of Science and Technology Studies
2016: WTMC (Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture)