There will be six subplenaries on the conference programme. They will take place on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday and will be streamed to the conference website. Participation of the audience will be mediated by sli.do.
(TUE 3-4:40pm CEST) Meeting access, login required.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, devastatingly so within racial and ethnic minority communities, researchers have documented its distinctive social and spatial patterns. Seroconversion and the course of the disease are consistently indexed along already harmful forms of ecological toxicity including air pollution, food injustice, and climate change. The risks of exposure to the novel coronavirus are tied not just to who a person is and who they’ve come into contact with, but where and how they live, work, eat, and breathe. Moreover, governments’ responses to the pandemic, and to the underlying inequalities it thrives upon, have been woefully inadequate and have called into question how we should understand the role of nation states and international health organizations in governing global public health. The pandemic is rendering transparent power relationships that are mostly hidden from view, especially those relationships that produce pandemic illnesses in societies and those that govern the production of scientific knowledge about pandemics themselves. Science and technology studies (STS) can help us understand and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, but only insofar as it can offer accounts of the political ecologies of the virus that map how power relations till the social, spatial, and epistemological grounds over which it travels. This subplenary brings together scholars working at the intersection of STS, political theory, and history across national boundaries and international contexts to explore how STS can contribute to our understanding of ecologies and inequalities in the wake of the global pandemic.
Chair: Joan Fujimura, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Speakers: Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney; Anthony Hatch, Wesleyan University; Duygu Kaşdoğan, İzmir Katip Çelebi University.
(TUE 6-7:40pm CEST) Meeting access, login required.
Given the massive social, political, legal and ethical challenges that have come to fore because of ruthless data brokerage companies, political propaganda agents, ever growing surveillance measures, and countless data leaks and security breaches, data sciences have started to reflect on the norms and values of their doings. In recent years, niches and events have emerged in the computer sciences, especially in the fields of social analytics, Human-Machine-Interfaces machine learning, or social computing, which facilitate regular exchange on the socio-technical challenges in developing IT for social good. Some of them are even sponsored by corporate actors in this domain. There, many aspects are discussed like new techniques to formalize (statistical) fairness against the many dimensions of bias, to better consider the real contexts of AI systems, to create new research programs on the social effects of machine learning. Many of the activities are strongly informed by STS contributions and all sorts of critical technology studies, or STS researchers are even directly included in the rethinking/reframing process.
However, the current pandemic seems to have exacerbated existing problems. While we see a lot of efforts to establish rapid datafied/digital responses – e.g. improve data sharing for collective learning and mutual aid or built mobile contract tracing apps, this tech solutionism is often too blind to many of the issues raised earlier, such as the widening of the data divides in the Global South, and the normalisation of surveillance. Where is STS, when it comes to the digital governance of such a crisis? What can we learn from history? What is the situation beyond the reflexive niches? What formats of intervention do we have in store to create and manage responsible datafication?
Chair: Katja Mayer, Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna
Speakers: Alex Hanna, Ethical AI, Google; Stefania Milan, New Media and Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam; Christian Sandvig, Center for Ethics, Society and Computing, University of Michigan
(THUR 3-4:40pm CEST) Meeting access, login required.
Timing matters! A seemingly straight forward assertion. Yes, for sure, timing matters! But how do we/should we understand the very notion of timing.
Once we move beyond the dominant understanding of time as expressed through calendars and clock-time, we start to encounter time in bewildering diverse forms – as tempo, rhythm, duration, acceleration, waiting, sequence, synchronicity and many more. Time is neither given, nor universal or invariable. Time is enacted in a variety of ways; it is performed through practices. It is the entanglement of all these diverse forms of time that together make up the temporal fabric of contemporary technoscientific worlds and of our lives within them. This draws our attention to the practices of weaving different times and temporal orders together, and sensitizes us to the fact that specific temporal (non)alignments can create collateral damages while each and any single form of time might to a certain degree seem reasonable and acceptable.
But how to capture these multiple, invisible forms of time, these processes that take place below the surface and can have massive repercussions? We thus will have to ask who has the power to do time in specific ways and not in others. Where are the places where time gets done and how does it manage to spill over to other places? Who can control whose temporal resources? For whom does time matter and in which ways? These are but a few questions we will address in this panel. This panel will move into three very different areas to explore how timing matters – to the world where information and communication technologies are important actors in making time, to the pandemic and how time matters in multiple ways and, finally, to academia itself.
Chair: Ulrike Felt, University of Vienna
Speakers: Judy Wajcman, London School of Economics and Political Science; Carlo Caduff, King’s College London; Filip Vostal, Czech Academy of Sciences
(THUR 6-7:40pm CEST) Meeting access, login required.
This subplenary will discuss the conflicts and collaborations among modes of explanation in STS as well as new approaches to research that challenge old dichotomies. It will focus on the many complexities of social, environmental, medical and scientific problems that require combination and negotiation of different types of expertise, and collaboration among different modes of study and explanation. In contrast to siloed methodologies, STS researchers are, for example, ignoring oppositions between quantitative and qualitative research methods and combining these two modes of explanation in innovative ways to study difficult questions and problems. They work across the boundaries between social research and creative practice, attempting to re-craft relations between representation and participation, for example by connecting data analysis and visualisation methods from design.
While much of this work is practical and methodological, it also requires deep and enduring engagement with the politics of explanation. Thus, while there is increasingly widespread acceptance that today’s complex problems cannot be solved by one discipline, the fundamental challenges this poses to established methodological dichotomies are much less widely recognized, as notions of real science continue to dominate the understanding of science’s usefulness to society. Some examples include how social understandings of race have entered into algorithms and software packages used in biomedical research; the socio-technical arrangements that inform and constrain the spread, testing, treatment, and mitigation of Covid-19. In each case, one needs not only both quantitative and qualitative data and methods, but also new experimental methodologies, to understand and account for what is going on and to craft strategies for change.
For this subplenary, each of the speakers will bring examples from their own work to show how and why today’s complex problematics requires us to engage practically, conceptually and imaginatively with the politics of explanation. Drawing on research experiences, we will discuss research methods and forms of explanation that challenge, trouble or seek to undo the dichotomies between quantitative and qualitative, scientific and creative, observational and experimental knowledge, and show how they can be productive of new ways of making knowledge and new ways of organizing our worlds.
Chair: Joan Fujimura, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Speakers: Laura Forlano, Illinois Institute of Technology; Joan Fujimura, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Noortje Marres, University of Warwick; Ismael Rafols, Leiden University
(FRI 3-4:40pm CEST) Meeting access, login required.
In many ways, the centres of gravity for STS remain in North America, Australia and Western Europe. However, such a portrayal ignores important (sometimes long-standing) developments in East Asia, Latin America and, indeed, Central and Eastern Europe. In this panel we aim to discuss how these re-locations and new contextualisations of STS actually happen – and very importantly what do they mean for the discipline. The panel will particularly pick up on debates that have been taking place in East Asian Science, Technology and Society and Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society.
How do we understand and re-work the historical asymmetries of STS? What influence is exerted by different research assessment systems and university rankings? How to build and experiment with trans-regional collaborations that would enact shared research agendas and matters of concern, without necessarily hiding areas of distinctiveness and difference? What does it mean, in terms of actual research and publication practices, to mistranslate across differences (Lin, Law 2019)? There are many questions to discuss with regard to the different contexts of STS but also what this means for the exploration of new empirical and conceptual possibilities.
Chair: Alan Irwin, Copenhagen Business School
Speakers: Tania Pérez Bustos, Universidad Nacional de Colombia; Gergely Mohacsi, Osaka University; Tereza Stöckelová, Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Charles University
(FRI 6-7:40pm CEST) Meeting access, login required.
Sustainable development was defined by the Brundtland commission as efforts to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In line with this understanding, it is important to apply a comprehensive approach to the challenges involved in developing a sustainable academy. First, clearly, the growing focus on global warming and other environmental concerns has forced institutions of research and higher education to address their own climate footprints and environmental impact. Second, universities and other institutions of research and higher education have come under increasing pressure to economise their resources in ways that threaten their relative autonomy as well as the working conditions of faculty and students, leading to increased precarity and job insecurity. This threatens the sustainability of academic institutions. Third, these institutions may play a vital role in providing knowledge and assessments that are needed in the sustainability transitions that are called for in wider society.
The Covid-19 pandemic led to a shut-down of universities and institutes in many places, which resulted in a replacement of physical with digital interaction in teaching and research. Moreover, the effects of the pandemic have also disclosed serious problems regarding economic sustainability of universities and future employment of graduates. The recent surge of protest against racism serves as a reminder that diversity remains a challenge to academic institutions and their sustainability in the broad sense of the concept.
Presently, we face a re-opening of academic institutions that seems guided by much uncertainty and anxiety. Experiences from the shut-down and the slow re-opening provide a window for critical engagement with academic institutions and practices. In this sub-panel, we shall explore and discuss the needs and options for making academia more sustainable in the multiple meanings outlined above. This includes reflecting about how the different dimensions of a sustainable academy should be balanced. Thus, the sub-panel invites participants to consider the interaction between these multiple meanings and what this means for strategies for a sustainable academy.
Chair: Knut H. Sørensen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Speakers: Maria do Mar Pereira, University of Warwick; Sharon Traweek, University of California – Los Angeles; Harro van Lente, Maastricht University