The STS Making and Doing Program invites 4S members to share expression of their on-the-ground practices and innovations in scholarly knowledge work in a range of formats extending beyond academic papers or books. Due to its great success at previous 4S conferences in 2015 and 2017, 4S Sydney is hosting the STS Making and Doing session for the third time.
In this session 4S members share scholarly practices of participation, engagement, and/or intervention in their fields of study. This includes new and emerging STS practitioners, interdisciplinary practitioners, Indigenous knowledge authorities, and researchers seeking to mobilise or make visible knowledge, language and culture practices not normally supported within the Western academy.
As scholarly works, STS Making and Doing presentations move beyond simple promotion and offer an analytic or reflexive contribution to STS concerns. Presenters either connect with one or more of the following modes in their presentations, or detail their rationale around an alternative mode.
This year, discussants will be assigned to highlight connections and differences among clusters of related projects. These will be listed in the final program. The STS Making and Doing Awards formally acknowledge and celebrate distinctive achievements in practices of STS making and doing. Judging for the STS Making and Doing Award will take place during the meeting.
Methods practices. Reflecting on, or proposing new, methods of scientific, social scientific and STS research inquiry. Including methods as experimental, contingent, performative, technical, and embodied, and as agents of and within diverse forms of social, technical and political arrangements.
Issues, people and publics. Concerning forms of participatory involvements in the formatting and arranging of civic life. Including forms of embodied and face-to-face engagement and experimentation, as well as digital, statistical and algorithmic practices of production and inquiry.
Performance and affect. Raising questions of material agency and contingency, including the potential of creative and poetic forms of knowledge production, as well as the involvement of the body in political and scholarly practice.
Knowing and governing. Provoking various ways of knowing and the study and practice of forms of organisation and innovation, as well as democracy and other politics including through policy, science, anthropocene futures and possibilities for activism and social change.
Infrastructure and co-design. Engaging means for producing, supporting, intervening within various forms of social, material, digital and virtual infrastructure subtending collective life, including participatory, collaborative and co-design practices and their effects.
Situated Knowledges. Enacting or articulating on-ground research or other knowledge practices which are developed and/or seek to remain ‘in-place’, including forms of knowledge work which are relevant to the interests of STS but which may not strictly identify as part of STS as a disciplinary area.