Open panels

The following open panels will be part of the conference. All accepted conference abstracts have been assigned to one panel. Please indicate when you register to which panel your presentation belongs.

All panels

Academic collaboration as an experiment

Recently, the notion of the experiment has sparked attention in the study of academic practices and beyond — as in ‘experimental entanglements’ (Fitzgerald and Callard, 2015), ‘experimental collaborations’ (Estalella and Sanchez Criado, 2018), ‘experimental interventions’ (Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015), ‘experimental zones’ (Marguin, Rabe, Schmidgall, 2020), or ‘experimental spaces’ (Cartel, Boxenbaum and Aggeri, 2019). In this panel, we want to follow up on these ideas to make sense of the scattered context of debates on interdisciplinarity.

As an alternative to the notion of ‘interdisciplinarity’, the notion of the experiment provides a rich entry point to facilitate reflections on contemporary academic practices. Speaking of experimental entanglements rather than interdisciplinarity does not presume the existence of separated entities and allows us to study heterogeneity and collaboration more freely. Thus, we want to ask what we can see differently when we approach current research collaborations through this idea. This is an attempt not only to reflect on the means of knowledge production but also on the larger institutional settings and our own interventions as STS scholars.

More specifically, we want to open up discussions along at least four lines:

The discussion of contemporary academic practice needs to pay attention to institutional and organizational aspects. In this context, the notion of the experiments provokes the question whether we can make sense of the current reconfigurations of the academic system in experimental terms: how can organizational practices be shaped to allow experimentation?
We further want to direct the attention to the material and spatial aspects of experimental entanglements. How can the notion of the experimental help us to make sense of the spatial and material arrangements?
Also, we want to address epistemological questions and ask how the collaborative production of novel scientific knowledge can be understood through the notion of the experiment. - Lastly, the experiment also provides an entry point to make sense of ‘our’ own interventions into collaborative settings. We want to make use of the notion of the experiment in a productive manner. Rather than pointing to the deficits and challenges of interdisciplinary collaborations, we want to ask how we could approach these settings by other means. We invite contributions that study academic collaborations as well as collaborations between academic and non-academic actors.

Panel organizers: Tobias Drewlani, Technical University of Berlin and Maria Bårdsen Hesjedal, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Agents of the General and the Particular

This session seeks papers that trace and inspect agents of the general and particular, the people and things that translate between instances, and collections of instances, to generalities, in attempts to produce universalities. Who or what constitute the agents of the general and the particular, and how do they accomplish their work, to what end, and with what consequences? The general and the particular are STS themes as old as the hills. But here we seek concrete examinations of human and non-human activities, infrastructures, and architectures that make these translations happen. For example, how particular phenomena become translated into generalities, such as equations, advice, guidelines, rules, software, models, algorithms, interviews, survey data or machine learning. We are interested in the agents of the general and particular in a broad sense, how generalities are translated into action, used to enact specific programmes or policies. How are such movements between sites and scales accomplished? What are the (small and big) tools, devices, and infrastructures that are enrolled by actors to navigate and translate things/facts/issues/etc. between the general and the particular? How do social movement actors, governmental organizations, information technologists, and/or scientists do this? We seek concrete examinations and narratives of the translations between particularity and generality (or vice versa!). What are the tools and techniques for doing so? What are the challenges, frictions and resistances these agents encounter?

Panel organizers: Lisa Linden and Francis Lee, Chalmers University of Technology; David Ribes, University of Washington

Animal Infrastructures: Multispecies Technologies of Domestication and Exclusion

Does technology domesticate animals or do animals domesticate technology? STS scholars have taken the concept of domestication beyond the biological, reframing it as an adaptive process surrounding people’s acceptance, rejection, and use of technology. Yet various forms of infrastructure and technology also interact with nonhuman animals. Through these interactions, animals are excluded from some spaces and invited into others, all the while utilising and adapting human-built technology for their own needs. In this session we will explore how concepts of domestication, domesticity, and the ‘home’ relate to actors beyond the human. Domesticating animals in the home has been traditionally understood through our relationships with pets and livestock. Nonhumans, however, make their homes in all manner of ways, entering so-called ‘human infrastructures’ and using human-built technologies in their homemaking practices. We therefore argue that our understanding and definitions of ‘home’ and ‘domestication’ should be expanded to incorporate these animal actors and the technology they interact with. By doing so, we challenge the problematic conceptualisation of the domestic and wild binary. We also highlight the question of nonhuman agency, including its centrality to the question of how infrastructures and technologies are both used and become users in domestication processes. What technologies facilitate the making of homes by nonhumans? What happens when infrastructures of nonhuman exclusion break down? How can we conceptualise both socially and materially an expanded definition of ‘home’? We welcome papers from STS scholars, geographers, historians, and members of other disciplines who examine the relationship between nonhuman animals and technology. Papers could address the following non-exhaustive themes: - The maintenance and breakdown of animal infrastructures - Animal-infrastructure networks - Nonhuman agency in human spaces - Case studies of nonhuman domestication practices - Material lives of animal infrastructures - Avian homes and domestication - Underwater homes and domestication - Urban environments and animals - Institutional knowledges and technologies - Infrastructural spatialities and transgressions

Panel organizers: Matthew Holmes and Charlotte Wrigley, University of Stavanger

Bridging STS & Design Research – Designing Interactions, designing the Socio-Technical

Bridging the gaps between Design Research and Science, Technology & Society Studies is a worthwhile endeavour that revolves around a central question: How can socio-technical configurations be designed? In promoting and shaping social and technological change towards sustainability, the critical question in both fields is how interactions, interdependencies, and communications between people and things are designed.

Architects, designers, and engineers of all kinds are shaping the technical world that surrounds us, from urban planning to the development of everyday objects and tools to the design of digital landscapes. In this context, one of the most important challenges for designers today is to help create a more sustainable world. However, looking only at the world of artifacts – the technical world– has severe limitations for those who want to promote such shifts towards sustainability. We design the things, but we design them for human use, we design them for use within existing infrastructures.

So we need research ‚for‘ design – concepts, thinking models and tools that help us combine the technical and the social world in sophisticated ways and re-open black boxed matters of course. In exploring habits & rituals, it becomes very clear in how many ways a technical object such as for example a mobile phone is connected to and entangled in the technological as well as in the social realms. Design Research can help understand how the technical and the social are intertwined. This panel aims to strengthen bridges between Design Research (understood as research ‚for ‘design as well as research‚ through design (Frayling 1994, 2015)) and Science, Technology and Society Studies and at the same time challenge technically and “digital-only” focused approaches to design.

Bringing together findings from Design Research activities and Science, Technology and Society Studies can be vital for sustainable design and can be fruitful for STS research as well. The panel especially welcomes papers, posters and presentations (including analogue and/or artifact-based talks and presentations) addressing at least one of the following questions:

How can designers encourage and promote more sustainable behaviour? Bearing in mind that users and objects configure each other, how can we take into account these processes of co-configuration regarding sustainable design?
How can STS perspectives help designers implement sustainable products and practices?
How can an STS approach stimulate design processes in general? Which Design Research approaches can inspire Science, Technology & Society Studies?
All types of research tackling sustainability design issues as well as challenging frameworks of meaning and contexts of practice, discussions and presentations that connect research in STS and design are welcome in this panel.

Keywords: shifts towards sustainability; socio-technical configurations; design; everyday objects; perception and design; Interface; forms of (tacit) knowledge.

Panel organizers: Stefanie Egger and Christian Lepenik, The Invisible Lab, FH Joanneum, NDU

Care studies and after – experimenting with materials, methods, and sites

When the edited volume Care in Practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms was published in 2010, the editors Mol, Moser and Pols launched a research program for care studies in Science and Technology Studies (STS). The collection of essays signaled a broad approach to the study of care, and relations of care: care was not only seen as localized in clinics and homes, but also at farms and other sites where humans and nonhumans meet.

Since then, care scholars have leveraged ethnographic articulations of messy, varied care practices to highlight the inventiveness, skills and responsiveness of those engaged in care (Davies, Greenhough, Hobson-West, & Kirk, 2018; Driessen, 2017); destabilizing care’s presumed oppositions to ‘cold’ technology (Pols 2012), killing (Law, 2010) and the economy (Harbers 2010); and critiquing (liberal) conceptions of subjectivity (Mol, 2008), formalized ethical and policy guidelines (Asdal & Druglitrø (unpublished), Druglitrø 2022; Pols, 2013; Singleton, 2010), and monolithic understandings of biopower (Moser, 2005; Vogel, 2016), to name a few. Attention to how care and maintenance work for cells, laboratory animals, equipment or data underpins scientific knowledge making itself (Martin, Myers, & Viseu, 2015; Suzuki, 2021; Pihl 2016; Dam and Svendsen 2018) has also shifted STS understandings of the politics of knowledge production (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

A politics of care, rather than highlighting alliances and interests, denotes that caring for one thing often comes at the cost of another. Care studies has not necessarily been about “thinking with care” as a political or normative outset, but rather an approach to investigate “the norms embedded in practices while interfering in them through adding a novel, oblique analysis” (Mol 2013: 381). With care studies now very well established, this panel asks – what is next with care? What could a possible care studies ‘and after’ look like? How does care studies align with or stand in contrast with other approaches to the study of values and value practices in STS, such as for instance valuation studies? What are the limits to care, if any?

These questions emerge from a set of tendencies that seem to underpin much work on care:

1. that ‘good’ care is first and foremost located in everyday, informal, and ‘messy’ practices, and in contrast to what is seen as the ‘systemic’, the formalized, and the standardized; 2. that care and the ability to identify and distinguish between good and bad care is first and foremost available by ethnographic investigations (and not by other forms of studying the documents, speech, or data that co-constitute policy practices, practices of economization, or science). In the panel, we aim to bring “care” in conversation with new sites, materials, theoretical conversations and methods. Hence, we especially welcome papers that experiment with and explore new conceptual and methodological tools for the study of:

Care in and across science and policy,
Care practices in the context of economization, financialization and the market.
Care and history
Care in conversation with decolonial and postcolonial approaches
Across care studies and valuation studies

Organizers: Tone Druglitrø, University of Oslo; Else Vogel, University of Amsterdam; Marie Stilling, University of Oslo; Wakana Suzuki, Osaka University; and Aysecan Terzioglu, Sabancı University

Caring and Repairing Data Lives

Data are not only generated about our lives, but are increasingly interwoven with how our lives are lived. How we undertake our work, interact with friends and family, follow news and social media, buy groceries and shop online, even how we relax and play — all these activities are mediated by data about us and others, and reworked through mundane data politics (Pink et al., 2017).

In this panel, we ask when and how to engage in these politics, not only in terms of critique, but maintenance: how to configure websites, apps and other digital services; what to share or not in which public streams; how to engage with and involve others. The panel aims to attend to data lives from an STS perspective of care and repair. This may include how we live with and alongside data and the everyday uses to which data is put, but also the lives of data themselves, their localities and connections, travels and transformations, their effects and affects, how they smooth things out but elsewhere create friction (Kitchin, 2021).

A care and repair perspective means attending to often neglected matters (de la Bellacasa, 2011). What become objects of care in data lives? How do we take time to tinker with data and choreograph care in our data practices (Law, 2010)? How do social and material relations decay and break (down), and how are they put back together (Ramakrishnan et al., 2021)? We are interested not only in critiques of our datafied and digitised society, but in examples and stories of how data lives and worlds might be otherwise. Imaginaries and speculation are welcome, but so too more present politics of prefiguration.

We invite a range of theoretical, empirical and stylistic approaches that explore how we can use concepts of care, repair, maintenance and infrastructure to surface these all-too-often submerged social processes and entanglements.

Datafication and Energy: Platforming, Infrastructuring, Experimenting

Actors from the energy and tech industries are increasingly introducing platform logics to the governance of energy production and transmission; they build new connections between global data centers and local energy networks; and are experimenting with new services via devices such as sensors and apps. In these contexts, we seek to understand the interlacing and intertwinement of infrastructures sustaining data streams and infrastructures carrying energy flows, and ask: how is this interlacing imagined and practiced? With which implications? For whom? As climate breaks down and wars break out, making energy “digital” has become a dominant imaginary that promises stability and a quick fix to a wide range of problems. These problems range from fossil fuel dependency and climate governance, to the maintenance and operation of energy infrastructure – as well as the production of economic value for a variety of actors and industries in the energy sector. In this context we see how rendering energy “digital” translates into an ongoing “datafication” and “platformization” of energy through the proliferation of apps, platforms and sensors that track and mediate energy relations at different scales ranging from everyday energy use, to the supply chains of fuels and the operation of energy grids. But we also see the “energification” of data infrastructure – such as data centers – through new interconnections with energy grids. These trends raise many questions about the entanglement of energy and data infrastructure. Which changes are made to existing localised and globalised energy systems to accommodate the hyperscale energy consumption of heavy data processing? Which actors make the new energy systems that are replacing or extending traditional systems? Are the maintenance of energy through digitalisation, as well as energy consumption through datafication, forms of infrastructural care or economic opportunism? In this open panel, we invite peers to reflect on the diverse ways in which the “digital energy” imaginary is enacted in practice – in multiple arenas, scales and contexts – and the resulting conflicts and tensions. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

The politics of power, value and multivalent conflicts that arise when major tech corporations get an increasing role in mediating the global governance of energy and carbon emissions through local ownership of renewable energy plants, technologies and grids;
Regulation and deregulation attempts that seek to drive, subsidise, intervene into or hinder digital energy interconnections;
Sociotechnical experiments with sensors, algorithms, machine learning and AI for micromanaging and steering grid operations, or managing “flexibility” at the imagined “edges” of data and energy grids;
The politics, resistances and breakdowns that occur in the interconnections of data centers with local electricity and (district) heating grids;
The proliferation of apps and new digital energy platforms for managing distributed renewable energy production and their role in mediating and governing data and energy flows;
Forms of ownership, formal and informal, that are both accelerated and challenged by reorganisation of industries involved in energy production and distribution;
Design and governance of virtual power plants, blockchain, and microgrids;
Governance of energy data sharing;
Methods to study the entangled interrelations between energy and digital industries

Organizers: Caroline Anna Salling, Technical University of Denmark; Darcy Parks and Julia Velkova, Linköping University

Demonstrating disruption

Disruption takes many shapes and forms, from the mundane to the extraordinary. But what counts as disruption and how do we know that it has taken place? Guggenheim et al (2014) argue that a disaster – one form of disruption – is only a disaster when it impacts humans or something of value to humans. This panel seeks to engage in how disruptions; past, active and possible are demonstrated and therefore made visible to publics. Crucially, we are also interested in the potential that demonstrations of disruption have to convince people of new knowledge and information to enrol them in new paths of action. Counter to this, we are also mindful that some demonstrations of disruption fall upon deaf ears and are not as effective as one would hope.

This panel will aim to discuss demonstrations of disruption and the work they do – or fail to do amongst publics. We welcome both theoretical perspectives and empirical accounts of demonstrating disruption. Initial theoretical direction from this panel comes from longstanding STS literature on demonstrations, such as the theatre of proof (Shapin & Schaffer 1985, Latour 1988, Collins 1988, Downer 2007) and the theatre of use (Smith 2009, Coopmans 2011), alongside more recent additions such as the theatre of failure (Perriam 2018, Grommé 2015) and the theatre of accountability (Cellard 2021) but we welcome abstracts that widen these theoretical standpoints on demonstrations.

This panel frames disruption as broadly as possible in terms of scale from everyday disruption to hyperbolic economic or technology-related definitions of disruption, to the threat of large scale disruption through war, climate change or societal collapse. The format of demonstrations is also intended to be broad, encompassing digital, analogue, activist and multi-modal forms.

Organiser: Jessamy Perriam, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Designing liveable fossil-free futures for all? In search for justice in democratised imagination, knowledge and governance

Some central aspects of a transition/transformation towards decarbonised societies have to do withby whom and how they are imagined and enacted, and what kinds of knowledge and knowledge claims are used in the process of ushering them in. In this context, concerns over justice and fairness are becoming increasingly acutely articulated (Goldman, Turner, and Daly 2018; Sovacoolet al. 2019; Schlosberg and Collins 2014; Nightingale et al. 2020), not only in Global North and South relationships, but also between local communities and actors across the world. Who bears the costs and benefits of decarbonisations?

Democratisation (pluralisation) turn in environmental governance in general and climate governance in particular has been widely discussed (Jernnäs and Lövbrand 2022; Pickering et al. 2022; Bäckstrand et al. 2010; Nasiritousi, Hjerpe, and Buhr 2014). Both governance and knowledge for fossil-free transitions/transformations are produced today with participation of many actors: policymakers, civil servants, academia, civil society, and business. They all bring to the table various visions of what a fossil-free society might look like, and various ways of knowing and enacting it. Diverse knowledge claims may contain diverse justice considerations (Kalt 2021); but also, more broadly, different ideas about what counts as knowledge and justice stem from and reinforce relationships of power.

Does this diversity imply irreconcilable differences, and if yes, how are they to be thought of – as sources of inaction, or as opportunities to practice democracy in the face of a potential environmental disaster? What do the dominant imaginaries of fossil-free society, relying on carbon budgeting, modelling, scenarios, risk assessments and techno-economic fixes ‘do’ to the horizons of possible futures? What alternative visions are pushed towards the margins, and with what effect on climate justice and potential for transitions/transformations? T

his open panel invites papers which deal with co-production of futures, knowledge and action for decarbonised societies. We welcome papers which may or may not have an explicit focus on justice or use STS concepts such as co-production, sociotechnical imaginaries, technopolitics, among many others. We would like to have a discussion of works which share a critical and curious approach to various understandings of fossil-free futures/transitions/transformations, and the roles of diverse actors in them, co-producing visions, knowledges, policies and practices.

Keywords: decarbonisation, fossil-free society, participation, democratization, non-state actors, governance, transformations, transitions.

References:

Bäckstrand, Karin, Jamil Khan, Annica Kronsell, and Eva Lövbrand. 2010. Environmental Politics and Deliberative Democracy: Examining the Promise of New Modes of Governance. Edited by Karin Bäckstrand, Jamil Khan, Annica Kronsell, and Eva Lövbrand. Cheltenham; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Pub.

Goldman, Mara J., Matthew D. Turner, and Meaghan Daly. 2018. “A Critical Political Ecology of Human Dimensions of Climate Change: Epistemology, Ontology, and Ethics.” WIREs Climate Change 9 (4). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.526.

Jernnäs, Maria, and Eva Lövbrand. 2022. “Accelerating Climate Action: The Politics of Nonstate Actor Engagement in the Paris Regime.” Global Environmental Politics 22 (3): 38- 58.https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00660.

Kalt, Tobias. 2021. “Jobs vs. Climate Justice? Contentious Narratives of Labor and Climate Movements in the Coal Transition in Germany.” Environmental Politics 30 (7): 1135–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2021.1892979.

Nasiritousi, Naghmeh, Mattias Hjerpe, and Katarina Buhr. 2014. “Pluralising Climate Change Solutions? Views Held and Voiced by Participants at the International Climate Change Negotiations.” Ecological Economics 105 (September): 177–84.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.06.002.

Nightingale, Andrea Joslyn, Siri Eriksen, Marcus Taylor, Timothy Forsyth, Mark Pelling, Andrew Newsham, Emily Boyd, et al. 2020. “Beyond Technical Fixes: Climate Solutions and the Great Derangement.” Climate and Development 12 (4): 343–52.https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2019.1624495.

Pickering, Jonathan, Thomas Hickmann, Karin Bäckstrand, Agni Kalfagianni, Michael Bloomfield, Ayem Mert, Hedda Ransan-Cooper, and Alex Y. Lo. 2022. “Democratising Sustainability Transformations: Assessing the Transformative Potential of Democratic Practices in Environmental Governance.” Earth System Governance 11 (January): 100131.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2021.100131.

Schlosberg, David, and Lisette B. Collins. 2014. “From Environmental to Climate Justice: ClimateChange and the Discourse of Environmental Justice.” WIREs Climate Change 5 (3): 359–74.https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.275.

Sovacool, Benjamin K., Mari Martiskainen, Andrew Hook, and Lucy Baker. 2019. “Decarbonization and Its Discontents: A Critical Energy Justice Perspective on Four Low-Carbon Transitions.” Climatic Change 155 (4): 581–619. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02521-7.

Panel organizers: Tatiana Sokolova and Ekaterina Tarasova, Södertörn University

Digital practices in institutionally complex contexts: Methodological challenges and practical solutions to understand the opaque and elusive.

This open panel invites contributions discussing the methodological challenges and practical solutions in studying digital practices in institutionally complex contexts. Algorithms and more broadly digital platforms have become an important object of study for many STS scholars – from from biomedical algorithms (Lees and Helgesson, 2020) and predictions in the embryology lab (Geampana and Perrotta, 2021) to facial recognition (Taylor et al., 2021; Eneman et al., 2022).

Yet methodological difficulties for the traditional ethnographically inspired toolkit of qualitative researchers have been increasingly discussed and multiplied. As Seaver (2017) argues, the term algorithm traveled from computer science into popular discourse and other academic disciplines, generating a certain degree of terminology and methodological anxiety. Many scholars have pointed out the opaqueness and inscrutability of algorithms as black boxes (Pasquale 2015; Introna 2016; Burrell 2016), recurring also to the metaphor of algorithms as myth (Ziewitz, 2016) or magic (Larsson and Viktorelius, 2022). Other scholars have also emphasized the elusiveness of algorithms, especially machine learning and other intelligent ones, inasmuch as they transform all the time, and they function in connection to each other in complex and mutable ways. In response to this opaqueness and elusiveness and following the long-time STS tradition (Law, 1992; Latour, 2005; Seaver, 2017), researchers have offered different analytical suggestions and emphasized the heterogeneity of digital practices, entangling algorithms, norm, ideas, organizations, actions (Gillespie 2016; Seaver 2017; Lange et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2019).

Methods have been suggested to get as close as possible to algorithms by studying those heterogeneous practices in which they are used (Seaver, 2017). Beside these flourishing and insightful methodological suggestions, the study of digital practices remains challenging particularly in institutionally complex contexts, where public and private organizations collaborate, formal regulations are dense, and the political debate frames a sense of urgency on the use of new technologies. In this panel, bypassing the question of what an algorithm is or might be, we would like to discuss the methodological challenges and practical solutions of studying digital practices in institutionally complex contexts, where algorithms are opaque and elusive. We invite methodological contributions based in field studies or of conceptual nature addressing a number of issues, like:

Techniques of entering the field and searching for elusive algorithms;
Unpacking and accounting for institutional complexity of algorithms;
Different ways of following algorithms-in-action in sensitive contexts; - Interpretation of the researchers’ position – distance/closeness, expert/amateur, individual/collective – to “see” algorithms;
Examples and reflections on interdisciplinary collaboration.

This list is not exhaustive, but simply exemplifies some of the possible themes in response to our call.

References:

Burrell, J. (2016). How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms. Big data & society, 3(1), 2053951715622512.

Eneman, M., Ljungberg, J., Raviola, E., & Rolandsson, B. The sensitive nature of facial recognition: Tensions between the Swedish police and regulatory authorities. Information Polity, (Preprint), 1-14.

Geampana, A., & Perrotta, M. (2021). Predicting Success in the Embryology Lab: The Use of Algorithmic Technologies in Knowledge Production. Science, Technology, & Human Values

Gillespie, T. (2016). # trendingistrending: When algorithms become culture. In Algorithmic cultures (pp. 64-87). Routledge.

Introna, L. D. (2016). Algorithms, governance, and governmentality: On governing academic writing. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 41(1), 17-49.

Lange, A. C., Lenglet, M., & Seyfert, R. (2019). On studying algorithms ethnographically: Making sense of objects of ignorance. Organization, 26(4), 598-617.

Larsson, S., & Viktorelius, M. (2022). Reducing the contingency of the world: magic, oracles, and machine-learning technology. AI & SOCIETY, 1-11.

Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oup Oxford.

Law, J. (1992). Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systems practice, 5(4), 379-393.

Lee, F., & Helgesson, C. F. (2020). Styles of valuation: Algorithms and agency in high-throughput bioscience. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45(4), 659-685.

Lee, F., Bier, J., Christensen, J., Engelmann, L., Helgesson, C. F., & Williams, R. (2019). Algorithms as folding: Reframing the analytical focus. Big Data & Society, 6(2), 2053951719863819.

Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Harvard University Press.

Seaver, N. (2017). Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. Big data & society, 4(2), 2053951717738104.

Taylor, S. M., Gulson, K. N., & McDuie-Ra, D. (2021). Artificial Intelligence from Colonial India: Race, Statistics, and Facial Recognition in the Global South. Science, Technology, & Human Values

Panel organizers: Elena Raviola, University of Gothenburg; Vasilis Galis and Luna Rasmussen, IT University of Copenhagen

Disrupted fieldwork and digital research encounters: Futures of digital ethnographic methods and interdisciplinary collaboration amidst global challenges

This panel focuses on digital ethnographic fieldwork and whether methods and collaborations in/of 'the digital' are the future 'new normal'. During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities were among the first institutions to go into lockdown, moving academic work off-campus and limiting access to nondigital field sites. Simultaneously, digital solutions became integrated into work practices and personal lives, moving field sites online at least partially or temporarily. This required ad hoc readjustments to suit the new social, material, and technological needs of remote research as much as the spatial configurations of ethnographic methods. Long-term effects included the (temporary) rise of digital methods in STS ethnography and its modes of interdisciplinary collaborations.

Although many scholars already worked with digital methods or conducted digital fieldwork before 2020, the pandemic required many more researchers to adjust to the ‘new normal’ of digital and online research practices, even if they were not specifically interested in ‘the digital’ previously. As such, they added to existing research practices. As a result, novel collaborations and ways of ‘working digitally’ are emerging in the wake of the crisis. A widely shared collaborative online document for ‘doing fieldwork in a pandemic’ (Lupton, 2021) highlighted the potential of digital research methods, drawing on a range of fields such as critical data studies, media studies, platform studies, or digital sociology.

Qualitative research traditions have much to offer, grappling with messy and complex datasets and intertwined technical and social effects, suggesting that reflexive ‘digital fieldwork’ (Lindgren 2019, Venturini & Rogers 2019) could be a valuable approach to dealing with digital field sites. STS researchers have contributed to such discussions. For example, Moats (2019) explores the tensions of ‘following the medium’ and following controversies, whereas Ribes (2019) comments on the challenges and opportunities that can be found in the intersection of STS and data science. Marres’ (2020) ‘situational analytics’ brings interpretative methodology into computational settings, whilst Vertesi and Ribes (2019) collect an array of examples of digital STS scholarship in their book. Wyatt (2022), an advocate for ‘digital humanism’, argues the need for different modes of collaboration across disciplines, where developing shared methods in the digital sphere might enact interdisciplinarity in fruitful ways.

This panel invites papers concerned with the practicalities of conducting different kinds of digital fieldwork in the post-pandemic ‘new normal’. We are particularly interested in research exploring a) the concrete doings of digital ethnography and methodographic reflections on the performativity of our research methods, collaborations, and digital devices (Greiffenhagen et al., 2011; Lippert and Mewes, 2021), and/or b) reflections of the potential future implications for STS methods during global geopolitical, ecological, and health-related challenges. We ask panel contributions to critically reflect upon potential exclusions and limits, frictions as well as delights of digital fieldwork, its methods and methodologies, and the academic infrastructures they are embedded into. The panel creates a collaborative space for STS researchers interested in ‘the digital’ as an empirical, theoretical or methodical concern, field site and/or field device to gather the learnings of pandemic digital fieldwork, paying specific attention to discussions on the present and futures of digital STS.

Panel organizers: Julie Mewes, Ruhr University Bochum; Frauke Rohden, University of Oslo; and Sylvia Irene Lysgård, Oslo Metropolitan University

DNA, Materiality, Information

Ever since its rise to prominence as the molecular carrier of hereditary information in the mid-20th century, DNA has been entangled in a wide range of scientific and technological practices. Recent decades, however, have witnessed a dramatic proliferation in our capacities to collect, store, sequence, analyze, synthesize, and manipulate DNA. From direct-to-consumer genetic testing and forensics to CRISPR gene editing and molecular computing, DNA interacts with material and informational infrastructures that often affect crucial aspects of our societies, such as healthcare and law enforcement, where legal and regulatory landscapes are often slow to catch up.

What happens to DNA as it navigates these infrastructures? How are infrastructures themselves affected by their interactions with DNA? What are the ethical and political implications of these entanglements? And what expressions and understandings of materiality and information are mobilized in these contexts?

We invite papers that engage with these questions through the study of DNA-focused scientific practices and technologies, as well as more theoretical or historical reflections on the notions of materiality and information as they relate to DNA.

Panel organizers: Stefano Mazzilli Daechsel and Maja Vestad, University of Oslo

Embracing the uncomfortable in energy transitions: examining conflict, justice, and disruption

The restructuration of the production, distribution, and consumption of energy towards a low emissions energy system, often labelled as the energy transition, brings along not only considerable technological and economic, but also social and political challenges. The energy crisis in Europe and the high electricity prices bring some of such tensions up to the forefront of the debate pointing not only to the need for a rapid but also fair and inclusive energy transition. Opposition and discontent towards energy infrastructure and climate polities are increasingly widespread as transitions proceed. In Norway, wind power and export of electricity have become very controversial topics. Moreover, higher meat prices, road tolls and carbon taxes are some of the climate policy measures raising strongest societal opposition.

The reasons why people disagree with such energy technology and policies are various and complex. While some may oppose transition measures because they do not agree with how the energy will be used, others will do it because they perceive the processes to be inadequate. In any case, conflicts and controversies are important expressions of democratic processes/societal engagement and thus, intrinsic parts of extensive societal transformation processes, such as energy transitions. We argue that such tensions and concerns are meaningful points of departure since they allow us to embrace the uncomfortable in energy transitions, that is, the (un)intended ways in which transitions outcomes touch upon areas of justice, equity, democracy, sustainability, and fairness. Issues of power, agency, inequality, and participation have emerged as important focal points for research examining the social dimension of energy transitions. (Foulds et al., 2022; Ingeborg rudet al., 2020; Sovacool et al., 2020).

To contribute to this growing body of literature, we invite both theoretical and empirical contributions that shed light on the tensions, controversies, dilemmas, conflicts, and issues of inequality and trade-offs involved in the processes by which energy transitions are enacted.

Contributions can address for instance:

Trade-offs, dilemmas and controversies (actors involved, goals, agendas, circumstances, instrumentalities and mechanisms, and the moments at which they are negotiated (or not).
Inequality and social justice concerns (socially uneven impacts of energy transitions pathways, dynamics of inclusion/exclusion, procedural injustices, uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of different energy pathway, etc.)
Disruption, conflict and societal engagement (actors, practices and outcomes, active resistance; the various ways in which publics engage beyond open-ended processes; emerging conflicts and the tensions between democratic governance and the actions deemed necessary for the implementation of energy technologies and policies; etc).

Panel organizers: Lucia Liste and Sara Heidenreich, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Energy Communities and Urban Sociotechnical Transformations

Energy communities including positive energy districts, renewable energy communities, and zero emission neighbourhoods are rapidly emerging as influential drivers in the transition towards decarbonised futures. Energy communities leverage the local scale to disrupt the social, institutional, and material infrastructures of energy supply and demand while introducing new constellations of producers, distributors, and consumers of energy services. They often include a combination of renewable and storage technologies, alternative institutional and regulatory frameworks, innovative models of ownership and responsibility, and novel individual and collective end user practices.

The downscaling and contextualising of energy systems has the potential to provide more flexible, costeffective, and efficient collective services while enhancing social cohesion and citizenship. Meanwhile, these new energy system configurations need to be integrated into existing urban infrastructure networks, planning and management processes, and sociocultural norms and expectations.

In this session, we invite papers that examine the sociotechnical implications of energy communities and their potential and actual impacts on sustainable urban transformations. We invite abstracts on topics including (but not limited to):

Institutional, regulatory and legal frameworks and mechanisms to support or obstruct energy communities
Contextual and situated characteristics of decentralised and distributed energy generation models
Opportunities and risks of digital and connected technologies such as blockchain, microgrids, and virtual networks
Integration of power and heat networks with water, mobility, and other collective services
New modes of ownership and responsibility, including multi-actor decision making and the commoning of energy services
Market-based approaches, local energy markets, and commercialisation
End user inclusion and exclusion as well as implications to citizenship
Performance assessment parameters and monitoring protocols
Upscaling and mainstreaming pathways for community energy models and strategies
Local resistance to energy transitions and tensions with incumbent urban planning processes

Panel organizers: Andrew Karvonen and Jenny Palm, Lund University; Thomas Berker, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Dick Magnuson, and Harald Rohracher, Linköping University

Environmental crises in digital culture: investigating networked silences

Contemporary digital culture is constituted through an information infrastructure made up of commercial platforms optimized to generate revenue through data extraction and advertising. This can mean encouraging certain forms of engagement, like on social media, or ranking information based on an understanding of relevance driven by consumer satisfaction, as is the case with search engines and Google in particular. Together, these platforms provide an information infrastructure designed to distribute content according to various interlinked commercial logics, which are almost completely beyond the control of democratic institutions. Much of the critical research on the role of social media and search engines related to environmental crises is concerned with the readily noticeable effects on, for example, larger discourses, extremist views, or polarisation. However, social media and search engines also shape everyday meaning-making on crises—such as the climate emergency or species extinction—by not only bringing certain understandings to the surface, but also pushing others to the background. Social media and search engines implicate engagement with everyday life and environmental crises on a constitutive level: Algorithms and affordances of social media and search engines, and the people and organisations that use them, co-produce what we call ‘networked silences:’ discourses, practices, and communicative norms that implicitly or explicitly obscure or conceal concerns and perspectives, render some relations invisible, and/or reinforce or generate ignorances and doubt specifically around environmental issues. As part of collective meaning-making around environmental issues, such networked silences have real implications for knowing and doing in everyday life, society and politics, and thus shape the possibilities for meaningful environmental transformations. It is therefore of great importance to map these networked silences and understand the specific mechanisms that enable and sustain them.

This open panel will explore the ways in which social media and search engines co-create networked silences, and how they can be interacted with following two questions: What is lost when contemporary environmental crises are increasingly negotiated through algorithmically mediated spaces? How can these ‘networked silences’ be understood, explored, made visible, and possibly unmade? We welcome all sorts of approaches including theoretical and exploratory ones. Examples from previous research, conversations, and a symposium at SLU Uppsala (please google “networked silences SLU”) during October 2022, help to illustrate the broad range of topics that we hope to discuss in this session which is not limited to the following:

popular or professional understandings of algorithms and platforms which shape people’s communication practices
limiting discourses on nature, climate, or environment that emerge or are reproduced through algorithms and affordances
semantic interpretations of search and recommender systems that conceal relations to environmental issues
media ecosystems, ‘rabbit holes’, ‘data voids’ and other exploitations of algorithmic logics which create or maintain ignorances about environmental issues

Panel organizers: Malte Rödl, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences; Jutta Haider, University of Borås, and Nina Wormbs, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

The Environmentalization of Economics

Economics is ubiquitous in environmental action. Over the past 50 years, the multiplication of environmental problems has gone hand in hand with the development of economic knowledge and devices that deal with those problems. From carbon markets to economic valuations of nature, from cost-benefit analyses to green finance, it is as if economics is constructing solutions to all our environmental problems.

In the STS literature, this phenomenon has mostly been studied through the lens of economization(Çalikan & Callon, 2009), that is, how the environment is brought into the economy. The environment has been found to be subjected to processes of datafication (Bowker, 2000), commensuration (Espeland & Stevens, 1998), commodification (Robertson, 2012; Smessaert et al.,2020), marketization (Ehrenstein, 2018), assetization (Birch & Muniesa, 2020), etc. These studies have shown that the environment is transformed by economic approaches, and they have pointed to the specific forms of expertise and knowledge production involved in these transformations. But they have equally shown that it is not all that simple to economize the environment: there is resistance.

This panel aims to investigate this resistance by studying the phenomenon of environmentalization of economics. The environmentalization of economics grasps the observation that economics is being mobilized for, and transformed by, attempts to tackle environmental issues. If there is indeed resistance, how does this resistance come about, and what does it do in practice? This question leads to at least two different sub-questions. First, what kinds of economic expertise are produced and mobilized, and how? Addressing this question makes visible the difficult decisions, the struggles and negotiations that are needed to come to economic solutions to our environmental problems. Instances of failure can be particularly telling for this approach. Second, the question can be turned on its head. If there is indeed resistance, does it have consequences for economics itself? To what extent do environmental issues challenge and renew economic approaches to the environment? This opens the way for a study of the evolution of economics in light of our environmental problems.

Topics for the panel may include, but are not limited to, studies on how economic concepts are developed and used to act on environmental issues, studies on particular devices aiming to transform “the conduct of conducts” (Foucault, 2004) of citizens, companies or states in the face of an environmental problem, or more explicit contestations of economic approaches to the environment which are more or less stabilized in public space.

References:

Birch, K., & Muniesa, F. (2020). Introduction: Assetization and Technoscientific Capitalism. In K.Birch & F. Muniesa (Eds.), Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (Issue December, pp. 1–42). MIT press.

Bowker, G. C. (2000). Biodiversity Datadiversity. Social Studies of Science, 30(5), 643–683.

Çalikan, K., & Callon, M. (2009). Economization, part 1: Shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization. Economy and Society, 38(3), 369–398. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140903020580

Ehrenstein, V. (2018). The friction of the mundane: on the problematic marketization of the carbon stored by trees in the tropics. Journal of Cultural Economy, 11(5), 404–419. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018.1461675

Espeland, W. N., & Stevens, M. L. (1998). Commensuration as a social process. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 313–343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.313

Foucault, M. (2004). La Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France (1978-1979). Éditions du Seuil/Gallimard.

Robertson, M. (2012). Measurement and alienation: Making a world of ecosystem services. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(3), 386–401. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00476.x

Smessaert, J., Missemer, A., & Levrel, H. (2020). The commodification of nature, a review in socialsciences. Ecological Economics, 172(October 2019), 106624. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106624

Panel organizers: Béatrice Cointe and and Kewan Mertens, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI-i3); Nassima Abdelghafour, Centre Alexandre Koyré (CAK), IFRIS; Alexandre Violle, Centre d'Etude des Mouvements Sociaux (CEMS), IFRIS.

E-verting public life: digital welfare services and the changing boundaries between states and citizens

Enforced by the COVID19 pandemic and enabled by digitalisation, the boundaries of public and private life have been disrupted by the practices of work, school, healthcare, and similar welfare services in domestic settings. During lockdowns, the private spaces and practices of home were connected in new ways to the public arena.

From the blurring of boundaries between home and work/school/healthcare come new ways of connecting, being, and relating. Being at home whilst simultaneously (and cumulatively) being present at the office, the classroom and the clinic constitutes new sociomaterial, political and cultural relationships between institutions and individuals.

The use of digital technologies in the crisis have been analysed by Gkeredakis et al (2021) as providing opportunity (experimentation), disruption (shifting to new practices) and exposure (of social and digital inequalities). The use of technology to provide remote (and convenient, safe) healthcare, for example, was speeded up during the pandemic with people more ready to accept the changes required to consult online.

However, the digital divide between those able to benefit from such changes and those not, has become more apparent. In the aftermath of COVID19 lockdowns, digitalisation of institutional and individual relationships continues. As a consequence, the boundaries of public/private and state/citizen are potentially not merely disrupted but everted: turned inside out. Private homes are entangled in the public infrastructure and civic society is reliant on private participation. There are many perceived benefits of and for the digital citizen. The speed of interaction and convenience of the digital state can render participation in social life seamless: employees have more freedom about where and when they work, patients can avoid unnecessary travel and the state can streamline functions.

The prospect of being entangled in the digital networks of state infrastructure also gives rise to concerns about privacy and surveillance of citizens as they participate in society. Further, the pressing concern of digital exclusion needs to be considered. An area of concern that has, we argue, been under-explored to date, is what happens to those people who are not fully enrolled as digital citizens. We ask: How do the processes of digitalisation of work, welfare and citizenship change participation in society? Do new networks of participation create new boundaries of exclusion? How do people repair the everyday practices of participation within and without the demands of digital society?

This panel aims to bring together scholars seeking to analyse and inform the creation of new networks between society and individuals and the implications for private and public life. We are interested in empirical and methodological papers from within and beyond STS that address questions of how citizens participate, through digital infrastructures, in society and the consequences of non-participation.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

How boundaries between public and private, state and citizen, are (re)drawn by novel digital technologies
Privacy, surveillance and participation
Digital technologies – disruption or repair social capital
Digital technologies and new dynamics of inclusion and exclusion
Analysis of new infrastructures and infrastructuring the home

Panel organisers: Marit Haldar and Lars Johannessen, University of Oslo; Gemma Hughes, University of Oxford

Friction with algorithmic systems: Exploring breakages, repair and renewal

In “Rethinking repair”, Steven Jackson (2014) asks: “what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points when thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology”. This panel follows Jackson’s cue to explore algorithmic systems with the lens offered by breakages and repair work.

Algorithmic systems, understood as “dynamic arrangements of people and code” (Seaver, 2019), are increasingly involved in people’s lives, having mundane, unexpected, and sometimes life-altering effects: such systems moderate online content, target and personalize commercial and political messages, predict risks, calculate social scores and automate public-sector decisions. The social, societal or organizational aims propelling the development and deployment of these systems are built on expectations about technology’s performance: typically including increased predictive capability, more efficient operations, or new processes that are devoid of human ideology, bias and error.

Across the board though, a friction can be observed between abstract expectations and actual systems: in practice, algorithmic systems can fail to meet their social, societal or organizational aims in locally specific and situated ways which can range from the trivial to the spectacular. This panel calls for empirical and conceptual contributions that explore algorithmic systems with the lens offered by breakdown and repair. While friction and breakages expose various kinds of vulnerabilities, misalignments or insufficiencies in and around algorithmic systems, they do not merely signal what went wrong, but alert us to the needs of maintenance, repair and renewal.

Considered in these terms, algorithmic systems come into being through repair work prompted by various breakages. We are interested in presentations that discuss globally shared notions of algorithmic systems in light of their local and situational specificity. We invite exploration of how algorithmic systems fail and break down when it comes to their social, societal or organizational aims, but also how they are repaired, developed or transformed.

The contributions could explore how and why algorithmic systems fail to meet expectations about technology’s potential, examine actual and potential breakages to think about ways forward in building better algorithmic services, or address how humans – as professionals, consumers or citizens – tinker with, creatively use or rearrange algorithmic systems to make them work for them. We are interested in how breakages can be used in a productive manner, to promote thinking about the repair and renewal of algorithmic technologies. The ultimate aim is to offer new directions for understanding algorithmic developments, and also a better sense of when algorithmic systems might be beyond repair.

Panel organizers: Tuukka Lehtiniemi and Minna Ruckenstein, University of Helsinki

From knowing to mattering: How do issues of science and technology in migration control become matters of care and concern?

Regimes of border and migration control have become heavily militarized and technologized in the past two decades. However, the use of science and technologies for purposes of border enforcement remains contested for various reasons. Concerns range from structural racism and discrimination being inscribed in technologies to lack of transparency, data protection, accountability and oversight of black-boxed technologies and automated decision-making.

What remains understudied to date is how critical publics emerge and unfold around such issues, and how critical publics emerge and make a difference in the design and implementation of technologized border and migration regimes. Science and technology studies (STS) offer scholars suitable analytical tools for studying contestations and controversy, how issues turn into matters of concern (Latour 2004, 2005) and care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 2012), how publics emerge (Chilvers and Kearnes 2015), assemble and consolidate around issues as issue-publics (Marres 2005; Marres and Lezaun 2011; Michael, 2017). The issue and practice-oriented understanding of political contestation promises new insights into the articulation of critical issues around technologized migration and border control.

To bring STS-inspired methods and analytical sensitivities to bear on borders and migration is crucial for at least three reasons: First, practices of border control are often shrouded in ignorance, secrecy and opaqueness, hence lots of potential issues are hardly known. Secondly, those affected by measures of border control and related technologies and infrastructures are often turned into non-publics and invisible collectives (Broeders and Dijstelbloem 2015). Thirdly, technologically and scientifically innovative means of border control – such as the use of drones and satellites to monitor border zones, facial recognition tunnels in airports facilitating seamless travel or the use of speech biometrics and the analysis of asylum seeker’s mobile phone data for country-of-origin determination– are often introduced in response to migration events which are framed in terms of ‘crisis’, while the technologies themselves are framed as disruptive ‘gamechangers’.

Hence, this panel asks –inspired by the conference theme – how issues and publics around the use of science and technology for purposes of border and migration control emerge in a policy field in which narratives of crisis, disruption and repair predominate. This panel is also interested in contributions that explore how controversies unfold in a highly contested policy field, the actors involved and the issues and concerns being articulated, amplified or silenced, as well as the processes and dynamics which enable or inhibit the articulation of issues of science and technology in border and migration control as matters of care and matters of concern.

It invites contributions that mobilise STS-inspired concepts and sensitivities to engage with questions such as the following: How do critical and marginalised voices become part of larger publics and controversies? How do issue-publics emerge, and which controversies and concerns gain authority and manage to affect the design, composition and operational logics of surveillance and information infrastructures? What does an STS-inspired, non-anthropocentrical approach add to the study of migrant protests, acts of civil disobedience, migrant solidarity and political participation of non-citizens in representative democracies?

Panel Organizers: Nina Amelung, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal and Stephan Scheel, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (Germany)

Future methods

The future has become an increasingly important arena for knowledge production, planning, and regulation. For instance, the complexities associated with climate change has led to an expanding use of scenarios that quantify, calculate, imagine, and perform different futures (Anderson 2010; Rickards et al. 2014). But technologies for probing, exploring, and predicting the future are not merely tools; they are also judgements that help frame and shape public debates, agendas, and worlds (Aykut et al. 2019). We should therefore attend to their capacity to draw virtual futures into the present and make them actual, as well as to their role in solidifying collective belief in the desirability and feasibility of certain futures over others (Jasanoff 2015; Groves 2017; Oomen, Hoffman & Hajer 2021).

Consequently, the aim of this panel is to explore and illuminate how the future is made mappable, measurable, and manageable. Its premise is that one important way into questions about the application of forecast to social policy starts from specific technoscientific practices – that is, practices embedded in knowledge infrastructures of prevision (Wenger et al. 2020) – of shaping the human disposition toward the future. In particular, the panel seeks to mobilize an interdisciplinary field of studies concerned with how practices of accounting for social or environmental change, and governing it through anticipative and speculative methods, work out, in however tentative or provisional a fashion, larger moralized disputes over the distribution of burdens, benefits, and responsibilities between actors (Elliott 2021). By doing so, we hope to contribute to an ongoing discussion about the complex interaction and feedback between attempts to render the future knowable and governable (Vervoort & Gupta 2018). We welcome papers that scrutinise what different future-oriented methods are doing, who are using them, for whom, and to what end.

References:

Anderson, Ben. 2010. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography 34(6).

Aykut, Stefan C., et al. 2019. “The Politics of Anticipatory Expertise: Plurality and Contestation of Futures Knowledge in Governance – Introduction to the Special Issue,” Science & Technology Studies 32(4).

Elliott, Rebecca. 2021. “Insurance and the Temporality of Climate Ethics: Accounting for Climate Change in US Flood Insurance,” Economy & Society 50(2).

Groves, Christopher R. 2017. “Emptying the Future: On the Environmental Politics of Anticipation,” Futures 92.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2015. “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity,” in Jasanoff, Sheila, and Kim, Sang-Hyun (eds.) Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oomen, Jeroen, et al. 2021. “Techniques of Futuring: On How Imagined Futures Become Socially Performative,” European Journal of Social Theory 25(2).

Rickards, Lauren, et al. 2014. “Opening and Closing the Future: Climate Change, Adaptation, and Scenario Planning,” Environment and Planning C 32(4).

Vervoort, Joost M., and Gupta, Aarti. 2018. “Anticipating Climate Futures in a 1.5 °C Era: The Link Between Foresight and Governance,” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 31.

Wenger, Andreas, et al. (eds.). 2020. The Politics and Science of Prevision: Governing and Probing the Future, London: Routledge.

Organisers: Daniel Andersson, Linköping University and Marie Widengård, Gothenburg University

Health data and public value in the Nordic countries

The Nordic welfare states have always been systematically collecting large amounts of population data (Bauer 2014, Tøndel 2014), including health and welfare data. Traditionally, this information was meant for governance and improving public health. In recent years, some Nordic countries, such as Finland, have positioned themselves in the global health data economy to attract investments (Tupasela, Snell, and Tarkkala 2020). This development includes efforts in building large national health infrastructures, such as Findata in Finland (Snell, Tarkkala and Tupasela 2021), Denmark’s National genome center (Jensen and Svendsen 2021), or a Health analytics platform in Norway (Åm, Frøyhaug and Tøndel 2021).

There are multiple ways health data can become valuable (Fiske, Degelsegger-Márques, Marsteurer and Prainsack 2022). The potential to derive financial profits from health data may challenge relations between citizens and the welfare state. The question emerges how publics are considered, and how efforts, that increase the availability of health data, are for the benefit of society and of public value.

There is little civic engagement in this topic, but the building of health infrastructures has caused some controversies. In this panel, we invite contributions on the issue of public value and health data in the Nordic countries. We invite empirical and theoretical contributions addressing questions and topics such as:

How do relations between citizens, Nordic welfare states, and marked actors change through new ‘data logistics’ (Tupasela 2023)’ in health care?
What and who is driving developments towards a health data economy in Nordic countries? What are the justifications? Which benefit-sharing-models are envisioned (if any)?
How do developments in health data governance build on or morph values expressed in the Nordic model concerning ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’? What are the similarities and differences among Nordic countries as regards public values and health data governance?
How does the policy work on a European Health Data Space influence health data governance in the Nordic countries, and vice versa?
How is policy learning from biobank governance in the Nordic countries translated into the new health data economy, regarding issues of data ownership, relations between samples and data, consent and opt-out, or public purpose evaluations
What new roles and forms do ‘quality indicators’ take in this larger picture of the health data economy and datafication?
Definitions and conceptualizations of public value and social benefits of health data in theory and practice

Organizers: Heidrun Åm, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Lotte Groth Jensen, Defactum; Karoliina Snell, Aaro M Tupasela, and Heta Tarkkala, University of Helsinki

Mapping the territories of digital contact tracing

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, policy makers and public health authorities mobilised big data, digital infrastructures, mobile networks and computer scientists to track and contain SARS-CoV-2 contagion. Digital contact tracing using smartphones emerged as a major innovation in this context. Following claims that traditional contact tracing by health authorities would not be able to cope with the high contagiousness of the virus, Covid-19 contact tracing apps were presented by their promoters as obligatory passage points for a more rapid, upscaled containment of the pandemic, while waiting for vaccines and vaccination.

Under conditions of great urgency and states of exception, more than one third of the world’s countries developed and implemented a national contact tracing app within larger ‘trace, test, and isolate’ protocols. Where debate was possible, it occurred as the experiment went on. Shifting away from the intrusive contact tracing approaches adopted mostly in Asia, several European countries developed privacy-preserving protocols. Most of them based their “privacy-by-design” solutions on Apple and Google’s exposure notification system – a transnational infrastructure which largely shaped national approaches, but not without persistent concern about privacy and sovereignty. Despite the variety of solutions and experiences, contact tracing apps remained widely controversial not only regarding privacy, power, and fundamental rights, but also as to their effectiveness.

Today, some countries have decommissioned their apps; others seek to scale up their digital practices and infrastructures to be better prepared. So, what have States learnt from the experiment? This panel proposes to address this question by mapping the territories of contact tracing. To do so, we welcome contributions focusing on one or more national experiences and considering one of the following streams of questioning.

A first stream focuses on design and implementation within existing sociotechnical frameworks. For example, how were design choices made amidst controversies linking knowledge and values about efficacy, privacy, and sovereignty? What are the consequences of those design choices in terms of the users of contact tracing, including not only individuals but also, potentially, public authorities and tech companies. To what extent do national solutions integrate with existing institutions and technologies for traditional contact tracing and other public health measures or technologies, such as testing and corona certificates, biobanks, and health registries?

The second stream addresses (non)adoption of contact tracing apps within larger public attitudes to technology and politics. This includes questioning what do qualitative and quantitative studies tell us about (non)adoption? What different forms of collective public reasoning can be seen at work? And how have national authorities reacted at public debate on adoption beyond “success” or “failure”.

A third stream, finally, looks at the learning process and the shaping of the future. This implies contributions examining whether and how different concerned actors are evaluating the outcomes from the experiment, considering that current design and implementation make assessments of effectiveness particularly difficult, and what they learned for the future. In this light, what directions are being privileged and what is the future of digital contact tracing?

Inviting contributions along one or more of these streams, the panel aims at facilitating comparative and analytical mappings of the territories of digital contact tracing.

Panel Organizers: Nicolas Baya-Laffite, University of Geneva; Céline Cholez, at University of Grenoble; and Kjetil Rommetveit, University of Bergen

Medical innovation: tracking transformations in the production, governance, clinical practice and access to medicines

Profound transformations are currently occurring in the way that disease is understood and acted upon. As genetic variants and other biomarkers increasingly become key signs of disease, new categories of disease emerge while existing classifications of disease are reconfigured. Rapid increases in computational power and development of analytical techniques aid researchers in expanding conventional ways of identifying and delineating ill health by capturing and analyzing datafied signs of disease, e.g. through ‘digital phenotyping’.

Meanwhile, the blockbuster era of pharmaceutical mass production is giving way to advanced, high-cost niche products such as gene and cell therapies and tissue-engineered products aimed at small patient populations. Different concepts are evoked to capture those transformations, including personalized medicine, precision medicine, stratified medicine, data-intensive medicine and ‘orphanisation’.

These transformations spur hopes of new treatment options but also invite critical reflection: What does the reclassification of diseases into ever more narrowly defined patient strata imply for the meaning of ‘rareness’? How do molecular markers of difference map onto other forms of human variation? What counts as ‘acceptable’ evidence and a ‘reasonable’ price when access to novel, high-cost therapies is delineated? When and by whom are the social and economic costs of digitalized diagnostics and monitoring (i.e. WGS, AI) voiced and silenced? Which kinds of diagnostic uncertainties arise and how are they dealt with by clinicians, patients and healthcare administrators? What does the reclassification of disease imply for patient identities and communities?

This panel engages STS scholarship on the social, ethical and economic implications of medical innovation. We invite papers that analyze current transformations in clinical research, diagnostics and treatment practices, discuss their implications or engage with innovative solutions to challenges of equitable access.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

Disease classification and patient stratification - Industrial innovation and new business models in the pharmaceutical sector
Pricing, payment models and other forms of valuation of novel therapies
Health technology assessment, drug coverage decisions and rationing dilemmas
Clinical challenges related to changes in diagnostics and treatment practices - Patient mobilization and identities
New data practices and negotiations about ‘evidence’ generation

Panel organizers: Sara Wadmann, Laura Emdal Navne, Amalie Martinus Hauge, and Anna Brueckner Johansen VIVE - The Danish Center for Social Science Research; and Paul Martin, University of Sheffield

More-than-human immunities and intimacies in life science and public health

The sustainability of life, society, economy, and the planet has become a key concern in life science research and public health medicine. Continuing shared explorations from the workshop with same title, organised by the MeInWe and ResBod research projects and hosted by the University of Copenhagen in fall 2021, this panel explores how relationships between life forms, societies and ecologies are imagined and reworked in constructing knowledge of health and disease.

We are concerned with continuing our explorations into how human and nonhuman beings are configured in situated scientific practices, and what more-than-human immunities and intimacies that emerge from in these practices, and last, how they change over time and space.

The overarching questions that this panel seeks to explore are: What versions of the individual and the collective, the human and the nonhuman, the planetary and the societal—their boundaries, relationships, and tensions—come to the fore in the life sciences and public health? How do data, vaccines, and genomic technologies draw boundaries as well as create relationships and intimacies between bodies and temporalities? With which methods and analytical resources may social scientists engage more-than-human immunities and intimacies in the life sciences and public health?

The panel welcomes empirically rich explorations – historical or ethnographic – of more-than-human immunities and intimacies in the life sciences and public health, as well as papers that experiment with new methods and concepts for studying the more-than-human condition of science and medicine.

Panel organizers: Mie Seest Dam, Mette Nordahl Svendsen, MEST – University of Copenhagen; Carrie Friese, London School of Economics; Hanne Castberg Tresselt, University of Oslo

More-than-human science policy?

Amidst unfolding ecological disruptions, governments, firms, and philanthropies clamor for scientific and technological solutions. It is likely that many of these solutions – emerging in the form of commodities to be bought and sold – will be implicated in the same social, technical, material and cultural webs that have produced the problems they seek to solve.

It is, in part, extractive industrial practices and evaluative frameworks which externalize harms to non-humans as ‘environmental costs’ (see Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1994) that have led to the coining of epochal terms like Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Chthulucene.

Those working in fields such as feminist STS and multispecies studies have elaborated how human wellbeing is necessarily interdependent with other-than-humans. They allow for a caring engagement with disrupted worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) and offer routes for thinking about collaborative survival on a damaged planet (Tsing, 2015).

Some of these ideas have begun to travel into spaces of research and innovation policy, by juxtaposing questions of care, control and conviviality (Arora et al. 2020), by drawing responsible research and innovation together with insights from multispecies studies (Szymanski et al., 2021), by critically engaging with ideas of care that underpin policy discourses (Kerr et al., 2018), by drawing on ideas of complicity to understand our own roles as academics sustaining extractive evaluative infrastructures (Fochler & De Rijcke, 2017), or by using them as routes to rethink the harms of research and innovation policy (Bernstein et al., 2022).

Despite the hive of activity in feminist STS and cognate fields, our sense is this work rarely survives close contact with the incumbent ways of thinking, doing and being that characterise policy worlds. Instead they are bureaucratised and co-opted by sedimented logics of, for instance, control, measurement and accountability. A telling example is the recent development of the “Do No Significant Harm” principle, part of the European Commission’ Green Deal, which gives prescriptions for dealing with significant harm as if it were invariant and absolute (Bernstein et al., 2022).

Current science policies continuously center humans-in-isolation, prioritize our economic value above all else, whilst struggling to include the interests of future generations and the relationships we have with other beings in their calculus. In this open track, we invite the Nordic STS community to explore what it might mean to engage in more-than-human science policy.

We ask researchers to bring theories, methods, or empirical experience to our panel with the aim of (for example) tuning research and funding practices to the concerns of more-than-human worlds. What might such an approach entail? What conceptual, practical and institutional equipment might be needed? How might it be bound or challenged? We seek to invite and reflect across feminist, decolonial, pluriversal, heterodox, and a range of other STS traditions to explore and rethink STS scholarship and its possible role in a more-than-human science policy. Speculations and practical experiences are welcome!

References:

Arora, S., Van Dyck, B., Sharma, D., & Stirling, A. (2020) Control, Care, and Conviviality in the Politics of Technology for Sustainability. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 16(1): 247–62.

Bernstein, M. J., Franssen, T., Smith, R. D. J., & de Wilde, M. (2022). The European Commission’s Green Deal is an opportunity to rethink harmful practices of research and innovation policy. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01802-3

Fochler, M., & de Rijcke, S. (2017). Implicated in the Indicator Game? An Experimental Debate. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 3, 21-40.

Funtowicz, S. & Ravetz, J. (1994) The Worth of a Songbird: Ecological Economics as a Post-Normal Science. Ecological economics 10: 197–207. Kerr, A., Hill, R. & Till, C. (2018) The Limits of Responsible Innovation: Exploring Care, Vulnerability and Precision Medicine. Technology in Society 52: 24–31.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Szymanski, E., Smith, R.D.J., and Calvert, J. (2021) Responsible Research and Innovation Meets Multispecies Studies: Why RRI Needs to be a More-Than-human Exercise. Journal of Responsible Innovation 8(2): 261–66. Tsing, A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Panel organizers: Robert Smith, University of Edinburgh; Michael J. Bernstein, Austrian Institute of Technology; Filippo Cuttica, independent consultant; Thomas Franssen, University of Leiden; Cian O’Donovan, University College London; and Mandy de Wilde, University of Amsterdam.

A Nordic Colonial Model?

Nordic colonialism is a vastly understudied, but emerging research field that interrogates the colonial past, present, and futures of the Nordic states. Most prominently, this involves the colonisation of the Indigenous lands of Kalaallit Nunaat and Sápmi, but Nordic colonialism also encompasses the Faroe Islands, Iceland, what is today known as the U.S. Virgin Islands, parts of India, Ghana, and the United States.

Inviting papers from across the social sciences and humanities, the panel aims to engender a broad conversation on the growing interest in Nordic colonialism. Examples of questions it seeks to raise include, but are not limited to the following: Does it at all make sense to speak of a Nordic colonialism? Are there commonalities between the colonial practices of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, or mainly differences? Is there a ‘Nordic colonial model’ or typology that is differentiated from colonialism in other places?

By what tools, technologies, and scientific underpinnings have Nordic colonial practices been carried out and made possible? What narratives and justifications have legitimised it? What are the on-going effects of Nordic colonialism? In the past as well as in the present, how are its consequences resisted and met through practices of survivance? Finally, and considering Nordic colonialism as an emerging research field, what methodological and ethical challenges does it face? How can these be overcome?

The panel welcomes presentations that engage with these and other topics in and across the social sciences and humanities, as well as by practitioners engaging in non-academic interrogative practices such as art and activism.

Panel organizers: Tone Huse, UiT The Arctic University of Norway/University of Oslo; Britt Kramvig, UiT The Arctic University of Norway; Astri Dankertsen, NORD University; and Prashanti Mayfield, UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

The promise of (alternative) platforms for (alternative) information infrastructures

Over the past three decades, IT infrastructure projects have emerged in all sectors of society. Be it in government, education, healthcare, research, agriculture, or finance, these projects have been driven by the same promise: sector-wide IT infrastructures will reduce costs, foster innovation, and ultimately improve social welfare. Most of these projects have failed to deliver. They have been criticized for being pipe dreams, unworkable from the start, or for leading to the transfer and accumulation of power.

But despite criticism and repeated failures, they keep coming back. Proponents argue that experience gained over the years and new technological capabilities will overcome the difficulties of the past; efforts must continue, especially in light of the new crises and threats facing society. It is not surprising that to attempt to build an information infrastructure is fraught with difficulties. Building a system is never done in a vacuum. Contextual constraints always limit the possible design strategies and decisions (Robey and Markus, 1984).

To develop an information system at the scale of an organisation or of an enterprise is reportedly difficult. How much more difficult can it be to design and roll out an information infrastructure, shared among many organisations, across an entire economic sector, and possibly even across national boundaries? At this level, to work on a blueprint does not make sense. Design becomes a delicate balancing act of the existing (Poppe et al., 2014; Nielsen and Saebo, 2016).

Architecture must preserve organizations and their information systems, which are associated with structures and procedures, and more importantly, with people and work practices (Bowker et al., 2009; Edwards et al., 2009). Some researchers have identified a new way to build information infrastructures that they have coined platform-oriented infrastructures (Hanseth and Bygstad, 2021). This suggests that the platform model, which has been known for 15 years, could serve as a foundation for the sustainable assemblage of sector-wide information infrastructures out of large and respected existing platforms. Yet, even when they are run by public actors, most platforms discussed in the literature are centralized and proprietary service platforms, structurally similar to the GAFAM (de Rosnay and Musiani, 2020). However, this type of platform is only one possibility among others: alternatives exist that rely neither on centralization nor on ownership. The most widely used is the TCP-IP protocol stack, which is the fundament of the Internet information infrastructure. But there are others.

These alternative platforms are increasingly sought after, especially in the context of the management and the sharing of sensitive or personal data. In this panel, we wish to collectively explore platform models (both dominant and alternative) and ask the question of their envisaged or proven opportunities for the constitution of sector-wide information infrastructures. Which are the socio-technical choices and the platform architectures involved in the design of Iis, whether centralized, peer-to-peer, federated or orchestrated? What configurations of actors do they presume? What is innovative or promising about them compared to past criticisms? What challenges and opportunities do they represent?

The panel invites contributions, both theoretical and empirical, that will advance knowledge and understanding of these issues.

Panel organizers: Léa Stiefel, University of Lausanne and Alain Sandoz, University of Neuchâtel

Re-/presentations of Disruption and Care

The term ‘Re-/presentation’ is borrowed from Paul Stenner for renderings that also create: The technologies of information in a wide sense with which human beings (with more or less disruptive /-ed lives) are being depicted and formed, for better and for worse (the Scandinavian ‘fremstilling’ is close, sharing etymological roots with Heidegger’s Gestell).

This panel recognizes and explores the performativity of such re-/presentations, in the light of the opposition between disruption and care. The belief that ‘knowledge’ always serves Enlightenment and human progress is recently, once again, shattered, not only by lies and misrepresentations, but by systematic, if unintended, disruptive consequences of technologies and infrastructures of information. As we struggle to contain the data doubles of archives and records, we also indulge in multiple self-re-/presentations on media we scarcely understand, and our cultural norms and values lag behind.

Ongoing proliferations of technologies, genres, and the communities and cultures that emerge with them, keep challenging our ways of thinking about epistemology and ethics, as well as the disciplinary frames from which we approach them. The suspicion arises that even announcing disruption – as a tendency inherent to Modernity – may itself be disruptive, as a self-fulfilling prophesy, no less than declaring hope. ‘Care’ has recently been reconceptualized in several strands of thinking, in ways that acknowledge the co-emergence of persons with technologies and collectives, and which seek to contribute to the rethinking of ethics that the Anthropocene urgently requires (by theorists such as Stiegler, Mol, Tronto, or Puig de la Bellacasa).

As practices of care tend to move beyond their different particular standards (e.g. education, therapy, nursing), those theories offer ways to reflect and rearticulate their re-/presentations as performative. For instance, the concept of care is perhaps a better way to approach the potentially ‘stigmatizing’ effects of re-/presentations (of crime, disease, etc.) than the liberal ethics of self-determination, which remains unable to address the emerging ‘care crisis’ in Western countries.

Can care, as emergent ethics, be conceptualized and concretized in ways that take us beyond the oscillations between order and disorder, which have enthralled critical social theory for so long, in our attempts to overcome the functionalisms with which we usually make sense of practices? Or must it return us to hopes of order – e.g. methods, strategies, models, priorities – that restrain us from imagining and performing emancipatory assemblages? Let us dive into cases where all this is at stake and urges us to relearn and re-/present ourselves and what we are doing

Panel organizers: Morten Nissen, Lisa Rosén Rasmussen, Merethe R. Gjørding, Hanne Knudsen, Aarhus University; Astrid P Jespersen and Maria Voulgaris Valeur, University of Copenhagen; Tine Friis, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen; Johanna Motzkau, Open University, UK; Mads Bank, University of Southern Denmark.

Rethinking the good green economy

In this session we depart from the notion of the good economy (Asdal et al., 2021) as an analytical tool for exploring how economies are reconfigured into striving for common goods beyond profit. We suggest that the green transition and its associated economies is an emblematic case of ‘good economies’ where ambitions for profits and the common good of climate mitigation are fused. This ‘good green economy’ spurs a number of issues that STS researchers should engage with. As renewable energy infrastructure projects are framed as being ‘good’ because they are ‘green’ - solving collective concerns over climate change (Frankel et al. 2019) - opposition that challenges the ‘goodness’ of such projects often become recognized as unreasonable NIMBYism (Not-in-MyBackyard) (Aitken, 2010; Papazu, 2017). Through this moral nexus of being good for profit and planet, the use of land for solar and wind tend to trump other land uses (Howe & Boyer, 2015; Rudolph & Kirkegaard, 2019) and discredit alternative community-based ownership structures (Kirkegaard et al. 2019) that attempt to propose other versions of a good economy. Thus, the good economy of the green transition comes with a specific set of morals that links energy production to economic growth and hence hampers calls for degrowth rather than ecological modernization (Daggett, 2019; Dunlap, 2021). This session brings together energy researchers in STS who strive to examine how the good of the green transition is constructed and deviced (Muniesa et al. 2007; Doganova and Karnøe 2015), tracing its socio-material consequences. By drawing attention to the moral aspects of the green transition we may explore the justifications (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) and devices (Muniesa et al. 2007; Doganova and Karnøe 2015) that help to maintain or create the conditions for criticizing the good green economy. We invite paper presentations that theoretically or empirically engages with un-blackboxing ‘the good green economy’ e.g. through:

analyzing the systems, discourses and valuation devices that sustain the good green economy
attending to critiques and controversies of the good green economy
following alternative pathways to the green transition

References

Aitken, M. (2010). Why we still don’t understand the social aspects of wind power: A critique of key assumptions within the literature. Energy Policy, 38(4), 1834–1841. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ENPOL.2009.11.060

Asdal, K., Cointe, B., Hobæk, B., Reinertsen, H., Huse, T., Morsman, S. R., & Måløy, T. (2021). ‘The good economy’: a conceptual and empirical move for investigating how economies and versions of the good are entangled. BioSocieties, 0317. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-021-00245-5

Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On Justification. Princeton. Daggett, C. N. (2019). The Birth of Energy [Book]. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1134cr

Doganova, L., & Karnøe, P. (2015). Building markets for clean technologies: Controversies, environmental concerns and economic worth. Industrial Marketing Management 44: 22-31.

Dunlap, A. (2021). Does Renewable Energy Exist? Fossil Fuel+ Technologies and the Search for Renewable Energy [Bookitem]. In A critical approach to the social acceptance of renewable energy infrastructures (pp. 83–102). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030- 73699-6_5

Frankel, C., Ossandón, J., & Pallesen, T. (2019). The organization of markets for collective concerns and their failures. Economy and Society 48(2): 153-174.

Howe, C., & Boyer, D. (2015). Aeolian politics. Distinktion, 16(1), 31–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2015.1022564

Kirkegaard, J. K., Cronin, T., Nyborg, S. & Karnøe, P. (2021): ‘Paradigm shift in Danish wind power – the (un)sustainable transformation of a sector’. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, Volume 23, Issue 1, pp. 97-113, DOI:10.1080/1523908X.2020.1799769.

Muniesa, F., Millo, Y., Callon, M. (2007). An introduction to market devices. In M. Callon, Y. Millo, & F. Muniesa (Eds.), Market devices (pp. 1-12). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Papazu, I. (2017). Nearshore Wind Resistance on Denmark’s Renewable Energy Island: Not Another NIMBY Story. Science & Technology Studies, 30(1), 4–24. www.vaab.dk.

Rudolph, D., & Kirkegaard, J. K. (2019). Making Space for Wind Farms: Practices of Territorial Stigmatisation in Rural Denmark. Antipode, 51(2), 642–663. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12428

Panel organizers: Julia Kirch Kirkegaard, Daniel Nordstrand Frantzen, and Sophie Nyborg, Technical University of Denmark (DTU)

Risk, finance, procedures of financialization and the new worth of the green

Finance has in the past recent years been called upon to turn into more of an environmental agent and addressed by, among others, the COP26 climate conference and the World Bank¹ to finance the changes that are needed to transition society in green and sustainable direction. In parallel, financial actors and institutions are restructuring and responding to the call by offering saving schemes for green investment and also building large departments for reporting on and valuing green companies and sustainable investments.

More broadly, scholars have recognized the influx of financial initiatives not only concerned with financial return but also some form of “social return” and connected its recent upswing to a legitimation crisis after the 2008 global financial crisis (Chiapello & Knoll, 2020; Langley, 2020; Langley et al., 2021). At the same time, this can be linked to a wider moralization of the economy (Fourcade 2017) and towards yet another way in which economy and ‘the good’ are being intertwined (Asdal et. al 2021).

The “green finance” sector, however, is diverse, comprising for instance, techniques and practices for decarbonizing capital (Langley et al., 2021), with a goal of directing investment towards low-carbon initiatives and away from high-carbon sectors. Also, this is about how financialized ways of operating and reasoning are shaping practices and sustainability issues outside the conventional sites of finance. In addition to how finance may have an impact on the climate change issue by investing in and directing capital towards so-called green projects, climate change is also thought to affect the financial sector itself. This can be seen for example in how the question of risk features in how finance approaches the environmental issue. Here the climate crisis is a risk not only to single investments, but to the financial system as a whole, and consequently becomes one of the reasons why finance needs to be concerned with the environmental issue in the first place. The fairly recent notion of “climate risk” for instance, highlights this. Some scholars, like Chiapello (2020) have questioned “the green finance moment” and its possibilities of offering solutions to solving the climate crisis, and views it rather as “a new stage in environmental policies that systemically accompanies the financialization of capitalism” (Chiapello, 2020, p. 20).

In this open panel we ask:

What is this ‘new’ and ‘green’ finance sector?
How does this new “green finance movement” shape the environmental issue
How to empirically and theoretically analyze finance as a new environmentally engaged actor and how should we understand and analyze claims that finance can secure and enable a green transition?
More specifically, we also ask what are the procedures and tools of valuations at play in ascribing monetary value to the environment?
What are the forms of valuations at work in finance as compared with other valuations tools, practices and disciplines?
How does finance seek to combine that of securing return with doing good with money and are these practices of valuation different from standard methods in finance, or are we rather seeing innovations in methods to handle such new issues?

The new role of finance is both empirically, theoretically, and analytically under-explored. This panel invites empirically grounded papers aiming at investigating the abovementioned and related questions.

References:

Asdal, K, Cointe, E., Hobæk, B., Reinertsen, H., Huse, T., Morsman, S., & Måløy,T, (2021)’The Good Economy’; a conceptual and empirical move for investigating how economies and versions of the good are entangled, Biosocieties.

Chiapello, E. (2020). Stalemate for the financialization of climate policy. Economic Sociology, 22(1), 10.

Chiapello, E., & Knoll, L. (2020). Social finance and impact investing. Governing welfare in the era of financialization. Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 45(3), 7–30.

Langley, P. (2020). Impact investors: The ethical financialization of development, society and nature. In The Routledge Handbook of Financial Geography (pp. 328–351). Routledge.

Fourcade, M. (2017). The fly and the cookie: Alignment and unhingement in 21st-century capitalism. Socio-Economic Review 15 (3): 661–678.

Langley, P., Bridge, G., Bulkeley, H., & van Veelen, B. (2021). Decarbonizing capital: Investment, divestment and the qualification of carbon assets. Economy and Society, 50(3), 494–516. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2021.1860335

Panel organizers: Kristin Asdal and Stine Engen, University of Oslo; Liliana Doganova, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation

[1] https://ukcop26.org/cop26-goals/finance/ See also The World Bank for a similar argument:https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/WEurope/2014/IMF-global-commission-economy-climate.pdf

Quantification in process. Putting data into measurement categories

Quantification refers to the process of building representations of reality with numbers – in fields as varied as science, economics, administration, or everyday life (Desrosières 1993, Porter 1995, Espeland and Stevens 2008, Hirschman and Berman 2018, Mennicken and Espeland 2019, Mennicken and Salais 2022). It includes two consecutive steps (Desrosières 2008): 1) constructing measurement conventions and categories, i.e. standards that define the object of measurement by selecting what counts and what does not, and 2) measuring, i.e. to fill in the categories with elements of the pre-existing reality (often called data).

This panel aims at empirically investigating the variety of processes by which data are produced and integrated into measurement categories, in order to better understand the intertwining of the two steps of quantification. To draw on an industrial metaphor: once the conventional blueprint has been agreed upon, how do the persons in charge of the quantification process (statisticians, accountants...) collect and transform their data input into a quantified output?

Putting data into categories is thus seen as a concrete activity, a set of material and moral practices that unfold in a work environment, drawing on ecologies of work and infrastructures ethnographies (Star and Strauss 1999, Star 1999, Denis and Goëta 2018, Didier 2022). Furthermore, putting data into categories is considered as a problematic process in which data must first be produced, then conveyed and transformed, before being integrated into categories of measurement (Edwards 2010, Gitelman 2013, Leonelli and Tempini 2020). From official statistics to corporate accounting, from management indicators to covid curves and dashboards, each quantification brings a particular response to the challenges of data integration into categories and implies a singular work on data.

To identify points of convergence and contrasts between the forms of integration, the expected communications will be based on a rich empirical material, and may address the following questions:

Which data are needed, and which criteria lead to their selection or dismissal?
How to collect and store them? To what extent should they be modified?
How to eventually articulate them to the categories?
How to maintain data into categories, and deal with the possible frictions resulting from the encounter between categories and data?

Panel organizers: Quentin Dufour, Camille Beaurepaire and Siyu Li, Ecole Normale Supérieure

Sector coupling in energy transition as sociotechnical processes

Energy transition is on the top of the political agenda in order to meet the climate objectives and is a crucial geopolitical issue to secure energy capacity. In this framework, electrification based on renewable energies is considered a key strategy towards a fossil free society. Nonetheless, in order to secure the fluctuations of renewable energies the integration and interoperability of adaptable infrastructures, combining energy production, storage and consumption, is required in order to achieve cost-effective efficiency, flexibility and reduce the impacts on the environment (European Parliament, 2018).

Even though there is not a consensus on what sector coupling (SC) is (Ramsebner et al., 2020), one can refer to a “process of coordinating the operation and planning of energy systems across multiple pathways and/or geographical scales to deliver reliable, cost-effective energy services with minimal im¬pact on the environment” (O’Malley and Kroposki 2017, p. 10). In the last ten years a rich corpus of literature has been produced on the issue of SC, which has been mainly focused on data availability, sharing and processing and in terms technical-economic benefits to achieve cost-efficiency (Ramsebner et al. 2020).

However, converging infrastructures means, first of all, to introduce a higher level of complexity and uncertainties connected to the governance of such integrated systems characterized by multiple actors (included prosumers), decision-makings levels (and policy frameworks) and working practices at organizational boundaries. For example, STS literature shows that the integration of systems takes shape, first of all, by energy models which combine different sectors – energy, transports, storage – and from which scenarios are developed as basis for decision-making.

The connection between modelling and decisions/planning or, in other words, between science and politics, is shown as crucial to understand future energy configurations. (Aykut, 2019; Silvast, et al., 2020). Moreover, the passage from actual centralized energy supply to decentralized ones is also meant to produce uncertainties as well as the entrance of individual actual actors (prosumers) as well as cooperative and new business opportunities (new business models) is likely to change the constellation of actors and poses questions on governance dynamics (Büscher and Scheer, 2020). In this process while politics is expected to steer sector coupling, it is still unclear how the interaction between multiple actors will be done (Büscher and Scheer, 2020) and how transparency and accountability will be ensured. Finally, sectors coupling will not happen in a vaccum but in inter-connection with already established path dependency processes, routines, professional competences, established power relations and decision-making process which may also hinder change (Shove and Spurling, 2013; Rinkinen et al., 2019). Thus, the flexibility and capacity of systems to converge and be integrated cannot be taken for granted but need to be analyzed and worked upon in each specific context.

These crucial dimensions – tightly connected to the “technical” feasibility of systems integration - are still underexplored (Silvast et al., 2021). This requires a sociotechnical approach whereby the “technical” dimension cannot be studied independently from social conditions, political opportunities and ethical choices connected to it (Sovacool, 2020; Shove and Trentmann, 2018). We welcome contributions that may shed light on

how sector coupling takes shape in specific contexts from a sociotechnical perspective;
the challenges connected to sector coupling which may hinder stakeholders’ capacity to act and to anticipate;
political and ethical issues emerging from sector coupling.

References:

Aykut, S. C. (2019) “Reassembling Energy Policy: Models, Forecasts, and Policy Change in Germany and France”, Science & Technology Studies, 32(4), pp. 13–35. doi: 10.23987/sts.65324

Büscher, C., Scheer, D. and Nabitz, L. (2020) Future converging infrastructures, TATuP Zeitschrift für Technikfolgenabschätzung in Theorie und Praxis · July 2020 European Parliament (2018) Sector coupling: how can it be enhanced in the EU to foster grid stability and decarbonise? https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2018/626091/IPOL_STU(2018)626091_EN. pdf

O’Malley, Mark; Kroposki, Benjamin (2017): Unlocking flexibility. Energy systems integration. In: IEEE Power and Energy Magazine 15 (1), pp. 10–14.

Ramsebner, J, Haas, R, Ajanovic, A, Wietschel, M. The sector coupling concept: A critical review. WIREs Energy Environ. 2021; 10:e396. https://doi.org/10.1002/wene.396

Rinkinen J. Shove E. and Torriti J. (2019) Energy Fables Challenging Ideas in the Energy Sector, Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge.

Shove, E. and Spurling, N. (2013) Sustainable Practices Social Theory and Climate Change, Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge.

Shove E. and Trentmann F. (2018) Infrastructures in Practice: The Dynamics of Demand in Networked Societies, Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge.

Silvast et al 2021 Silvast, A., Laes, E., Abram, S., Bombaerts, G., 2020. What do energy modellers know? An ethnography of epistemic values and knowledge models. Energy Research and Social Science 66, 101495. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. erss.2020.101495 Silvast, A., Abram, S. and Copeland, C. (2021) Energy systems integration as research practice, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, DOI: 10.1080/09537325.2021.1974376

Sovacool, B. K., D. J. Hess, S. Amir, F. W. Geels, R. Hirsh, L. R. Medina, C. Miller, et al. 2020. “Sociotechnical Agendas: Reviewing Future Directions for Energy and Climate Research.” Energy Research & Social Science 70: 101617

Panel organizers: Silvia Bruzzone, Mälardalen University (Sweden)

Situating Democratic Futures

Following on from the recent book Democratic Situations (Mattering Press 2022), this panel invites papers interested in going beyond democracy as an assortment of abstract ideals, an off-the- shelf theoretical construct or taken for granted political reality. It encourages participants to ask what shapes democracy might take and how democratic encounters and situations may surprise us if they are allowed to emerge through analysis or other types of active engagement rather than deployed as a theoretical starting point.

Democratic politics has been conceptualized as an incredibly broad term in STS (Brown 2015) and is often invoked to argue for making science and technology more ‘democratic’. But what is the relationship between STS analyses of democratic politics and ambitions for a politics that can be called ‘democratic’? While politics and the political have been widely explored, there has been a tendency to simply assume that democratic politics is an ideal available to guide analyses and interventions.

We find this challenge topical yet underexplored in current STS research. How can democratic politics be understood and studied based on the empirical-conceptual repertoires and methods of STS? We welcome papers that aim to contribute to the study of democracy with a small d, by investigating democracy as a rapidly shifting and techno-scientifically entangled moving target. We are interested in exploring how, through empirical analysis of practical encounters, democracy may emerge as something that fluctuates; something that must be practically coordinated and is often contested as well as mobilized for different purposes.

We are also interested in exploring how to study and re-describe central categories of political life, such as the electorate, the community, or the public, without either reifying or delegitimizing them. Following from this, how do we understand less obvious sites of democratic politics as exactly that: sites that are, in perhaps surprising ways, relevant to democracy today? These questions are especially urgent in a time when democratic politics, foundational to many contemporary societies as well as to our technoscientific futures, seems endangered and under attack from many sides. What risks are involved, if any, in unpacking institutions and practices assumed to secure and support ‘modern democracy’? And, conversely, under the current circumstances, do we dare not to unpack the workings of our systems in time to learn more about them?

We invite papers which study what we call democratic situations empirically, and which do not take for granted that all politics are democratic or that democracy is what political scientists claim it is. These might include papers about formal or informal procedures involved in democratic politics, technologies invested with democratic capacities, or controversies over what counts as democratic in specific empirical contexts.

Panel organizers: Irina Papazu and Andreas Birkbak

Small data, big deal or big data, small deal? Zooming into the practices of digitalised policing

The rapid evolution of machine learning, data mining and data analysis have advanced crime analysis and constituted data technologies as an imperative for police work (Ferguson 2017). Several software packages for data analytics are promoted to police officers for identifying patterns that indicate future spatial and temporal distributions of crime (Kaufmann et al. 2018).

Predictive policing is aimed at anticipating the future, however there is also research indicating that it is more attuned towards present (Hildebrandt 2016). There is scarce research on how digital tools are practically adopted and adapted in policing and with what adverse social impact (Halterlein 2021). Hence, there is a conceptual and empirical need for research that simultaneously examines how policing actors are using data driven technologies and focuses on how their varied usage affects not only crime solving/prevention but also the technologies themselves (Meijer and Wessels 2019). Moreover, we know very little of how the knowledge is produced, used, perceived and experienced in Nordic countries, which might account for specific features in the deployment and perception of digital policing tools.

This panel therefore focuses on how big and small data, humans and software co-constitute crime, crime solving and/or prediction in a Nordic context. We invite contributions that problematize how police officers and other policing actors are using technologies, how their varied usage affects policing, and how digitalised policing influences the processes and outcomes of knowledge production. The panel will also examine what values are embedded in digital policing technologies, and how these are negotiated and transformed before and after implementation of these technologies. Finally, we aim to discuss how can STS inspired methodologies and conceptual frameworks contribute to studying predictive policing and intelligence-led policing, considering the often non-transparent development and implementation of digital police technologies. T

he panel welcomes a diverse set of papers with concepts, approaches, and methods to problematize how social and cultural values, biases, and legal adjustments are conceived and embedded in data-driven police innovations, as well as experienced, negotiated and practiced by citizens, law makers, police officers and software developers.

Ferguson, A.G., (2017). The rise of big data policing: Surveillance, race, and the future of law enforcement. NYC: NYU Press.

Hälterlein, J. (2021). “Epistemologies of predictive policing: Mathematical social science, social physics and machine learning”. Big Data & Society, 8 (1): 1–13.

Hildebrandt, M. (2016) New Animism in Policing: Re-animating the Rule of Law? I: B. Bradford, B. Jauregui, I. Loader og J. Steinberg (red) The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing, Los Angeles: Sage.

Kaufmann, M., Egbert, S. and Leese, M., (2018). Predictive policing and the politics of patterns. The British Journal of Criminology, 59(3), pp.674–692.

Kaufmann, M., 2019. Who connects the dots? Agents and agency in predictive policing. In Technology and Agency in International Relations (pp. 141-163). London: Routledge.

Meijer, A. and Wessels, M. (2019) Predictive Policing: Review of Benefits and Drawbacks, International Journal of Public Administration, 42:12, 1031-1039

Panel organizers: Helene O. I. Gundhus, Vasilis Galis, and Anda Adamsone-Fiskovica

The Socio-Technical Landscapes of Cybersecurity

Prompted by rising levels of cybercrime, cyber espionage, disinformation campaigns, military cyberspace operations, and hacktivism, cyber and information security is a burgeoning area of socio-technological development and politics in which governments and industry increasingly invest attention, interest, and resources (Jacobsen & Liebetrau 2022). Cyber and information security is also a growing sub field within Computer Science, which as an intellectual field increasingly influences how we organize social life and come to think about the world we live in (Amoore 2013, 2019).

Arguably we are currently bearing witness to the increasing ‘securitization’ (Hansen & Nissenbaum 2009, Wæver 1993) a techno-politics with wide societal ramifications. This is connected to profound changes to how we manage risk, and uncertainty and organize the future. Louise Amoore (2013) argues, for instance, that at least since 9/11, we have seen the rise of a new politics of possibility, where even the slightest identification of potentials for something (bad) to occur, may legitimize state or political intervention, such as intense surveillance and data capture (Bigo 2006).

Cyber security issues are also fueled by an increased dependency on IT as a crucial component in critical infrastructures, which makes those vulnerable to cyber-attacks as well as human and technical errors. At stake is also how trust in e.g., state institutions is affected as they increasingly come to rely on IT systems by default and how trust itself becomes depended on trust in and among particular groups of experts in CS engineering and research (Mackenzie 2001). Furthermore, it becomes an issue how users, citizens or human beings are configured with the securitization of social life in particular settings (Klimburg-Witjes & Wentland 2021). More STS research is needed for understanding the complexities of our quickly evolving socio-technical landscapes of cyber security.

In this panel we welcome STS engagements with matters such as:

Critical infrastructures and systems
Trust, mistrust, and uncertainty
Future making
Risk and threat management
Configuration of users in relation to secure systems
Politics of possibilities, potentials, or probabilities
Securitization - Surveillance - Vulnerability

Organizers: Christopher Gad, IT University of Copenhagen and Torben Elgaard Jensen, Aalborg University

Sociotechnical Data Studies

Sociotechnical as in actor-network theory or material-semiotic as in feminist STS, implies an ontology in which facts, technology, organizations, infrastructures - ‘worlds’ broadly speaking, are thought of and studied as heterogenous assemblages. It implies an ontology in which things are comprised of various elements and forces. An ontology that knows no boundaries. Or at least no boundaries should be assumed, only empirically found.

In this panel we want to investigate what sociotechnical data studies might entail. In widespread and prevalent technology optimist discourses, data is endowed with huge potential. For instance, in the two recent reports issued by the Danish Agency of Digital Government, data is presented as a “resource” – in Danish “råstof” – that will make welfare services more effective, better and more cost effective. Data is articulated as a driver for innovation and growth in businesses; it will decrease energy consumption and solve the climate crisis and so on.

Characteristic of the discourse are ideas about data as universal, transcendent, neutral, objective etc. In the field of critical data studies such conceptions have been rightfully challenged. But in the field of critical data studies and also in current public discourses, data is articulated as means for surveillance, exploitation, disciplining and manipulation, most famously expressed in the work of Shoshana Zuboff. The promises as well as the dark sides of data thus live side by side. Shared by both the optimistic and pessimistic discourses are ideas about the force and agency of data, but in shifting ways. In one instance, data seems to hold tremendous power, while in the next that very power is ridiculed. Ironically, in critical data studies one finds such asymmetrical discourses that first ridicule ideas about data ‘as the new oil’, yet in the next, grant data the role as being a forceful perpetrator of malicious acts.

The obvious response in STS to such ‘inconsistencies’ is to ‘get empirical’ and closer to the practice and subject matter and approach it as a sociotechnical problem. Sociotechnical approaches to data thus seem pertinent. Yet how do we study and research these complex digital infrastructures in other than rudimentary ways?

Opening the ‘black box’ of data and digital infrastructures seems to be a wholly different challenge than unpacking speedbumps, door-closers, guns and hotel keys… or is it? Have the tools of STS become feeble and weak in an arms race against the digital? And what are the ontological politics of data and digital infrastructures? How do data weave together new ontologies and thus novel ontological problems? In short, how do we go about doing sociotechnical data studies? This panel invites presentations that:

Theorize and conceptualize data and digitalization as sociotechnical
Propose ways and methods of studying data as sociotechnical
Present empirical sociotechnical studies of data and the digital Investigate the relation between data, democracy and digital citizenship as a sociotechnical problem
Other…

Panel organizers: Peter Danholt, Peter Lauritsen, Patrick Heiberg Kapsch, and Antoinette Fage-Butler, Aarhus University

Soil Repair: Recuperating Human-Soil Relationships

Human survival depends on the invisible and largely unknown world below our feet. The slow pace of “natural” soil creation processes (pedogenesis) justifies a perspective on fertile soils as a limited non-renewable resource, like coal and oil. Planet Earth has reached “peak soil”, the point at which we are destroying soil faster than it can recover. Moreover, precarious, contested and post-conflict livelihoods remain largely disconnected from conversations on more-than-human health based on microbial and metabolic thinking.

Soils are not just endangered—they are also becoming dangerous. Contaminated by chemicals and radioactive substances, some soils pose a threat to more-than-human health. Further, soils’ weakened ability to store organic matter—the result of extractive land use and global warming—means that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other climate gases are being released, accelerating the climate crisis. In this panel we will jointly begin to examine how soil scientists and practitioners have developed, carried out and imagined ways of maintaining and restoring soils. We conceptualize soil not as a natural resource to be exploited, but as “anthropogenic” – as lively and dynamic natural-cultural composition responsive to human care.

We aim to rethink and reimagine human-soil relationships beyond extraction, but to open up soil management to developing more relational understandings. This entails inventive methods, attending to studies of repair and maintenance. This Soil Repair panel invites contributions on soil repair, soil ecologies, soil remediation, soil commons, and soil aesthetics, contributing to one or several of these research themes:

knowledges about technologies and practices of soil repair in landscapes damaged by industrial agriculture or pollution
soils as living multispecies ecologies responsive to human care
inventive bioremediation experiments – anchored in technoscience, communities, or arts – with toxic, radioactive, or depleted soils
the role of emerging soil imaginaries in technoscience, agriculture, literature, and the arts for building more sustainable futures.

We aim to bring together scholars interested in both empirical and conceptual/theoretical contributions on practices of care and repair in relation to contaminated, toxic, and depleted soils. We are particularly interested in submissions that are grounded in empirical cases or specific sites of soils recuperation. These include, but are by no means limited to studies that contribute to:

conceptualizing and historicizing the layered assemblages of anthropogenic soils - close-up studies of bioremediation technologies and other practices of soil recuperation after industrial pollution, fallout, mining, or intensive agriculture
praxiographies of knowing and doing soils – and the multiple ontologies brought about by monitoring, measurement, planning, agricultural recuperating and environmental remediation
artistic research and practice-based experiments in conceptualizing and doing soils otherwise
efforts toward reimagining soil health, soil commons, and soils futuring.

We welcome contributions that engage with these topics on site and theoretically including formats of practice-based and artistic research.

The panel is coordinated by members of the large interdisciplinary project “Anthropogenic Soils. Recuperating Human-Soil Relationships on a Troubled Planet (SOILS)”, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and University of Oslo.

Panel organizers: Susanne Bauer, Marianne Lien and Daniel Münster, University of Oslo; Nora Sørensen Vaage, NORD University

Solving (social) problems?: Imaginaries of infrastructures and participation in the Good Democracy

Democracy is a spatial-material setting where problems are imagined to be taken care of and solved in participatory-sensitive ways. In this setting, building (good) public infrastructures, inclusivity, diversity, and public participation are more and more imagined to provide democratic solutions for contemporary problems. What happens when future making as a mode of governance (Jasanoff 2019) is practiced in democratic ways of life?

The imaginaries of how good democratic problem solving should be practiced vary in communities that are differently affected by a variety of conflicts and problems that undergo divergent (e)valuations. Some problems, crises, catastrophes (Latour and Weibel 2005), or the care taking of ruins (Tsing 2021), are imagined to be more pressing than others, depending on which futures are imagined (Doganova 2018, Jasanoff and Kim 2015). Additionally, the constitution of democracy facilitates through infrastructures of problem-solving that some ways of how problems and crises are attempted to be solved, are preferred over others. Modes of preference are usually connected with who the imagined public is that is concerned and affected by a problem.

Public participation can become problematic, because what participation means has to be negotiated, defended, and maintained. How are democratic dilemmas approached, for example when when environmental conservation outweighs resource extraction or vice versa? Or when violence in urban areas is used to discriminate against peoples in racist ways through the topological figure of the ghetto? Who is subjected to the imaginaries of having to live a good democratic life, and how? Which infrastructures and whose participation are imagined to be valueable and good? Which and whose futures are given precedence when doing politics in times of catastrophe? Where does the idealisation of the future (Dányi 2018, 2021) make life in the present more difficult or even unbearable? The works presented and discussed in this panel will explore problematisation processes and related infrastructures around social and ecological dilemmas and imaginaries of the solutions for the good democratic way of life. It follows the understanding that democracy is a way of life that is endangered and has to be subjected to forms of care-taking (van Rahden 2019).

Dányi, Endre. 2018. 'Good Treason. Following Actor-Network Theory to the Realm of Drug Policy.' In World Politics in Translation: Power, Relationality, and Difference in Global Cooperation, edited by Tobias Berger and Alejandro Esguerra. London; New York, NY: Routledge.

Dányi, Endre, and Róbert Csák. 2021. 'Drug Places and Spaces of Problematisation: The Melancholy Case of a Hungarian Needle Exchange Programme'. Drugs and Alcohol Today 21 (3): 190–200.

Doganova, Liliana. 2018. Discounting and the Making of the Future. Vol.1. Oxford University Press. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2019. 'Future-Making as a Mode of Governance'. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Socities. https://www.mpifg.de/aktuelles/Veranstaltungen/Podcasts/jasanoff.asp.

Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds. 2015. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.

Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: [Karlsruhe, Germany]: MIT Press; ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe.

Rahden, Till van. 2019. Demokratie: Eine Gefährdete Lebensform. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2021. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. New paperback printing. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Panel organizer: Katharina Wuropulos, Helmut Schmidt Universität Hamburg

Studying the State

State and government have increasingly become the object of STS analyses. These include the study of parliaments (Asdal & Hobæk 2016, 2020; Brichzin 2020; Laube, Schank & Schaffer 2020), bureaucracies (Hull 2012a, 2012b, Reinertsen 2016), the work of bureaucrats (Mangset & Asdal 2019) the practices of policy development (Reinertsen & Asdal 2019), and also thematically oriented studies, such as digitalization of the state (Maguire & Winthereik 2019).

Building on these contributions, this open panel seeks to bring together ongoing work on the state in STS within the Nordic setting. We seek to explore the theme of ‘studying the state’ on two levels: First, we invite contributions that investigate government and the state as their empirical object. Examples may be changing state infrastructures, the inner workings of government institutions, practices of governing, state-citizen interactions, and the role of knowledge and expertise.

Are there specific Nordic modes of governing? If so, what may STS add to the conversation? How to deal with power in our analyses? In bringing out empirical details from various national, regional and local settings, we will start to assemble an STS analytics of the Nordic welfare state. Second, this open panel invites contributions about knowledge production of and on the state. What are the systems, practices, and politics involved? Examples may be public inquiries, expert commissions, evaluations, audits, and media reports.

How do they study the state and its workings, how do findings and analyses circulate, and how are they translated, contested, and possibly used within government? By means of what techniques, methods and infrastructures? What actors are involved, and what difference do they make? How does the state change in the process?

In addressing this dual concern, we welcome contributions across the full range of theoretical, empirical, and methodological approaches at our disposal in STS, and are also explicitly interested in those seeking to bridge and expand STS into other disciplinary and analytical traditions, such as political science and law.

Panel organizers: Hilde Reinertsen and Gro Stueland Skorpen, University of Oslo

Technoscientific entanglements of reproduction

Questions pertaining to reproduction have always been at the heart of feminist politics and scholarship. In feminist STS (FSTS) and/or feminist technoscience, reproductive technologies and reproductive care are recurring and vibrant themes, interrogating how reproduction is made and unmade - and how it could be otherwise. In light of recent political developments where rights to abortion, contraceptives and maternity care are threatened, scholarship on these issues become particularly pressing.

In our panel we will explore practices, technologies and knowledge surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, and ask how STS scholarship can improve and expand reproductive health-care, reproductive technologies, and norms and normativities of childbearing. We welcome work from any disciplines with an interest in FSTS and an empirical focus on themes such as but not limited to in/fertillity, birth-control, the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, abortion, natal and postnatal care, childbirth, birth injuries, gynecological exams, vasectomies, breastfeeding and artificial wombs. We particularly invite creative and speculative suggestions, inspired by or consisting of critical design studies, art methodologies, and/or activism. The contributions may range from established projects to ongoing investigations and new initiatives. Our ambition is to provide an inventive and engaging space for elaborating on the entanglements of reproduction.

Panel organizers: Josefin Persdotter and Helena Cleeve, University of Gothenburg; Jenny Gleisner, Linköping University

Universities and Grand Societal Challenges: Disrupting academic work and modern knowledge-making ecologies

Universities are some of the oldest and most robust modern institutions. Their size and their importance in contemporary societies have increased substantially over the past century, due to their establishment as main hubs for the making, evaluation, and dissemination of knowledge, not the least through higher education.

Since the 1990s, concerns have been voiced over the trajectory of universities and academic work, particularly how they have been reshaped by neoliberal ideologies, especially managerialism and new public management. Today, universities face critical challenges, related to funding and relevance to society, but also in terms of the impact of and trust in the knowledge academics generate. Policymakers increasingly present universities and research institutes with so-called grand societal challenges, expecting these institutions to play a major role in the engagement with these challenges.

This is an opportune moment, therefore, to examine and rethink the position and role of universities and the knowledge-making ecologies within which they are enmeshed. This task is even more relevant for the STS community to uptake, since at the core of the field are fundamental questions about the relationship between science and society. This panel aims to contribute to better understanding the complexities and diversities of current university practices and explore alternatives. More specifically, we welcome submissions that examine the following challenges:

Academic freedom, epistemic politics, and collegiality
Audit cultures, academic assessments, academic precarity and the future of tenure
Open science and academic publishing cultures
New theories of knowledge and science
Effects of digitalization and machine learning
Usefulness of university degrees and universities’ engagement with life-long learning
Repairing academic citizenship
University utopias and hopeful futures

Panel organizers: Kyriaki Papageorgiou, Knut Sørensen, Vivian Lagesen, and Helen Gansmo, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

(Un)timely Endings: Negotiating Sociotechnical relations in their unmaking

Despite critical approaches aiming to mitigate harms wrought by emergent technologies, we little understand what it takes to disarticulate, dismantle, and let go of complex sociotechnical relations that comprise technological infrastructures. Public calls to dismantle or abandon technologies and large-scale systems are now commonplace from ongoing massive efforts of science, policy, and industries to phase out fossil fuel-driven infrastructures, to the current and ongoing dismantling of Twitter as it falls into organizational neglect and users migrate elsewhere. Systems that are aging, obsolescent, or deprecated are all around us.

Nuclear power plants are taken down, data centers, fiber optic cables, copper-line telephone systems, are “retired”, algorithmic systems, knowledge infrastructures, and software supporting organizational work, are continuously abandoned and replaced. These systems comprise sociotechnical relations, a wide variety of attachments and commitments – affective, material, embodied, professional, economic –that are refigured in their unmaking. What is a timely ending for some, may be experienced as untimely to others, as the differential temporal entanglements of technological lifetimes are exposed in their negotiated endings.

When systems come to an end, there is a shift from repair as upkeep of ongoingness, towards letting go or “repair into decay” (Cohn 2016). This is a laborious process that requires disarticulating technology; engaging with fragility (Tsing), as well as the transience and ruination with infrastructure (Velkova 2019). This panel takes dismantling, decline, and deprecation of aging or retiring sociotechnical systems as a starting point to provoke a discussion about the technopolitics, temporal work, detachments and negotiations that unfold when technological development becomes oriented towards termination.

We invite papers to engage in a conversation about decline when it is oriented not towards producing the ongoingness and durability of a system – as captured by perspectives on maintenance and repair - but decline oriented towards an end. Suggestions for questions and topics that papers could explore include, but are not limited to:

How is technological “retirement”, “decrescence,” “devolution”, and disarticulation from sites of use/social practice enacted?
How is "untimelines" socially negotiated, contested, challenged and inhabited? When and how does it matter, for whom?
How are entangled lifetimes, lifecycles, livelihoods disentangled? How are attachments/affinities – of materialities, bodies, knowledges – to an aging technology refigured towards endings?
How are different endings - convivial (Cohn 2016), or toxic or violent negotiated and which endings are enacted? What could it mean for sociotechnical systems to age and die “well”?
How is loss of relevance of knowledge/expertise enacted and negotiated in the social shaping of infrastructural untimeliness /dismantling/ disappearance?
Waning of / Decrescence of/transformation of imaginaries associated with a technology in decline (e.g. what it would look like if we revert the temporality of sociotechnical imaginaries – not towards a future but towards imagining/enacting a past?)
Conceptual work to consider technological lifetimes and durations, their finitude as well as ongoingness.

Panel organizers: Julia Velkova, Linköping University and Marisa Cohn, IT University of Copenhagen

Upside Down: Unsettling the Verticality of Infrastructures

Scholarly attention to verticality offers fresh perspectives to what is arguably, and perhaps understandably, a strong horizontal bias in social inquiry. Noteworthy works have addressed satellite vision (Parks 2005) and the production of vertical territory more broadly (Braun 2000). Though not always invoking the concept of verticality as such, ethnographers have also attended to distinctions between above and below; for example, by showing how conceptions of the underground are shaped by social relations and practices above the surface (Ballestero 2019), how grounds sometimes are lifted to be held in atmospheric suspension (Choy and Zee 2015), as well as the ways in which the extraterrestrial becomes infrastructurally folded into ground (Bichsel 2020).

Sociotechnical engagements with the subterranean, the skyward, and the extraterrestrial underscore the need for methods that can attend to how actors encounter, apprehend, and tap into domains in ways that might trouble widespread understandings of verticality as merely a question of control and co-optation, most typically with reference to panoptic visualization and other forms of totalizing surveillance.

While the politics of verticality raises salient questions about simplification and reduction, there might also be a value in slowing down our analyses so as to get at the subtleties of situated infrastructural engagements with distinct socio-environmental realms. In this connection, and as Seaver (2021) has demonstrated with regard to the spatial imaginaries of social theory more generally, scholarly attention to vertical infrastructures might also elicit and perhaps help to redescribe our own vertical presumptions, epitomized by key analytics such as hierarchy, figureground and, indeed, the infrastructural itself as a modality that postulates orders of emergence and depth.

We invite papers that address any of these issues as they arise from attention to vertical infrastructures in diverse contexts. How are these sociotechnical relations informed by deep-seated histories of power and domination, and how might they sometimes be generative in ways that challenge or bypass attempts at mastery and subsumption? How does verticality come to matter multifariously through different infrastructural arrangements and across disparate empirical settings?

How might attention to these infrastructures unsettle separations between surface and subsurface, ground and atmosphere, or inner and outer spaces? What are the possibilities and limitations of these separations in terms of the political and socio-cultural work they enable or foreclose? How does social theory itself exhibit forms of verticality, and how do such imaginaries inform our approaches to verticality as an object of scholarly inquiry and description?

References:

Ballestero, A. 2019. “Touching with Light, or, How Texture Recasts the Sensing of Underground Water.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 44 (5): 762-785.

Bichsel, C. 2020. “Infrastructure On/Off Earth.” Roadsides 3: 1-6.

Braun, B. 2000. “Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality in Late Victorian Canada.” Cultural Geographies 7 (1): 7-46.

Choy, T. and J. Zee. 2015. “Condition-Suspension.” Cultural Anthropology 30 (2): 210-223. Parks, L. 2005. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham: Duke University Press.

Seaver, N. 2021. “Everything Lies in a Space: Cultural Data and Spatial Reality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (S1): 43-61.

Panel organizers: Chakad Ojani and Susann Baez Ullberg, Uppsala

Who is FemTech for? Intersectional Interventions

This panel draws from cultural studies and feminist science and technology studies to offer a timely and exiting intervention into the growing field of women’s digital health. It explores the intersection of gender and embodied computing, with particular attention to access barriers and the forms of biometric surveillance that operate in wearables, ingestibles, and embeddables marketed to women (the industry generally known as “FemTech”).

While the most utilized and profitable FemTech products include ovulation and fitness trackers, reproductive technologies, contraceptive microchips, and “smart” pills, this only represents a fraction of health concerns affecting women. Moreover, while the industry, with a (2019) global market share of 18.75B (USD), is predicted to be worth 60B by 2027 (Emergen, 2020), this occupies a small share of the overall digital health market, which is estimated to grow from 84B (USD) to 221B (USD) in the same time span.

Although the availability of FemTech has been increasing over the last decade, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for discreet, portable, and accessible digital tools that can be used in a self-monitoring capacity as a response to an absence of access to regular healthcare providers. Yet while COVID-19 has facilitated the growth of FemTech, it has also exacerbated and exposed significant gaps in the industry. Whether a lack of critical literacy around digital health, design and aesthetic impediments, the reality that women’s symptoms and pain are not taken seriously, or the fact that most FemTech products still presume a white, middle class, heterosexual, reproductive, and able-bodied user, it is problematic that women (particularly those in underserved or emerging markets) still have unequal access to basic reproductive healthcare and women’s health technologies (Wiese, 2021).

This panel aims to explore FemTech within the context of Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FTST), whereby the entanglements of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality and other social and cultural identities are brought to the fore. If STS is inherently the consideration of the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts, then this panel asks, to borrow in part from Sara Díaz, “what role can technoscience play in the movements to achieve gender justice?” and how are the operations of power and privileged exacerbated and challenged within the women’s digital health milleu? (2020). In other words: Who is FemTech for?

This panel, then, responds to gaps in women’s access to self-monitored technologies of wellbeing, and in consideration of intersectional marginalisations within both the health and technology sectors where racialized and low-income women suffer disproportionately. By addressing the gaps in FemTech research and socio-cultural barriers to access, this panel will critique the forms of knowledge and experience produced through medical and cultural discourses regarding women’s bodies to both highlight the inequalities in women’s digital health, and imagine alternative models which optimise technology for women in a way that is safe, accessible, and inclusive.

Panel organizer: Lindsay Balfour, Coventry University

Published Jan. 14, 2023 11:58 AM - Last modified May 25, 2023 3:11 PM