Diffracting the Critical

... famously expressed in Bruno Latour's concern that critique may have run out of steam. As a research practice striving for exploratory, collaborative and inventive engagements, STS has often distanced itself from critique as a merely theoretical and normative exercise. Major critical perspectives in STS are driven by feminist approaches to situated knowledges, analytics of materialised power, histories of colonial and postcolonial science and technology, as well as more-than-human ontologies. These perspectives continue important traditions of critique while connecting with more recent critical formations such as Queer and Trans Studies, Black Studies, Indigenous Studies and Environmental Justice.

Many of these approaches embrace modes of critique that go beyond unmasking, deconstructing, and reflecting. We suggest that ‘diffraction’ offers a productive figure to think and do such critique. Donna Haraway and Karen Barad have described diffraction as a methodology that is attentive to the ways in which differences are made and matter differently – an approach to research and knowledge production that has been widely developed further within Feminist STS. Here, diffraction is a critical practice of mapping out differences through their effects in the world in order to understand how categories of the social, including race, sex, gender, sexuality, religion, labour, the (non-)human and the (non- )living persist and transform. With the title Diffracting the Critical, we want to mobilise diffraction and diffracting in two ways: (1) as a challenge to review and collect critical practices in and of STS research, and (2) as an expansive mode of doing critique, also outside the confines of STS.

Diffracting the critical, we believe, is an important task to re-equip STS in the age of climate change's poly-crisis, as we see natural disasters, demographic changes, economic instability, and democratic backsliding compound an already seemingly insurmountable set of problems. Questions about where these shifts are felt and how they manifest socially and politically are inextricably bound up with the legacies of colonialism, the ongoing injustices of resource exploitation, and rising right-wing populism. Our current predicament, thus, affords a return to a formative question in STS: what is “the critical” in a field that is methodologically, thematically, and theoretically as diverse as ours?

The STS Hub 2025 is an opportunity to collectively explore contemporary formations of critique in and with STS along three thematic clusters: ecologies & infrastructures, scales & temporalities, collaborations & solidarities.

Ecologies & Infrastructures

Ecologies and infrastructures have long been analysed as political, as they emerge from historically situated practices, shape knowledges, and constitute subjectivities. Critical perspectives in STS have, among other things, focused on tracing power dynamics in the construction and maintenance of infrastructures, both physical and digital, as well as on the production of differential vulnerabilities within ecologies. Yet the critical acquires another significance, closer to criticality than critique, with the recognition that life, human and otherwise, thrives in “critical zones” characterised by material phase transitions, sympoietic emergences, and dangerous tipping points. This, in turn, challenges the way we understand the critical as embedded in techno-material processes. Infrastructures labelled as critical, as fundamental support structures for life, data, and the economy, have come into view as managing and anticipating potential risks. The global competition for critical raw materials is yet another development, where the critical denotes a state of geopolitical, ecological, and existential crisis.

Scales & Temporalities

In an age of post-colonial entanglements and planetary turmoil, a key dimension of the critical must also be scalarity. At what scales and times should we consider, research, and critically engage the multiple problems of our time? This is a fundamental methodological, epistemological, and ontological problem. On the one hand, neither the scale of “locality” nor that of “the planetary” seems entirely sufficient or convincing for problems that are at once global and local. On the other hand, our methods appear somewhat unsuitable for problems that often require doing research across times and scales, not only beyond the “human” but also beyond the boundaries of individual and disciplinary research projects. The possibility of critical research and practice increasingly depends on the capacity of effectively bringing together radically different scales and temporalities, from deep time and the Capitalocene to the nano-scale and the planetary, to think differently about where we find ourselves today.

Collaborations & Solidarities

The critical is also being reinvented through research collaborations and in emerging forms of academic solidarities. In Germany, STS is increasingly institutionalised in research and higher education, leading to interdisciplinary collaborations close to the centres of subpolitical decision-making and authority. This presents a unique opportunity for STS to make critical interventions in spaces where techno-scientific, positivist, and economic rationalities rule. Such opportunities can align with movements from within science that take a critical stance in advocating for open science, responsible research and innovation, research integrity, reproducibility, or experimental data platforms. Furthermore, STS increasingly collaborates with affected communities and issue publics that engage in their own forms of critique. These developments compel STS to reassess its relationship to critique: how can we critically engage with such forms of critique and strike the difficult balance between collaborative engagement and analytical distance? And lastly, the critical lies at the heart of emerging forms of academic solidarities that expose structures of academic precarity, sexualised violence, and abuses of power. These experiences make evident that critique is a continuous process. It is part of the steady struggle to open structures and categories, but also different ways of knowing in, through, and beyond research, science, technology, and education.

Diffracting the Critical calls for a collective exploration of how the critical is entangled in the complex interplay of ecologies, infrastructures, scales, temporalities, collaborations, and solidarities. We encourage reflections on how the critical is mobilised and enacted within STS. This moment of diffraction also requires us to ask where STS has underdeveloped a critical voice or where critique might be reoriented. This conference is an invitation to strengthen and expand upon critical perspectives and approaches within STS, and to form new alliances and collaborations! We welcome contributions that engage STS from a plurality of disciplines and fields, including, among others, Algorithm Studies, Architecture, Arts, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Data Studies, Design, Disability Studies, Education Studies, Ethnology, Film Studies, Gender Studies, Geography, History, Humanities (Environmental or otherwise), Literature, Media Studies, Migration Studies, Philosophy, Political Science and Theory, Queer and Trans Studies, Sociology, and Urban Studies. We are specifically committed to promoting expansions and intersections of STS with non-academic and non-disciplinary knowledges and practices.

Presentations can be held either in English or German. We strive for a diversity of voices and perspectives from any and all disciplines and career stages. While papers on any subject in STS are welcome, we especially encourage topics that resonate with the overall conference theme.

We encourage submissions of panel proposals (1) that, based on paper presentations, discuss specific dimensions of the conference topic. We also welcome panels that (2) experiment with the format of the panel, reflecting on rules, strategies, and styles of engaging in discussion and speaking well in the presence of others, as well as those that (3) seek to discuss and diffract critique in relation to the current political, institutional, and media conditions in Germany and beyond.

To facilitate a wide-variety of conversations, panels can extend, at maximum, to two 90-minute sessions. Conventional panels based on paper presentations will be able to accommodate a maximum of 10 contributions. Panel chairs are expected to coordinate the announcement, submission reception, selection process, and presentation order of their sessions.

To propose an Open Panel, please submit a 200-word abstract and a 75- word bio of each chair (max. 2 chairs), as well as an email address for paper submissions. To propose a Closed Panel, please submit a 200- word abstract and a 75-word bio of each chair (max. 2 chairs), as well as a 200-word abstract of each paper contribution.

• ➜ Call for Closed Panels closes 31 October 2024.
• ➜ Notifications of Acceptance for Open Panels: Early September.
• ➜ Notifications of Acceptance for Closed Panels: 15 November 2024.

Paper Submission: Open Panels will be published on the conference website by 01 September 2024. Scholars interested in participating in an Open Panel should submit their individual paper proposal, including a 200- word abstract and a 75-word bio, to the panel chair(s).

Please take into account that the Open Panel chairs are responsible for organising the panel, and that questions should be directly addressed to the chairs of the Open Panels.

• ➜ The Call for Individual Proposals opens 01 September 2024.
• ➜ The Call for Individual Proposals closes 31 October 2024.
• ➜ Panel chairs will notify accepted participants by 15 November 2024.

We welcome multimodal contributions in the form of videos, photography, installations, graphic novels, games, websites, walks and other formats. Multimodal contributions will be exhibited in dedicated conference spaces. Two exhibition and screening spaces for the multimodal contributions will be open throughout the conference. We plan to hold multimodal sessions during which the authors of these contributions will be able to present and discuss their contributions with conference attendees.

If you are interested, please submit a 300-word description explaining the topic, the media of the contribution, as well as any technical requirements for exhibiting it, along with a short bio of 75 words of each contributor to: sts-hub2025-multimodal@hu-berlin.de

To be able to plan better, we have shifted the deadline from 20 December 2024 to 29 November 2024. Please contact us, if this is interfering with your original contribution plans.

• ➜ The Call for Multimodal Contributions opens 01 September 2024.
• ➜ The Call for Multimodal Contributions closes 29 November 2024.

We welcome individual or co-authored poster submissions that address the conference topic. Accepted posters will be presented in a dedicated space within the conference venue. We plan a dedicated multimodal and poster plenary session where authors can discuss their posters with conference attendees.

Posters should be submitted as an image / PDF file (min 600dpi) together with a short bio of 75 words for each author. Accepted posters will be printed by the conference organisers in A0 format and exhibited at the venue.

• ➜ The Call for Posters opens 01 September 2024.
• ➜ The Call for Posters closes 20 December 2024.

Convenor(s): Tereza Stöckelová, Hana Porkertová

Contact: tereza.stockelova@soc.cas.cz

Abstract: STS has developed the notions of fluid objects, which change in gentle flows, and fire objects, characterized by jumps and discontinuities, to account for specific social topologies of matter. However, the current poly-crisis calls for new concepts that embody both fluid and fire qualities, articulating the tension between life as usual (which we, collectively, mostly continue to live) and the anticipation of tipping points or major breakdowns. Due to the industrialization of food and toxic exposures, we are in a state of chronic inflammation, creating a milieu conducive to life-threatening diseases. With the ongoing burning of fossil fuels, our house may not be on fire (yet), but it is inflamed, and it requires significant effort to keep the wildfires at bay. While acute inflammation is a protective physiological mechanism in response to harmful stimuli, it can easily run wild or become chronic, inflicting irreversible damage.

In this panel, we aim to conceptualize the topology, temporality, and politics of inflammables in the current smoldering world. We invite participants to propose specific “inflammable objects” for collective panel reflection to determine what forms of methods, collaborations, research ethics, and “occupational safety” inflammables require from critical STS researchers. Standard papers as well as multimodal contributions are welcome.

Convenor(s): Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations

Contact: milena.bister@hu-berlin.de

Abstract: Habitability as a central term in the Anthropocene can be immensely productive for STS. It allows for diffracted thinking through times and scales, full of "interfacial oscillations among that which is experienced as habitable or uninhabitable, as a kind of regionalizing of relationships between life and nonlife", as explored by AbdouMaliq Simone (2016: 135).

Habitability blurs ontological certainties and easily exceeds fields: the biom, the house, the infrastructure, the city, the planet. This panel discusses habitability as both a relational concept and a phenomenon of more-than-human engagement. We aim to bring together ethnographic STS work, that grapples with the current or imminent destruction of entire ecosystems and critically engages with socio-material experiments for healing, repairing, caring, resurgence, sustenance. By seeing ourselves and our research practices implicated in the politics of habitability (Langwick, 2018), this panel also tackles the question of how do we as STS scholars address habitability today and further how the concept of habitability can help us to see and conceptualize forms of living. We invite contributions that recast the challenge as one of ecological scale (Papadopoulos, 2022). This includes perspectives of eco-feminist, postcolonial, and disability studies which investigate situated practices and experiments in rendering spaces (co-)habitable.

Convenor(s): Cornelius Heimstädt, Tanja Schneider

Contact: cornelius.heimstaedt@hu-berlin.de

Abstract: The concept of sustainability is ubiquitous in contemporary economies, yet actors invoke it to describe a wide range of practices and processes—often with divergent, sometimes contradictory, implications. An electric car manufacturer may call his new factory sustainable, despite it being constructed in a water conservation area. A start-up helping polluting industries (e.g. petrochemical, meat, aviation) offset carbon emissions may do so in the name of sustainability. Meanwhile, an organic farmer may cite sustainability to explain the elevated price of her carrots. Inspired by, but not identical to, debates on the valuation of nature (e.g. Fourcade, 2011; Fairbairn, 2021; Asdal & Huse, 2023), this panel invites researchers to investigate the many ways in which sustainability is valued in technoscientific capitalism. The valuation practices (see Helgesson & Muniesa, 2013) we encourage exploring are diverse and may encompass, but are not limited to, re-defining, operationalizing, quantifying, pricing, and contesting sustainability. By analyzing these practices across different industries, our panel aims for a transversal diffraction of the “economized” (Çalışkan & Callon, 2009) sustainability discourses shaping the present— perhaps starting with, but going beyond, the critical reflex of “debunking” (Latour, 2004) them as mere instances of ‘greenwashing’ or similar.

Convenor(s): Patrick Bieler, Nona Schulte-Römer

Contact: patrick.bieler@tum.de

Abstract: The production of artificial chemical substances in late industrial societies has pushed humanity “outside the safe operating space” (Persson et al. 2022). This has lasting implications for human and planetary health as well as social formations (e.g. Murphy 2017; Shapiro/Kirksey 2017). However, outside of these critical assessessments of chemicals, in this panel we query: what does it mean to acknowledge our lives are entangled with anthropochemicals all the way down (Papadopoulos 2022)?

We propose to tackle this question along three reflexive paths (which are not exhaustive, of course):

First, how do we reflect in how far STS’ common forms of deconstructive critique are themselves embedded in and shaped by 'petromodernity' (Klose/Steininger 2024), and what is the consequence thereof? Second, how do we remain sensitive to the logics and politics of scaling by which molecules come to shape large technological systems and societies (and vice versa)? Third, how can we initiate a collaborative socio-chemical project that aims to transform the chemical foundations of late industrial societies from within through generative critique and experimental practices?

These questions open up chemicals as specific entities that are ‘good to think with’ (Boudia et al. 2021). They help us to critically diffract pressing questions of socio-technical, moral and natural order, North-South relationships, metabolic ethics (Landecker/Kelty 2019), knowledge and ignorance (Frickel/Elliog 2018) and the reconstitution of life itself and forms of sociality at the molecular level.

Convenor(s): Charrlotte Adelina, Elisabeth Luggauer

Contact: elisabeth.luggauer@hu-berlin.de

Abstract: With the accelerating climate crisis, plants are increasingly enrolled in interventions furthering multispecies health and livability. Urban greening is intertwined with the many anthropocentric, colonial, racial-capitalist, gendered, and casteist power dynamics inscribed in the planning and inhabiting of cities and the ordering of 'green spaces', often re-asserting techno-scientific and colonial tropes of 'inert' greenery.

Thus, critical approaches toward urban greenery as symbolic interactions and species collectives demand diffracting perspectives across scales, temporalities and epistemic divides. Mobilizing 'diffraction' with Donna Haraway and Karen Barad as the critical mapping out of how differences matter and as a technique of thinking one through a different other, this panel aims to diffract perspectives on urban greening beyond 'nature', 'landscape', 'ecology', and 'infrastructure'.

For example, how do perspectives on cities, futures in climate crisis, etc., alter when thinking greenery through multispecies collectives and the effects they pose to urban cohabitation? Or, how do more than human justice and health change when re-thinking 'greening' through situated forms of power and socio-cultural engagements in urban spaces?

We invite critical and experimental contributions from STS, multispecies anthropology and geography, feminist and decolonial ecologies and situated political ecologies, as well as others, to diffract together perspectives on emergent practices of urban greening.

Convenor(s): Erik Aarden, Pouya Sepehr

Contact: erik.aarden@aau.at
pouya.sepehr@hu-berlin.de

Abstract: Cities have increasingly become focal point in discourses around contemporary environmental problems. With their dense concentration of human activities, cities are often viewed as both drivers and potential solutions for issues like anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss. This paradoxical role raises critical questions about how matters of environmental concern manifest in urban contexts and how these considerations account for the living and non-living collectives that inhibit them.

This panel seeks to explore how global challenges of the Anthropocene are localized within urban environments and how situated multispecies configurations shape interactions between humans and non-humans. Additionally, this panel aims to incorporate the concept of diffraction as a methodological tool, challenging traditional notions of objectivity and reflexivity, promoting a relational and entangled approach to research. This approach is particularly suited to uncovering the dynamic processes through which urban spaces are constructed as multispecies life-worlds.

We invite contributions that engage with questions around the urban as multispecies life-worlds, focusing on the intersections of urbanization, multispecies interactions, and environmental justice.

Convenor(s): Christof Lammer, Sandra Calkins

Contact: christof.lammer@aau.at
s.calkins@utwente.nl

Abstract: Conservation, agriculture and public health identify specific “critical species” that need to be protected, managed or exterminated. Determining who or what is critical requires assessing similarities, gauging proximities, and setting boundaries. Such valuations of species are underwritten by a set of material-semiotic practices that we call kinship measurements.

While racist histories of human differentiation have long been criticized, many scientific disciplines continue to deploy measures of kinship less critically when it comes to non-human lives. Moreover, these measurements’ political and economic consequences often remain underexamined.

We seek to examine how methods, indicators, and technologies used to measure genetic, chemical, or microbial relatedness overlap and compete with measures of lived closeness, good care, genealogical proximity, behavioral resemblance, and morphological affinities.

How and where do these different measurements of kinship matter, and what politics do they enable?

We invite papers that examine scientific metrics and their infrastructures along with other ways of knowing and sensing kinship that are mobilized in projects concerned with threatened species, heritage breeds, local varieties, invasive species, disease vectors, or agricultural productivity and sustainability. Shifting analytical attention to practices and materialities of measuring kinship allows new perspectives on how differential regimes of valuing lives are established and can be challenged.

Convenor(s): Jorge Martín Sainz de los Terreros, Brett Mommersteeg

Contact: sainzjor@hu-berlin.de
brett.mommersteeg@hu-berlin.de

Abstract: In physics, diffraction has an intrinsic relationship with shadows (and shades), for it is defined as “a physical phenomenon that comes into being when a multitude of waves encounter an obstacle upon their path” (Geerts and van der Tuin 2016). For diffraction to happen, the propagation of the wave has to be disturbed by some sort of matter that consequently becomes a “secondary source” of the propagation wave. Hence, a new wave is generated, a wave that bends the corners of the blocking object and enters the geometrical region of the shadow, lightening it up.

Following this entangled relationship, this panel explores the figure of shadows (and shades) as spaces for inhabiting diffraction, and asks what is illuminated in this sense of critique. Therefore, we aim to activate shadows (and shades) as critical zones for theorising and practising research. In that sense, diffraction for us could be described as “a critical practice of mapping out differences” in (the) light of shady zones. We welcome papers that discuss the figure of shadows as, among other things, unclear, invisible, hidden and obscure matters and infrastructures that might be enlightened by diffraction.

Convenor(s): Christine Hanke

Contact: christine.hanke@uni-bayreuth.de

Abstract: This panel focusses on the deep intertwining of European industrialization and colonialism, involving steam factories and plantation economies, infrastructures of transport and communication, tropical hygiene and public health, botanical gardens, extraction and mass media entertainment. We will investigate these relationalities through case studies that follow specific objects/substances/things and their multimodal appearances – for example cocoa/chocolate, cinchona/quinine, caoutchouc/rubber, copper/daguerreotype.

By scaling down onto concrete materialities and taking into account multiple temporalities, the panel aims at diffracting the relationalities of European colonialism, industrialization, infrastructures and media since the 19th century.

The panel encourages to experiment with diffracting methodologies – formats can range from paper presentations to experimental audio-visual as well as performative interventions that follow an object/substance/thing.

This setting aims at a reflection of methodologies and epistemic frameworks: How can we diffract colonial, industrial, infrastructural and medial entanglements? How can we describe, narrate, visualize, show, spell out, analyze, resist, unsettle them in decolonial and power critical ways? How do these entanglements affect and transform our theoretical and methodological frameworks? And how do familiar epistemic frameworks need to be questioned and transformed?

The panel invites case studies in multiple formats that reflect on their own theoretical and methodological framework in decolonizing, antiracist, queer feminist ways.

Convenor(s): Paul Trauttmannsdorff, Silvan Pollozek

Contact: paultrauttmansdorff@gmail.com
pollozek@europa-uni.de

Abstract: The notion of critique, or “the critical,” has been integral to scholarship on borders and migration— from autonomy of migration perspectives to critical security and border studies. This open panel aims to reimagine the role of critique within STS approaches to border and migration regimes. We propose to explore the range of critical practices that can be mobilized and enacted within and beyond the boundaries of STS research on borders and migration. By considering the interplay of ecologies, infrastructures, scales, and networks that characterize today’s border regimes and their datafication, we seek to understand how researchers can critically engage with and intervene in these systems in transformative ways. The panel discusses the conditions and frameworks that make critique possible and, conversely, when critique is rendered ineffective or impossible. It asks what different traditions and modes of critique can be developed and what potential implications they have for methodological/conceptual STS approaches. By reflecting on how “the critical” is entangled with various dimensions of border and migration control, we also ask where STS has underutilized its critical potential and where it could be reoriented to foster new alliances and interventions. We invite contributions (empirical papers, theoretical reflections, or other types of interventions) that expand the conceptual/methodological toolkit of critique available to STS scholars, enabling more robust and impactful engagements with the challenges, threats, and violence posed by contemporary borders and their digital transformations. Contributions may, for example,

• • Review critical practices within STS research on borders, technology, and migration;
• • Analyze possible modes of critique in the field of (datafied) border and migration regimes;
• • Propose new frameworks for collaboration and solidarity in critical STS research;
• • Explore entanglements of doing critical, ethical, and/or activist research;
• • Investigate new forms of critique of digital technologies in border and migration control.

Convenor(s): Luis Aue, Alila Brossard Antonielli

Contact: luis.caspar.aue@hu-berlin.de

Abstract: Since the inception of internationalist movements, sites, and actors, technology has been central to discussions, enactments, and the perceived successes and failures of internationalism. From regulating weaponry to coordinating vaccination campaigns and transmitting development technologies, the spread, control, and updating of technologies have been core to the promise of modernity associated with international actions and practices. This panel invites scholars from the growing body of research that examines internationalism and technology to explore these entanglements: How have internationalism and technopolitics intertwined, whether as part of progressive projects or in efforts to maintain (colonial) domination? What different ways of mobilizing technopolitics have been present in internationalist projects, from socialist internationalism to liberal, nationalist or anticolonial internationalisms? What kinds of discussions about technopolitics have emerged and been acted upon in internationalist sites? We welcome submissions from scholars employing various methodological approaches, ranging from historical analysis to conceptual reflection or ethnographic studies. Contributions are welcome that focus on any type of technology that intersects with internationalism, including health, security, military, development, or diplomatic technologies. Our goal is to deepen and broaden the discussion on the internationalist dimension of global technopolitics, creating a space to reflect on how technological internationalism has reproduced and challenged global technological inequities.

Convenor(s): Jan-Peter Voß, Hagen Schölzel, Ulf Bohmann

Contact: jan-peter.voss@humtec.rwth-aachen.de

Abstract: The opening-up of science and technology for societal engagement is often legitimized as a contribution to “democratize” the shaping of collective orders. Concrete practices of representing society, however, pose questions about their democratic value. For example, when stakeholders are selected for their capacity to support or inhibit a particular research or innovation programme, it is merely the anyway powerful who feed their views into the making of science, technology, and innovation.

There is a case for democratic critique. At the same time, however, “democracy” does not lend itself easily as an Archimedean point for leveraging critique. Recent developments in political theory and STS expose democracy itself as “manufactured” (Voß & Schölzel, 2024). With a “practice turn” in democracy studies, the demos and other kinds of collective subjectivities are reconstructed as only being performatively brought into being through specific practices and apparatuses of political representation.

STS-related political theorizing suggests differentiating good performative experiments from bad ones, and to generally value diversity against the background of unavoidable reduction, partiality, and selectivity of methods of representation.

What does this mean in practice? We welcome contributions that take a reflexively critical look at participatory practices with regard to their democratic quality.

Convenor(s): Karina Maldonado-Mariscal, Jessica Mesman

Contact: karina.maldonado@tu-dortmund.de

Abstract: The concept of exnovation has received particular attention in STS, sociology and environmental studies. This panel responds to the need for critical perspectives in STS and sociology, seeking collaboration and plurality across disciplines. Yet in STS, exnovation has two faces: a deliberate termination of structures, technologies, products, and practices (Heyen, 2017) and approaching forgotten competencies as valuable resources for improvement (Mesman 2008) and creation of space for new innovations (Hebinck et al., 2022). The panel aims to act as a platform where exnovation scholars seek a better understanding of how exnovation as destabilisation and regeneration can facilitate transitions between ending and creating something new and better (Arnold, 2015, Maldonado-Mariscal and Hölsgens, 2024). Considering this focus we welcome contributions of studies that focus on historical, contemporary and normative practices of exnovation. This includes not only the termination of practices that have become obsolete or undesirable (Ziegler, 2023), but also hidden or forgotten practices that are highly valued. We particularly welcome examples of exnovation in the Global South that expose complex dichotomies of development and deceleration or neglication.

Convenor(s): Manuel Jung, Marlise Schneider

Contact: manuel.jung@tum.de

Abstract:

Living labs have gained prominence as tools for testing innovation policy and transformative initiatives across sectors. Experiments in public spaces promise to bring diverse actors together for co-creating solutions. Tacitly, these experiments often mirror scientific approaches, where “successfully” tested solutions are expected to be transferable to other regions. Despite the optimism surrounding living labs, many fail to deliver on these promises.

Instead, public experimentation comes with its epistemic and ontological consequences. Public experimentation shapes understandings of exclusion and inclusion, power, and responsibility (Engels et al. 2019). The experimental framework creates specific temporalities of socio-technical change, while the prerequisite of scalability provokes tensions with local solutions. The scaling of tested solutions remains puzzling despite being a central preoccupation (Pfotenhauer et al. 2022).

In this panel, we draw on diffraction to highlight differences and local negotiations in experimental spaces for a critique of experimentalism as a panacea to grand societal challenges.

• • How does the performativity of experiments create powerful and resonant representation of futures?
• • How do living labs inscribe both difference and transferability in experimental places?
• • How can experimentation move away from the positivist logic of linear understandings of scaling to anchor responsibility and care more deeply in experimental practices?
• • What does this make visible about innovation and democracy?

Convenor(s): Christian Herzog, Deniz Sarikaya

Contact: deniz.sarikaya@uni-luebeck.de

Abstract: Sustainability is clearly a desirable goal, and some AI developments seem to promote sustainability by making processes more efficient. However, narrow concepts of efficiency and progress, particularly when using technologies to support sustainable development goals, often overlook crucial dimensions of cultural and social change. This panel sheds light on how a critical perspective can broaden the concept of sustainability (or encourage the application of broader notions than those typically operationalized in practice). This requires, among other things, viewing AI technologies as socio-technological phenomena, rather than merely technological advancements.

The open section "Transdisciplinary and Sustainable Cultures of Technology Development" gathers insights from inter- and transdisciplinary research on sustainable knowledge, innovation, and corporate cultures. Authors are invited to explore development contexts as cultural spheres. Technologies like AI may not simply impose changes in cultural practices as external disruptions. Instead, existing knowledge, research, (responsible) innovation, and corporate cultures can significantly influence how the potential of technology and AI is envisioned and pursued—not only as contributions to sustainable development but in broader contexts as well.

We aim to invite the panel participants to collaborate in the future and discuss the possibility of hosting an edited volume or special issue based on this session.

Convenor(s): Anke Gründel, Julio Paulos

Contact: anke.gruendel@hu-berlin.de
julio.paulos@arch.ethz.ch

Abstract: Public Sector Innovation (PSI) has become a central framework for rethinking technical democracy. PSI’s emphasis on collaborative methodologies, such as co-design and citizen engagement, promises more responsive and adaptive governance. The challenge for STS is to critically engage with PSI while recognizing that the traditional tools of critique may need to be rethought in light of the reflexive, adaptive nature of these new governmental practices. How can STS scholars examine PSI without relying on a predefined notion of critique that might no longer be adequate for understanding these contemporary practices?

We are looking for contributions that move beyond simply exposing the limitations or contradictions of PSI by investigating how these initiatives open up or foreclose specific modalities of political action. We ask not whether PSI delivers on its promises of enhancing democracy, but how it might reshape our understanding of what democracy could and should be. By engaging with PSI in this way, STS can contribute to a deeper understanding of how innovation processes and democratic practices are co-constituted. This requires considering how it influences the broader atmospheres—political, cultural, technical, and environmental—in which democracy is experienced and practiced.

For an extended abstract, please email the organizers.

Convenor(s): Niloufar Vadiati, Nas(s)im Mehran

Contact: niloufar.vadiati@leuphana.de
nassim.mehran@charite.de

Abstract: Digital platforms are increasingly functioning as urban infrastructures, leaving cities with no alternative but to arrange their spatial, economic, and social processes around them. Problematizing the infrastructural role of digital platforms, particularly by corporate-tech entities, is on the rise, highlighting issues such as privatized governance, algorithmic power, financial speculation of urban space, gig-labor exploitation, and unregulated platformed workspaces.

Simultaneously, digital platforms have also acted as glitches across different socio-political contexts, leading to urban hacks, opening new spaces of grassroots mobilization, and ultimately serving as alternative social and care infrastructure.

This panel aims to map the major critiques around ‘Digital Platforms as Urban Infrastructures,’ and beyond that, to open space for otherwise critical thinking. We would like to proactively invite scholars and activists from grassroots organizations, particularly from the economic Global South, which is characterized by “non-state-invested infrastructure,” to geographies with Western-sanctioned states, to join the discussion.

The hope of this panel, in line with the concept of STS, is to embrace different critiques and situated perspectives, ultimately aiming to practice ‘diffraction’ as methodology.

Convenor(s): Robel Afeworki Abay, Robert Stock

Contact: robert.stock@hu-berlin.de

Abstract: Starting with the disability rights movement of the 1970s, the critique of normative corporeality and cognition has multiplied, focusing on processes of knowledge production in architectures, sciences, and technologies. Under the auspices of anti-assimilationist critical disability and crip scholarship, initiatives of care and allyship are unfolding in order to reposition the often ambivalent implications of technological innovation, smart, climate-friendly cities, postcolonial constellations and political dimensions of advanced assistive technologies and their material and economic characteristics at the intersection of artistic interventions, citizen-driven technology, sociological reflection and science experimentation. There is a growing body of work addressing the global politics of disablement, the question of the posthuman, dissolving boundaries between body and environment in Anthropocene situations as well as damaged, invalid landscapes or hacking and DIY practices emerging to navigate inaccessible worlds. Against this backdrop of novel approaches focusing on disability justice, the panel invites to question the diffraction of disability critique and complex embodiment, to investigate binary patterns of thought and to strengthen intersectional and queer studies approaches. The aim is to speculate on the histories and futures of disability, politics of thriving, violent monocultures and cultural diversity in order to reimagine possible scenarios in the face of critical-material relations between the social, the natural and the technological.

Convenor(s): Martina Erlemann, Petra Lucht

Contact: martina.erlemann@fu-berlin.de
petra.lucht@fu-berlin.de

Abstract: Feminist Science & Technology Studies (Feminist STS) have grown to a vibrant, constantly evolving, and differentiated research field that provides a wealth of insights into how the critical in STS can be developed further. As part of Feminist STS, concepts of situatedness (Haraway 1988) and diffraction (Barad 2003) as research practices embrace the critical. Feminist STS scholars in German contexts pursued these approaches to develop self-reflexive research that investigates social inequalities, capitalist, imperialist, and neo-colonial practices in science & technology.

To name a few, Bath et al. (2017) suggest response-ability for critical STS, Ernst (2017) argues for emancipatory interferences in engineering, Erlemann (2024) develops re-figurations of epistemic practices to diffract the critical, and Schmitz, Papenburg & Lucht (2023) identify meeting points of Feminist STS with Postcolonial Studies.

In this open panel, we aim to foster dialogues among scholars who work on interventions into science and technology from Feminist STS perspectives. We invite contributions that address societal challenges that are engrained in the techno-sciences and discuss whether and to what end science & technology can be transformed through integrating feminist paradigms into STS research, including intersectional, postcolonial, de-colonial, post-humanist, and queer research perspectives, as well as participatory and/or experimental approaches.

Convenor(s): Annika Just, Isabel Gebhardt

Contact: just@dzhw.eu

Abstract: Psychological sciences aim to uncover truths about human nature, social interactions and mental illness, significantly impacting individuals' lives. A large portion of psychological research is grounded in a positivist framework that (de)values produced knowledge according to an ideal of universal objectivity. This promotes a predominantly quantitative approach to research while running at risk of neglecting other perspectives.

We argue that by reflecting on psychology's epistemic premises and research practices, the discipline's knowledge (production) can become more inclusive, intersectional, and power-sensitive. Although reflective perspectives exist within psychology, they have yet to gain broader institutional traction.

STS have developed robust tools for critique, emphasizing that scientific findings are not immutable facts, but socially constructed entities. Their methods, frameworks and insights into science and society hold great diffractive potential for psychology. Scholz (2018), for example, proposes using Barad's Agential Realism as a theoretical foundation to deconstruct experimental psychology.

With the goal of joining forces, this panel aims to foster a dialogue between STS and psychology. We therefore invite contributions from STS scholars who engage with psychological topics, as well as from psychologists in research, teaching, or practice who critique their discipline - acknowledging these roles might overlap. Through short presentations and a fishbowl discussion, we aim to explore how psychological knowledge can be diffracted, envisioning collaborative efforts to promote power-critical research within psychology. Contributions in English or German are welcome.

Convenor(s): Tamara Schwertel

Contact: tamara.schwertel@uk-koeln.de

Abstract: This panel focuses on Science, Technology, and Medicine Studies (STMS), examining the current positioning and potential of this research field. Specifically, it analyzes the role of medicine as a research field within the STS framework.

Especially within medical sociology, the medical field has been extensively researched and has undergone significant shifts over the past decades. Critical approaches, which were prominent in the past century through social science and sociology of knowledge research, have increasingly receded into the background. In many areas, medical sociology has increasingly transformed into an auxiliary science to medicine, leading to a depoliticization and de-emphasis on critique.

Against this backdrop, Adele Clarke and others advocated for the establishment of a feminist and power-critical program within ST(M)S. These approaches have led to the development of methods, such as Situational Analysis, and theoretical concepts, such as Medicalization.

Possible questions for contributions:

1. What might STMS look like in the current context, and what role can critique play in knowledge production in this field?
2. How is the relationship between STS and medicine shaped?
3. What are the current critical studies, approaches, and concepts in the field of STMS?

Contributions can highlight both historical developments, as well as current studies and methods.

Convenor(s): Ann Kristin Augst, Bianca Jansky

Contact: kristin.augst@tu-dortmund.de
bianca.jansky@uni-a.de

Abstract: In various healthcare contexts, STS scholars have explored criticisms of the medical system and its epistemologies. This panel focuses on the role of social media as a space for creating attention and forming interest groups around medical critique. We particularly want to examine chronic health conditions that receive inadequate attention within the established (bio)medical system, such as ADHD and autism in women, endometriosis, ME/CFS, and Long COVID. Our aim is to address the modalities and complexities of critiquing medical (non)care infrastructures and logics, while simultaneously striving for recognition and visibility by actors within the same system.

We seek to delve into the layers of criticism, questioning which actors the critique on social media targets, the logic it follows, and the forms and collectivities it assumes. We also want to explore how this criticism is distributed when those affected are heard and seen. Additionally, we are interested in whether this critique has a productive impact on the medical system itself.

We invite STS researchers to address these questions and consider the extent to which “old” STS perspectives can be applied to understand the dynamics of social media critique and what new insights we can gain from them.

Convenor(s): Louis Ravn, Yana Boeva

Contact: yana.boeva@sowi.uni-stuttgart.de

Abstract: Since the initial theorization of boundary work as the “attribution of selected characteristics to the institution of science” to demarcate it from “non-science” (Gieryn, 1983: 782), the concept has found widespread use in STS and beyond. More recently, an emerging body of scholarship on data attends to the multifaceted ways digital data relate to various practices of boundary-making. Forms of discursive boundary work have been shown to demarcate digital data as ontologically distinct from their underpinning socio-technical apparatuses (Thylstrup et al., 2022), while digital data are also mobilized to reinforce existing and install new boundaries (Amoore, 2021; Pelizza & Van Rossem, 2023).

In this open panel, we pursue this conference’s theme of “diffracting the critical” (Haraway, 1988; Barad, 2007) by asking: How do different modes of boundary work play out in the age of datafication? To what extent do digital data continue the legacies of technoscientific boundary work, and how are digital data productive of new boundary-drawing practices? We invite contributions that:

• • Critically engage with the entanglements between boundary work and data practices
• • Diffract related concepts (e.g. boundary objects, agential cuts) in relation to data practices
• • Explore “boundaries” as a guiding metaphor/concept for digital STS (Vertesi et al., 2019)

Convenor(s): Kevin Wiggert, Ingmar Mundt, Jana Pannier

Contact: jana.pannier@wzb.eu
kevin.wiggert@tu-berlin.de

Abstract: Two actual developments can be observed in the production of knowledge: On the one hand, knowledge is becoming increasingly datafied and algorithmised. In addition, more and more knowledge is being collected in an anticipatory or predictive manner about future situations and conditions. This knowledge may be relevant to decision-making for actors and organisations but it remains highly speculative and contestable in ontological and epistemological terms, especially when taking their material backing into account. This panel will therefore focus less on existing approaches to future or anticipatory imaginaries. In taking a diffractive approach, differences and interferences between established and anticipatory or predictive forms of knowledge come into view, as well as emerging concrete practices and their materialities. Therefore, the aim of this panel is to examine these through the analytical lenses of (a) which knowledge about the future is made ‘tangible’ or ‘durable’ in the present and which material and temporal conditions are created for this and (b) for whom which ontological and epistemological challenges arise. This touches, for example, on questions of anticipatory or predictive infrastructures, modes and practices of anticipating, enacting, (re)organising, and contesting predictive knowledge systems, or governance approaches to deal with future materialities.

Convenor(s): Emma Sicher, Rasa Weber

Contact: emma.sicher@hu-berlin.de

Abstract: Interspecies interactions are intensely explored in Multispecies Studies, with special attention to the challenges posed by contemporary poly-crises. Scholars like Ávila (2022) emphasize the need for conscious approaches in design research to acknowledge multispecies interdependence and promote practices of care and coexistence for a more equitable (Holland & Roudavski 2024), cosmopolitical (Yaneva & Zaera-Polo 2015), and regenerative “Pluriverse” (Escobar 2018). Bringing these theoretical insights into practice poses critical challenges.

Biodesign (Myers & Antonelli 2012), an interdisciplinary field engaging with living organisms—from bacteria to corals—explores new ‘living’ materialities (Karana, et al. 2020) through prototypes, artifacts, and architectural structures. While intense collaboration takes place with biotech disciplines, there is limited inclusion of other-than-academic, vernacular, and tacit knowledge, such as cultural craft techniques and field-based multispecies ontologies.

We advocate for fieldwork as an underexplored diffracting method that can enhance multispecies sensibilities, deepen engagements with situated configurations and ecologies, and foster reflexivity and sensitivity in Biodesign processes. This panel seeks to elaborate on experimental field-based contributions to Biodesign.

We aim to explore how ethnographic methods, practice-based designerly ways of knowing, and development of knowledge in actu (Mareis 2017) can contribute to the study of interspecies interactions in the field. We also want to examine how prototyping can become a diffractive practice, engaging with the flux of materialities (Ingold 2007) and organisms in situated contexts. Furthermore, we are interested in how Biodesign-artifacts can foster invitational practices (Lindström and Ståhl 2020) through regenerative socio-materialities in situated configurations and ecologies.

We welcome critical discussions on epistemological, ontological, and praxiological translations across diverse sites (Latour 1983), attempting to bridge academic and other-than-academic and disciplinary boundaries.

Convenor(s): Margarita Macera, Tomago Orresón

Contact: tomago.orreson@gmail.com

Abstract: Mapping can be an imaginative exercise of openness and creation-in-becoming beyond anthropocentric operations that seek to delineate, delimit, and justify territories. As a creative, relational process, mapping allows for drawing on more-than-human co-laborative ways of being together among differences and reflecting on asymmetrical power dynamics while (dis)assembling infrastructures and ecologies.

The diffractive and critical aspects of mapping come to matter through a series of multimodal and inventive exercises that explore and disseminate other ways of doing STS. Regardless of their possible outcomes, these exercises articulate a multiplicity of spaces, bodies, materials, and relations temporally, producing and resulting from the entanglements of human and non-human ontologies into ‘critical zones’.

By focusing on multispecies encounters, this panel aims to explore mapping as an inventive and multimodal methodology that highlights the multiple ways (more-than-) humans come together, while reflecting on the ethical, political, and methodological challenges of producing multispecies cartographies. Concretely, we aim to explore, among other issues:

1. The semantics and translation processes of multispecies mapping.
2. Territorial (re)definitions through multispecies encounters.
3. Resistances to and limitations of multispecies cartographies.

We welcome theoretical, multimodal, and experimental contributions to a diverse set of fields and disciplines, including anthropology, geography, biology, urban studies, landscape architecture, and related fields.

Convenor(s): Merle Ibach, Paula Schuster

Contact: merle.ibach@hcu-hamburg.de

Abstract: Design ethnography has emerged as a critical approach within Science and Technology Studies, offering nuanced insights into the complexity of designed environments and the making of socio-technical regimes. Over the past 15 years, various focal activities have developed, such as workshops as spaces to transform knowledge (Kjærsgaard 2016) and prototyping for speculating on possible futures (Halse 2013, Smith et al. 2020), making things to make sense of things (Jungnickel 2018) or unmaking the plastic era (Lindström/Ståhl 2023). Further scholars have been advocating for more creative approaches including experimental co-design as part of field research (Drazin 2021) or embodied exercises of sensing, walking, writing, performing, and recording (Culhane and Elliott 2016).

This panel encourages contributions that elaborate on experimental and creative tools to conduct (design) research ‘in the field’. Design, characterized by creating things, interactions, and possible futures, offers unique approaches to fieldwork, moving "from observation and interpretation to collaboration, intervention, and co-creation" (Gunn et al. 2013). Therefore, we ask: How do (designed) tools shape, blur, or diffract the understanding of research subjects, become co-creators in the field, or even demand complicity? We are happy to welcome stories from the field, especially but not limited to, that aim to dissect, diffract, or defrag established modes of fieldwork, participatory observation, interviews, or data collection. To further intersect the fields of Design and STS, we encourage sharing experiments, prototypes, iterations, tools, trials, and socio-technical considerations associated with designing or hacking ethnographic tools.

Convenor(s): Maxime Le Calvé, Ksenia Federova

Contact: maxime.le.calve@hu-berlin.de

Abstract: Perception is not passive but active, a realization that has led Science and Technology Studies (STS) into new territories. John Law (2017) argues for modes of knowing beyond critical reflexivity, critiquing the rationalist constraints of social science and advocating for the luxurious artistic inventiveness – such as that of the Baroque– as a counterpoint to dry rationality. He emphasizes performativity, theatricality, and immersiveness as crucial tools for social scientists. In the post-truth era, where rational arguments lose traction, what sense-acts must scholars adopt to keep pace with their fields? How can we know in ways that are not only intelligible but also sensible?

Recent STS practices (Rogers et al. 2021; Sormani, Carbone, Gisler 2019) demonstrate various forms of artistic engagement with scientific knowledge, raising questions about making arguments in non-textual, visual, and performative modes (Salter, Burri, Dumit 2017). This panel brings together practitioners from art and social science who creatively use contemporary arts and technologies—such as electronic sensors, machine learning, speculative thinking, and making techniques—to diffract conventional ideas about identity, social norms, and governance. We aim to explore how these methods can reshape perspectives on human-nonhuman relations, disrupt institutionalized norms, and serve as platforms for collective sense-making.

Convenor(s): Melpomeni (Melina) Antonakaki, Sheena F. Bartscherer

Contact: melina@antonakaki.eu

Abstract: The many critical framings that cohabit the space opened up by the ‘responsible metrics’ advocacy, as well as discussions around failed replications, have recently brought new types of epistemic activism to the fore. Parts of STS have expressed themselves as fully implicated (Rushforth & Hammarfelt 2023); others have sought reflexive dialogue (Peterson & Panofsky 2021). There are other aspirations worth noting, such as: researching, problematizing, contributing, or critiquing these activities.

This panel diffractively convenes the four themes of replication, relevance, reflexivity, and reform as more-than-scientific movements that have had some success in publicly challenging ideas of a "self-correcting" science, while operationalizing “openness”, and often building on the visibility and urgency with which highly publicized cases of research misconduct have deepened demands for moral and epistemic accountability of working scientists and academic administrators. We invite submissions (paper or research report) on any of the 4Rs or their intersections in researching, publishing, teaching, agenda-setting, or otherwise working toward transformative scientific change. We seek to discuss analyses and viewpoints “through one another while paying attention to patterns of difference (including the material effects of constitutive exclusions)” (Barad 2011: 445), thus fostering community and synergetic encounters across projects, priorities, positions.

Convenor(s): Anne Dippel

Contact: anne.dippel@uni-jena.de

Abstract: This panel invites discussions on how current modes of diffracting critique in the humanities and social sciences can be seen as intra-active (Barad 2007) reconfiguration of academia. Instead of focusing on difference, contributions are invited which engage with questions how diffracting modes of critique, stemming from the widespread dissemination (Derrida 1981) of ideas in a simulated world, can lead to healing modes of reflection, counteracting agonistic diffraction – producing a critical practice aware of differences and respect towards the other. The panel seeks to identify where regenerative (Saleh 2010), caring (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, Cubellis 2020), and curing reflections emerge within a deceitful media landscape (Natale 2021) to responsibly counter-act in a world of poly-crisis.

What new diffractive patterns emerge, disseminating care while established modes of critique are canceled out by new modes of interference? In response to Baudrillard's theory of simulation (1976), Latour once questioned whether critique had "run out of steam" (2004). It did, because this world is energized by electricity rather than thermodynamics, running in computational speed. While traditionally critique fragmented worldviews into “smaller waves” of thought styles, newer, larger wave formations are now interfering across disciplines, some phenomena are cancelled out – others, such as posthumanism, emerge. All contributions focusing on merging, on regenerative and healing modes of engagement countering a world of ardent differentiations and manifold exploitations are welcome.

Convenor(s): Stefanie Raible, David Seibt

Contact: stefanie.raible@jku.at
david.seibt@jku.at

Abstract: Transdisciplinary collaborations and critical engagements are increasingly common forms of doing STS as the field moves beyond traditional modes of academic knowledge production. On the one hand, this move away from arm’s length methods and critical distance is driven by the urge of researchers to actively engage with the issues they study. On the other hand, transdisciplinary collaborations have become institutionalized criteria in evaluating academic work and allocating funding.

Transdisciplinary collaborations and critical engagements are increasingly common forms of doing STS as the field moves beyond traditional modes of academic knowledge production. On the one hand, this move away from arm’s length methods and critical distance is driven by the urge of researchers to actively engage with the issues they study. On the other hand, transdisciplinary collaborations have become institutionalized criteria in evaluating academic work and allocating funding.

In this panel, we therefore ask: How can collaborations with actors beyond academia be used to produce robust scientific knowledge and advance STS theories? How and by whom can collaborative modes of making and doing STS be designed to facilitate basic research? How are critical collaborations shaped by diverse interests and sensibilities of the actors involved? What modes of in/exclusion and forms of in/visbility are produced in these encounters and for whom do they become productive? How can we develop new methods and reconfigure existing methodologies to engage in critical collaborations and advance basic STS research?

We invite conceptual contributions as well as contributions based on empirical collaborative research.

Convenor(s): Nadine Osbild, Bernhard Isopp

Contact: nadine.osbild@tum.de
bernhard.isopp@tum.de

Abstract: Science and Technology Studies has a track-record of critically engaging with science and engineering pedagogies, but only relatively recently has STS’s own approaches to teaching become an area of extended critical attention. This panel aims to diffract how we teach and communicate STS knowledge: Inspired by Barad’s (2007) notion of reading diffractively, it wants to start a conversation on concepts and methods of diffractive STS teaching. Drawing on sensibilities from feminist STS, and new materialist pedagogies, we understand diffractive STS pedagogies to actively teach through socio- and spatio-material contexts, diffracting the dissemination and making of STS knowledge as an assemblage of material objects, spaces, practices, and social relations. We welcome all contributions that:

• • engage with creative, exploratory, and interventionist teaching approaches that conceptualize teaching as an intra-active process of knowledge creation
• • shed light on institutionally and materially engrained power dynamics, and inequalities in STS teaching
• • explore the way in which STS teaching intervenes in and negotiates both the field’s and/or the individual STS teacher’s and student’s own critical voice in the classroom
• • and/or otherwise critically engage with STS pedagogies through a diffractive lens

We invite both conceptual explorations of diffractive STS pedagogies and empirical insights from your own teaching experiences.

Convenor(s): Stefan Böschen, Cornelius Schubert

Contact: stefan.boeschen@humtec.rwth-aachen.de
cornelius.schubert@tu-dortmund.de

Abstract: STS has largely developed by critically questioning established institutions, power structures, and knowledge relations. Epistemic participation, for example, played a decisive role in integrating diversity into knowledge production. Similarly, strategies of subversion were considered and practiced in the design and development of technologies. Those early days provided significant insights. Now, 40 years later, the situation has changed dramatically: in times that can be described as proto-fascist, the question arises as to how institutions such as science and academia can be protected, maintained, and advanced in the face of conspiracy narratives, alternative facts, and anti-science sentiments. In addition to critique and reconstruction, the question of the (re)construction of democratic institutions also emerges.

Against this background, the panel will address:

1. Which concepts and theories are of paramount importance for studying the interplay between science and the development of democracies?
2. What role can STS play in reconfiguring democracies, and what role should it (not) play?
3. What possibilities do we have to address this issue constructively in STS teaching?

The panel’s ultimate focus is on how teaching STS at universities can contribute to the development of democracy.

Convenor(s): Ingmar Lippert, Juliette Favre

Contact: I.Lippert@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Abstract: This proposal is part of an ongoing conversation on teaching STS at the STS-hub. The panel and workshop focus on the infrastructural assemblages of teaching STS in higher education in Germany. Key questions include:

• • Which aspects and perspectives of STS are taught in Germany?
• • Which formations of STS are performed in teaching?
• • Which ecologies of STS (canonizations, hybridizations, diffractions) exist?

With the panel and workshop, we hope to collectively reflect on what may constitute a critical core in contemporary STS teaching. How do the multiple (un)certainties revolving around contemporary environmental crises and socio-economic-political developments (desired or undesired, such as decolonization or proto-fascisms) reconfigure how STS is taught?

The panel starts with input on teaching STS under contemporary conditions, featuring selected panelists from different locations, disciplines, and approaches (50 minutes). This is followed by a two-part workshop phase. In the first part, using digital tools, we will collect reactions from the audience about the discussion and their experiences with teaching and learning STS, generating an inventory. The results will be made available, and we will form small groups to discuss these results (40 minutes). In the second session, we will draw the discussions together and consider formats and ideas that promise generative reconfigurations of courses, teaching sessions, and learning experiences (50 minutes).

Convenor(s): Sebastian Pfotenhauer (TUM STS), Alexander Wentland (TUM STS)

Contact: sebastian.pfotenhauer@tum.de
Alexander.wentland@tum.de

Abstract: This panel uses the coincidence of the STS-Hub deadline and the panic-stricken spectacle of state elections in three Eastern German states as an occasion to ask: What does STS have to say about ‘Eastern Germany’? And are we actually saying it?

‘The East’ has become a contested epistemic object in German and European politics, subject to diverse forms of medicalization and othering, as well as a corollary set of promissory strategies to save the dying patient (and, with it, the project of liberal-democratic capitalism). Many of these strategies are centered on technology and innovation as harbingers of prosperity, social transformation, and sustainability (e.g. Green New Deal investments, Silicon Saxony, the transformation of coal regions etc.). At the same time, the diagnoses of demise themselves are built on the back of powerful technologies – from indicators revealing inequality or pockets of innovativeness, to the role of mainstream or social media, all the way to the (lack of) provision of basic infrastructures.

For the purposes of this panel, we understand ‘Eastern Germany’ both as a concrete set of discourses, spaces, people, and things currently troubling German politics, and more broadly as an invitation to think critically about all kinds of collective otherings and performative problematizations in Germany and beyond. The conveners of this session do not have any specific topics or conceptual or methodological approaches in mind. However, we are animated by a shared sense that the rifts currently coming to a head in ‘Eastern Germany’ (and in many other places) are something that a field centrally concerned with unequal promises and consequences of ‘progress’ should be able to speak to. The following questions might provide some inspiration:

• • What does it mean for regions like ‘The East’ to have a future? What illnesses and remedies are being diagnosed, by whom, and through which forms of authorization?
• • How can or should we understand ‘The East’ as a space of innovation and experimentation? How is it being configured as one by policy-makers, business, civil society?
• • What does STS have to offer for post-industrial / post-communist / declining / peripheral regions today? Which role do promises of science, technology, and innovation play in these regions?
• • How should we think about / with / for regions, for example as critical observers or as part of revitalization strategies? Is ‘region’ a tenable unit of analysis in STS?
• • How responsive is STS in such ‘constitutional moments’ like the observed state elections in ‘Eastern Germany’? Is the required repertoire of response-ability for ‘Eastern Germany’ different from other socio-technical crises?
• • What kind of questions do moments like the Eastern German elections raise, for example concerning vulnerability, justice, expertise, or democracy?

In the context of this conference, it is befitting that Bruno Latour’s Why has critique run out of steam? arguably marked a (stylized) turning point for both Latour’s own oeuvre and parts of STS that provided an opening for recentering attention to some of the political macro-categories like statehood, identity politics, social movements, election politics, inequality, and “grand challenges” – concerns that had previously become increasingly decentered, fractalized, and multiplied in STS research, thus losing some of their critical heft. By leaving us hanging with a provocative juxtaposition of facts and nationalism, Critique prefigured both the tone and the way in which one of Latour’s latest works, Oú atterir?, picks up its analysis from seeming contradictions of the 2016 Trump election.