Panel organizers:
Fannie Frederikke Baden, Lund University, fannie_frederikke.baden@kultur.lu.se
Per Högselius, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, perho@kth.se
Markku Lehtonen, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, markku.lehtonen@upf.edu

This open panel will function as a forum for discussion of recent and ongoing research about nuclear energy (and nuclear weapons) in STS, history of science and technology, the environmental social sciences/humanities, cultural studies and related fields. We welcome and encourage contributions of all kinds, including not only traditional disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship, but also activist and artistic interventions.

Studies of nuclear energy – and nuclear weapons – have a long history. Early academic works addressing nuclear themes took inspiration from the growing controversies over the atom that unfolded in the 1970s and 1980s. STS scholars and historians of science and technology traced the emergence and evolution of national nuclear programs and the public’s fascination with and anxieties about the atom. They analyzed the dual military and civilian purposes of nuclear engineering, the technopolitical choices underpinning these developments, the rise of anti-nuclear movements, and the role of technoscientific expertise. Nuclear power also inspired new theorizations in the social sciences. The nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986), for example, famously inspired key social theories of risk, including Charles Perrow’s theorization of “normal accidents” and Ulrich Beck’s “risk society.” Political scientists turned the anti-nuclear movement into a paradigmatic case for the New Social Movements theory, and STS scholars used the nuclear case to conceptualize “sociotechnical imaginaries.”

The more recent literature has expanded to include detailed accounts of nuclear risk management and of nuclear disasters. This trend is also reflected in popular culture through the success of Johan Renck’s HBO miniseries Chernobyl and the Netflix documentary Meltdown: Three Mile Island, while a new breed of pro-nuclear environmentalism, under the label of ecomodernism, has produced its own accounts highlighting the virtues of the atom (e.g. Pandora’s promise, Nuclear Now, and Atomic Hope). Studies of nuclear energy from a media perspective have proliferated, as has research on nuclear weapons and extensive international comparative research on the relations of the nuclear sector with society at large. Another intriguing subfield that has seen a marked upswing is the study of nuclear energy from a heritage point of view, which has intersected in interesting ways with research on nuclear waste management.

We aim to structure this open panel into three broad themes:

1. Histories of the development and abandonment of nuclear technologies

Nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons, fuel cycle facilities and radioactive waste projects are often perceived as “science-based” and technologically “complex” and “advanced”. Yet the argument that nuclear science and technology are unique and exceptional has not prevented scholars from highlighting the prominent role of more mundane and banal technical components in such facilities, ranging from the ordinary-looking pumps, pipes and valves that make up much of a nuclear power plant to the seawalls and sandbags needed to prevent them from flooding. Based on this understanding of nuclear power as a hybrid technology that merges the glamorous and the banal, the old and the new, the large and the small, we challenge our panel participants to open up the scientific and technological black box of nuclear things – and examine how scientists, engineers, political actors, antinuclear activists and the general public have interpreted nuclear science and technologies in their historical context.

2. Cultural responses to nuclear developments

Cultural responses to nuclear developments encompass a wide range of media, including popular culture, artistic expressions, and literary representations, such as When the Wind Blows (1982) by Raymond Briggs, The Atomic Priesthood Project (2009-2016), or Neville Shute’s On the Beach (1957). Often categorized under the umbrella term nuclear culture, these responses have been explored through concepts such as the nuclear sublime, ecocriticism, memory, and technological imaginaries, and frequently analysed from a microhistorical perspective. We define a cultural response as a societal reaction to nuclear developments, be it oppositional, supportive, or ambiguous.

3. Future promises and expectations concerning nuclear science and technology

Today, nuclear power is increasingly portrayed as an essential but insufficient component of sustainable energy futures, notably as a solution to the climate and energy security crises. The current hopes of yet another “nuclear renaissance” build on and seek to revive and reshape past promises such as fast breeder reactors, nuclear fusion, and safe geological disposal of nuclear waste. The latest trend is the promise of small modular reactors (SMRs), described as cheaper, safer, quicker to deploy, more flexible, and more compatible with decentralised and renewables-led energy systems than large nuclear power plants, whose construction has recently faced formidable difficulties in the West. To buttress the legitimacy and credibility of nuclear promises and shape expectations, nuclear advocates and their detractors draw upon contrasting interpretations of the historical experience from the nuclear sector. We invite contributions that analyse the entanglement of discourses, institutions and materiality in the construction and contestation of today’s nuclear promises and expectations.

Panel organizers:
Elena Raviola, University of Gothenburg, elena.raviola@gu.se
Vasilis Galis, ITU Copenhagen, vgal@itu.dk
Ursula Plesner, Copenhagen Business School, up.ioa@cbs.dk
Bertil Rolandsson, University of Gothenburg, bertil.rolandsson@gu.se
Vasilis Vlassis, ITU Copenhagen, vavl@itu.dk

The emphasis on border surveillance and monitoring through technologies has made border infrastructures central to the governance of mobility, solidifying their role as a means of addressing a perpetual state of crisis in borderlands. In practice, this work of infrastructuring borders (Dijstelbloem, 2021; Guild and Bigo, 2010) materializes the tension between mobility and security. Borders emerge as high-stakes loci for experimentation with advanced technologies and transnational collaboration, while simultaneously serving as mundane sites of everyday labor for border guards, customs officers, airport security personnel, and others. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the pervasiveness of biometric technologies and their performative role in shaping political subjectivities in mobility across the borders (e.g. Amoore, 2021; Van der Ploeg & Sprenkels, 2011; Wilson, 2006).

However, borders are not solely defined by high-tech innovations. Instead, they are created through assemblages of digital and analogue interactions involving bodies and technologies (Canzutti & Tazzioli, 2023). Recently, scholars have provided valuable insights from a variety of perspectives into the different materialities of borders, highlighting the underdetermined and often mundane processes through which users and subjects are constituted (Pelizza & Aradau, 2024; see here also the notion of digiwork, Justesen & Plesner, 2024). At many European borders, advanced technologies – such as biometric recognition systems, machine learning algorithms, various scanners, and interconnected databases – interact with the embodied work and judgment of border guards and other personnel (Møhl, 2022; Bellanova & Glouftsios, 2022; Broeders, 2007). These interactions place border infrastructures within heterogeneous assemblages of technologies, practices, and organizations (Gillespie, 2016; Seaver, 2017; Lange, Lenglet & Seyfert, 2018). As such, the work of infrastructuring borders oscillates between high-tech interventions and the mundanity of everyday practices, which we would like to unpack in this panel.

This panel invites contributions that explore the practices, processes, and discourses surrounding the infrastructuring of borders, particularly in light of contemporary pressures to balance heightened security with maintained mobility. We welcome diverse methodological and conceptual contributions, addressing cases from the Nordic region and beyond on a variety of issues. To inspire potential contributions without limiting the scope, here are some thematic areas to consider:

• The interplay between advanced technologies and embodied labor at borders;
• The mundane and often invisible work that sustains border infrastructures;
• The assemblages of materials, technologies, ideas, and practices that constitute border infrastructures;
• The inter-organizational making of borders;
• The role of crises in shaping and legitimizing border infrastructuring efforts;
• The ethical, political, and social implications of emerging border technologies;
• Methodological challenges to study border practices across actors, locations and technologies.

We welcome papers discussing these and other issues in relation to the infrastructuring of borders in the Nordic region and elsewhere to open, constructive and engaged discussions.

References
Amoore, L. (2021). The deep border. Political Geography, 102547.
Bellanova, R., & Glouftsios, G. (2022). Formatting European security integration through database interoperability. European Security, 31(3), 454–474. https://doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2022.2101886
Broeders, D. (2007). The New Digital Borders of Europe: EU Databases and the Surveillance of Irregular Migrants. International Sociology, 22(1), 71–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580907070126
Canzutti, L., & Tazzioli, M. (2023). Digital–Nondigital Assemblages: Data, Paper Trails, and Migrants’ Scattered Subjectivities at the Border. International Political Sociology, 17(3), olad014. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olad014
Dijstelbloem, H. (2021). Borders as infrastructure: The technopolitics of border control. The MIT Press.
Gillespie, T. (2016). # trendingistrending: When algorithms become culture. In Seyfert, R. and Roberge, J. (eds.) Algorithmic cultures (pp. 64-87). London: Routledge.
Guild, E., & Bigo, D. (2010). The transformation of European border controls. In Extraterritorial Immigration Control (pp. 252–273). Brill. http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/10.1163/ej.9789004172333.i-441.59/?crawler=true&mimetype=application/pdf
Justesen, L., & Plesner, U. (2024). Invisible Digi-Work: Compensating, connecting, and cleaning in digitalized organizations. Organization Theory, 5(1), 26317877241235938.
Lange, A. C., Lenglet, M., & Seyfert, R. (2019). On studying algorithms ethnographically: Making sense of objects of ignorance. Organization, 26(4), 598-617.
Møhl, P. (2022). Biometric technologies, data and the sensory work of border control. Ethnos, 87(2), 241-256.
Pelizza, A., & Aradau, C. (2024). Scripts of Security: Between Contingency and Obduracy. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 01622439241258822.
Seaver, N. (2017). Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. Big data & society, 4(2), 2053951717738104.
Van der Ploeg, I., & Sprenkels, I. (2011). Migration and the Machine-Readable Body: Identification and Biometrics. In H. Dijstelbloem & A. Meijer (Eds.), Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe (pp. 68–104). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230299382_4
Wilson, D. (2006). Biometrics, Borders and the Ideal Suspect. In S. Pickering & L. Weber (Eds.), Borders, mobility and technologies of control (pp. 87–109). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4899-8_5

Panel organizers:
Amelie Lange, Technical University of Denmark (amela@dtu.dk)
Henriette Langstrup, University of Copenhagen (helan@sund.ku.dk)
Benjamin Lipp, Technical University of Denmark (bmili@dtu.dk)

The persistence, fluctuation, and open-endedness of chronic illnesses – what we understand as their chronicity – pose ongoing challenges for healthcare systems. Chronicity doesn’t simply unfold over time; it actively entangles itself with lives, institutions, and infrastructures, demanding forms of care that traverse boundaries between clinic and home, and blur distinctions between medical and consumer spheres.

Increasingly, healthcare systems turn to digital technologies as mediators of this care, promising efficiencies, enhanced patient engagement, and optimised outcomes. Yet, these technologies do not simply solve problems – they also generate new ones, producing tensions between organising and doing chronic care.

This panel invites contributions that explore how digital technologies come to matter in chronic care. Rather than viewing these technologies deterministically – as solutions imposed on pre-existing systems – we ask how they engender new rationales and logics for organising and performing chronic care. Chronic illness defies linear resolution, but many digital tools are designed to make it legible, predictable, or manageable. Wearable devices, for instance, promise continuous symptom tracking and feedback, extending the clinic’s gaze into domestic spaces and requiring patients to align their daily lives with the infrastructures of care these devices depend on. Similarly, the promises of automation and predictive algorithms frame chronic care as a matter of optimisation, yet risk sidelining the messiness of fluctuating symptoms or individual lived experiences.

These developments are not neutral. They invite certain forms of care while excluding others. Rather than taking these promises for granted, we ask how digital technologies co-constitute new practices, and relations in chronic care infrastructures (Langstrup 2013) or multi-sited therapeutic assemblages (Trnka 2021), that challenge traditional boundaries of space and spheres (Sharon & Gellert 2024).

For example, they may emphasise patient self-monitoring and data sharing, positioning individuals as both responsible agents and subjects of care (Bruni and Rizzi 2013), while at the same time transforming the domestic sphere into a site of medical intervention. They may also prioritise particular temporalities – efficiency, process, and control – that sit uneasily with the fluctuating rhythms of chronicity (Cluley et al. 2024; Greco and Graber 2020). Finally, they might give Big Tech actors access to vulnerable spheres of health and private life, promoting market and data logics (Sharon & Gellert 2024) rather than logics of care and solidarity (Mol 2008; Prainsack & Kickbusch 2024).

At the same time, these technologies create space for adaptation, negotiation, and resistance, as patients, caregivers, and professionals work to make them fit the socio-material realities of chronic care (Torenholt et al. 2020; Mattingly et al. 2011), echoing the ongoing processes of chronic living (Manderson and Wahlberg 2020) that involve continuous adjustments and relational practices in the face of persistent illness. Contributions to this panel might engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

Temporalities of Chronic Care: How do digital devices (re)shape temporal arrangements of chronicity, such as long-term illness trajectories, treatment schedules, and risk of complications or co-morbidity?

Datafication of Chronicity: How does the datafication of chronicity, through tools like patient-reported outcomes (PROs) and electronic patient records, but also self-tracking transform care practices, responsibilities, and narratives of illness?

Clinical Decision Support: How do clinical decision support systems shape care practices in the diagnostics, resource allocation, and treatment of chronic conditions?

Unpredictability and Standardisation: How do healthcare systems negotiate the inherent unpredictability of chronicity when using digital technologies that often demand standardisation and control?

Maintenance Work: What kinds of maintenance work are required from patients and healthcare professionals to keep digital technologies functioning, and how does this shape care relationships and practices?

Access and Inclusion: How do these technologies condition access to chronic care, and what does this mean for who gains—or is excluded from—access to in-person care when we delegate certain tasks and decisions to digital tools?

Through this panel, we aim to critically examine how chronicity and digital care infrastructures are co-constructed and share in a discussion of how they transgress and redefine boundaries. We invite empirical studies, conceptual reflections, and methodological approaches that illuminate the tensions and transformations at the intersection of digital technologies and chronic care. By paying close attention to the relational, material, and ethical aspects of these arrangements, this panel seeks to open up new ways of thinking about what technology is doing as we ask what it means to care – and to be cared for – in the context of chronicity.

Bruni, E., & Rizzi, C. (2013). Looking for data in diabetes healthcare: Patient 2.0 and the re-engineering of clinical encounters. SCIENCE STUDIES, 2013(2), 29-43.
Cluley, V., Burton, J. O., Hull, K. L., & Eborall, H. (2024). The paradox of haemodialysis: the lived experience of the clocked treatment of chronic illness. Health Sociology Review, 33(1), 24-42.
Greco, C., & Graber, N. (2022). Anthropology of new chronicities: illness experiences under the promise of medical innovation as long-term treatment. Anthropology & Medicine, 29(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13648470.2022.2041550
Langstrup, H. (2013). Chronic care infrastructures and the home. Sociology of health & illness, 35(7), 1008-1022.

Manderson, L., & Wahlberg, A. (2020). Chronic living in a communicable world. Medical Anthropology, 39(5),428-439.

Mattingly, C., Grøn, L., & Meinert, L. (2011). Chronic homework in emerging borderlands of healthcare. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 35, 347-375.
Mol, A. (2008). The logic of care: Health and the problem of patient choice. Routledge.
Prainsack, B., & Kickbusch, I. (2024). A new public health approach to data: why we need data solidarity. bmj, 386.
Sharon, T., & Gellert, R. (2023). Regulating Big Tech expansionism? Sphere transgressions and the limits of Europe’s digital regulatory strategy. Information, Communication & Society, 1–18.
Torenholt, Rikke, Lena Saltbæk, and Henriette Langstrup (2020) “Patient Data Work: Filtering and
Sensing Patient-reported Outcomes.” Sociology of Health & Illness 42(6): 1379–93.
Trnka, S. (2021). Multi-sited therapeutic assemblages: Virtual and real-life emplacement of youth mental health support. Social Science & Medicine, 278, 113960.

Panel organizers:
Niklas Bremberg (Stockholm University, niklas.bremberg@statsvet.su.se)
Adrienne Sörbom (Stockholm & Södertörn University, adrienne.sorbom@score.su.se)

Why, how, and with what effects is scientific knowledge about climate change used to shape policy actions on climate risks in global environmental governance? The scientific knowledge on climate change is rapidly developing, and recent estimates suggest that the frequency and intensity of climate risks, e.g., droughts, floods, forest fires, extreme weather events, and sea level rise are likely to increase in all regions of the world (WMO 2023; IPCC 2023; 2021). The UN Secretary-General consistently describes climate change as an existential threat to human societies and eco-systems across the globe, and climate experts in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assert that climate risks are neither threats in a distant future nor only a challenge for developing and vulnerable countries. Furthermore, the UN addresses climate risks as a development and humanitarian concern since several decades, and a fund to help vulnerable countries cope with loss and damage related to climate change was agreed at COP28 in 2023. However, a UN Security Council (UNSC) draft resolution on climate change as a threat to international peace and security was blocked by China, India, and Russia as recently as 2021. Despite this disagreement among member states in the UNSC, the UN Climate Security Mechanism has been established to help actors in the UN system assess and respond to climate risks, and several International Organizations (IOs), such as for instance AU, EU and NATO, have started to respond to climate risks. Also, various non-state organizations, such as think tanks, civil society associations and business associations, are active in the field of climate risks. However, we know little about why and how IOs and NGOs make use of scientific knowledge while addressing climate change as a security issue and beyond, and what the effects might be on international cooperation and diplomacy.

 This panel seeks to bring together junior and senior scholars from various fields of social science interested in advancing research on how scientific knowledge is shaping ideas and understandings among various groups of actors in global environmental governance regarding what climate risks entail and what can be done to advance international cooperation to avert, reduce, and manage the adverse effects for states and societies. While the political responsibility for managing climate risks still mainly rests with national governments, the scientific knowledge about such risks is increasingly shaped and drawn upon in international settings, such as IOs and international agencies, which makes it imperative to better understand why, how, and with what effects scientific knowledge about climate change is used to shape policy actions on climate risks in global environmental governance.

 The panel invites contributions in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and International Relations (IR) that are interested in advancing research on communities of practice (CoP) and epistemic co-production in global environmental governance. Drawing on the work by Wenger and others, CoPs are defined as communities of practitioners bound by a shared interest in learning and performing common practices. More than groups of practitioners acting together, CoPs are social processes of negotiating meanings, perceptions of competence, and background knowledge. CoPs are sustained by repertoires of communal resources and social practices that embody the community’s knowledge. These repertoires, in turn, instill the community’s practitioners with the dispositions and expectations necessary to cultivate shared values, legitimize authority, and engage in mutually negotiated joint enterprises. Research in STS has highlighted how scientific knowledge is always embedded in social practices and the concept of knowledge co-production has been successfully applied in IR and global environmental governance to show how state representatives and diplomats might steer the development of scientific knowledge, while climate experts, IO officials and civil society actors contribute to assemble “epistemic objects” in international policymaking processes.

 The panel welcomes conceptual and empirical contributions, and themes that potential contributions might explore could include: how mixed groups of practitioners in international politics co-produce knowledge on climate risks; how communities of practice relate to science as a form of strategic communication in policy advocacy; how communities of practice develop legitimacy as “experts” while drawing on science;  how epistemic co-production may take form in specific communities of practice; how new technologies afford new ways of imagining and legitimizing policy solutions to manage climate risks; as well as other themes that relate to the overarching focus of the panel.

Panel organizers:
Stefanie Egger, s.egger@invisible-lab.com
Hedda Lilleng, hedda@snohetta.com
Christian Lepenik, cl@invisible-lab.com

Connecting the dots between Design Research, Architecture and Science, Technology & Society Studies is the endeavor that this panel is proposing. It revolves around the central question: How can socio-technical configurations be designed? In promoting and shaping social and technological change towards sustainability, the critical question in all three of the mentioned fields is how interactions, interdependencies and communications between people and things should be designed.

The work of architects, designers, and engineers of all kinds is playing a pivotal role in shaping the technical world that surrounds us, encompassing urban planning, the development of everyday objects and tools and the design of digital landscapes, very often leaving the silos of their disciplines behind. In this context, one of the most significant challenges facing designers today is to contribute to the creation of 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. The objects we design are created for human use and are designed to be used within existing infrastructures. Research for design is a necessity, encompassing concepts, thinking models, and tools that facilitate integration between the technical and the social realms, thereby addressing matters that have previously been overlooked. By investigating habits and rituals, it becomes evident in how many ways a technical object, such as a mobile phone, is connected to and entangled in the technological as well as in the social realms. Design research can help us understand the intricacies of this intertwining.

This panel aims to strengthen bridges between Architecture and 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 technical or “digital-only” focused approaches to design. Bringing together findings from Architecture & 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, experiments, posters and multimodal presentations (including analogue and/or artifact-based ones) addressing at least one of the following questions: How can designers and architects encourage and promote more sustainable behavior? 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 and architects implement more sustainable products and practices? How can an STS approach stimulate design processes in general? Are there certain Design Research approaches in particular that 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 and architecture are welcome in this panel.

Panel organizers:
Mylène Tanferri, IT University of Copenhagen (mylt@itu.dk)
Camilo Castillo Estupiñán, University of Gothenburg (camilo.castilloe@gu.se)
Brian Lystgaard Due, Copenhagen University (bdue@hum.ku.dk)

This panel explores the theoretical and methodological intersections between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Multispecies Studies (MS), with particular attention to how tools, techniques and scientific knowledge shape, mediate, and transform encounters between humans and other-than-humans. While STS/ANT has historically been engaged with non-human actors – from Callon’s scallops to Latour and Strum’s baboons – and MS has theorized other-than-humans writ large, there is ample space to examine how these fields can mutually inform each other. We are interested in methodological applications for multispecies projects such as ethnographies, experiments, designs, films, artistic work, and more, where STS methodologies can address current challenges in MS, while also demonstrating how MS perspectives can enrich STS analysis of scientific and technological activities involving other species, inclusive in reflexive ways.

Methodological issues in treating other species as ethnographic subjects have been recurrently addressed under different aspects (Head et al., 2014; Taylor and Hamilton, 2014; Swanson, 2017, Lien and Pálsson, 2021), while the practical applications of MS approaches beyond theory have been questioned (Dowling, Lloyd and Suchet-Pearson, 2017). Methods are crucial for MS – in the practical and conceptual means used to account for, describe, integrate, and engage with other species (Hamilton and Taylor, 2017). Hence the question: how to conduct fieldwork to uncover other species agencies and what definitions of agency emerge from the methods employed?                                   

In considering more specifically how agency is engaged with and through methods, this panel aim to address a central tension regarding ontological statuses, such as the agency of species and technologies : Is there, or not, an ontological difference in agency between humans and non-humans (Asdal, Druglitrø and Hinchliffe, 2016)? how do we conceptualize the differences between/within species and non-humans such as machines or tools? Does symmetry counteract the visibility aimed by MS for under- valorized “others”? How to delve into the differences and specificities between humans and other species without reifying these? And how to productively interfere with species thinking still bounded to classificatory and taxonomic schemas?                                                               

To explore these questions we would like to address two key activities of methodological interest: technologies and knowledge practices. First, by examining the role of tools, techniques or technologies in creating, sustaining and maintaining multispecies encounters. Not restricted to digital tools (Turnbull et al., 2023), these can include data collection methods such as lists and grids (Law and Lynch, 1988) in conservation field mapping, autonomous recording devices such as sensors or drones, but also mundane agricultural tools, breeding machines and other forms of practical interventions such as CRISPR methods. Beyond acknowledging technological mediation in abstract, we want to learn more about these “mediations” (Gomart and Hennion, 1999), and not take them for granted. We aim at exploring how technologies’ agency is constituted through multispecies encounters and how this, in turn, shapes the agency of other entities, while creating differences and commonalities amongst them and organizing their relationships.

A second space of inquiry concerns knowledge practices in the natural sciences. Knowledge-production and its socio-material arrangements can transform multispecies encounters, from bioacoustics to electrophysiology, which in turn shapes the ways agency is attributed and distributed across species boundaries, and how those boundaries are sustained and maintained. Looking at the tools that populate the microbiology lab for instance can help in examining some of the scientific assumptions about other species agency MS work often relies on. What are the experiments, assumptions, practices and techniques that make such results possible and how do they inform them more specifically? What does an STS perspective on natural sciences knowledge production uncovers about “proofs” and representations (Hacking, 1983; Lynch, 1988) of other-than-human agency as outcomes of scientific activities? Here, we aim at understanding how scientifically mediated multispecies encounters bring into being and respecify phenomena such as intelligence, intention or communication when natural sciences play with these concepts for other species. In other words, how to incorporate scientific knowledge in multispecies analysis without bracketing the dynamic character of knowledge as a practical, social and locally situated achievement.

Rather than assuming that STS and MS are already integrated through their mutual borrowings, the panel aims to clarify their distinct contributions while identifying potential synergies and frictions. By bringing together research working at the intersection of these fields, the panel is open to contributions aiming to explore the methodological and conceptual challenges of analyzing multispecies encounters through a careful and critical lens regarding the role of technologies and knowledge practices. In doing so, the panel welcomes ongoing or finished projects concerned with the complex web of relationships between technologies, human, and more-than-human species, in all kinds of current critical matters such as biodiversity monitoring, agriculture, energy transitions, biotechnology, disease outbreaks and more.                                                                                                                                                        

References                                            
Asdal, K., Druglitrø, T. and Hinchliffe, S. (2016) Humans, Animals And Biopolitics: The more-than-human condition, Humans, Animals and Biopolitics: The More-Than-Human Condition       

Dowling, R., Lloyd, K. and Suchet-Pearson, S. (2017) ‘Qualitative methods II: “More-than- human” methodologies and/in praxis’, Progress in Human Geography, 41(6), pp. 823– 831                                    

Gomart, E. and Hennion, A. (1999) ‘A Sociology of Attachment: Music Amateurs, Drug Users’, The Sociological Review, 47(1_suppl), pp. 220–247.                                                                                                        

Hacking, I. (1983) Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.                                                                                                           

Hamilton, L. and Taylor, N. (2017) Ethnography after Humanism. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.                                                                                                           

Head, L. et al. (2014) ‘Vegetal politics: belonging, practices and places’, Social and Cultural Geography, 15(8), pp. 861–870.                                                                                                           

Law, J. and Lynch, M. (1988) ‘Lists, field guides, and the descriptive organization of seeing: Birdwatching as an exemplary observational activity’, Human Studies, 11(2–3).                                                                                                            

Lien, M.E. and Pálsson, G. (2021) ‘Ethnography Beyond the Human: The “Other-than- Human” in Ethnographic Work’, Ethnos, 86(1), pp. 1–20.                                                                                                            

Lynch, M. (1988) ‘The Externalized Retina: Selection and Mathematization in the Visual Documentation of Objects in the Life Sciences’, Human Studies, 11(2/3), pp. 201–234.

Swanson, H.A. (2017) ‘Methods for Multispecies Anthropology: Thinking with Salmon Otoliths and Scales’, Social Analysis, 61(2).                                                                                                           

Taylor, N. and Hamilton, L. (2014) ‘Investigating the other: Considerations on multi- species research’, Studies in Qualitative Methodology, 13, pp. 251–271.                                                                                   

Turnbull, J. et al. (2023) ‘Digital ecologies: Materialities, encounters, governance’, Progress in Environmental Geography, 2(1–2), pp. 3–32.

Panel organizers:
Annika Bergviken Rensfeldt, University of Gothenburg, annika.bergviken-rensfeldt@gu.se
Thomas Hillman, University of Gothenburg, thomas.hillman@ait.gu.se
Ida Martinez Lunde, University of Oslo, i.c.m.lunde@iped.uio.no
Antti Pakkari, Tampere University, antti.paakkari@tuni.fi
Lina Rahm, KTH, linarahm@kth.se
Elin Sundström Sjödin, Mälardalens University, elin.sundstrom.sjodin@mdu.se

Critical education technology studies is an emerging research field which examines the sociotechnical entanglements of educational technologies and their broader societal implications, employing critical perspectives often grounded in Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches. This interdisciplinary area scrutinizes the multifaceted impacts of technology on learning, teaching, knowledge, equity, the environment, and broader societal power dynamics related to education and technology. Challenging narratives of technological neutrality and inevitability, critical education technology studies investigate the political, social, and environmental dimensions of educational technology, while also exploring alternative pathways for its development and use. This field of critical education technology studies relate to STS-based studies in education established in the 1990s and onwards (Gorur et al., 2019) and in particular to sociology of education traditions, on issues such as the sociomaterial nature of curricular, epistemic and regulatory practices, the history and political economy of technologies in education, policy governance, knowledge and expertise, the role of big data, platforms and AI-infused learning analytics, and the evolving configurations of educational institutions, classrooms, and online spaces.

We welcome conceptual, empirical, and speculative contributions that critically examine the sociotechnical entanglements of educational technologies through STS frameworks. As part of the panel, shared discussions will reflect on what the Nordic context and contributions bring to the field of critical education technology studies. Issues of equity, sustainability, and public governance will be considered in relation to the global challenges and transformations shaped by educational technologies. The panel aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, deepen our understanding of how digital technologies are transforming education systems, and inspire pathways toward more equitable, ethical, and sustainable futures for education and educational technology.

We invite contributors to participate on an open panel on themes that include but are not limited to, STS research on:

• Technological Artifacts: Examining the design, materiality, and implications of digital technologies in education, and education about digital technologies, including for example how platforms, apps, artificial intelligence (AI), social robots and data visualizations, form part of pedagogical practices.
• Policy, Governance and Technoscience: Investigating the role of governments, institutions, actor networks, science and discourses in shaping the regulation and co-production of educational technologies.
• Political Economy: Analyzing the business practices, infrastructures, digital capitalism logic, and value creation strategies of the edtech industry, including startups, big tech corporations, and edu-businesses.
• Social Justice and Diversity: Exploring how educational technologies (re)produce inequalities, impact marginalized communities and human rights, and fail – or succeed – to address postcolonial and heterogeneous audiences.
• Learning, Pedagogy, and Assessment: Examining how digital technologies influence teaching, learning, literacy, curriculum and assessment practices, including the role of platforms, interfaces, data analytics, and algorithmic modeling.
• Pedagogical Work and Invisible Labour: Investigating how digital technologies is reconfiguring teacher and student work, and related problems of hidden and unpaid labour
• Political and Ethical Considerations: Addressing privacy, surveillance, affective dimensions and the broader political and ethical challenges posed by data-driven education systems and how they affect educational subjects.
• Postdigital Education, and Resistance, Non-Compliance and Protests Relating to Educational Technologies: Perspectives and phenomena challenging current understandings and materializations of technology, digitalization, and AI in education.
• Sustainability Futures for Education and Educational Technology: Investigating the environmental impact of educational technologies, globally and locally, and proposing strategies for mitigating their ecological footprint.
• Histories and Futures of EdTech: Tracing hidden histories, patterns, and hype cycles in educational technology while imagining speculative futures, including utopian and dystopian scenarios and alternative future pathways.

Panel organizers:
Maria Jernnäs, Department of Thematic Studies: Environmental Change, Linköping University, maria.jernnas@liu.se
Juliana Porsani, Department of Thematic Studies: Environmental Change, Linköping University, juliana.porsani@liu.se

The collection and use of social and environmental data for decision-making substantiate the very understanding of what it means to be a modern society (Durkheim, 1982; Weber, 1978). This understanding rests, among other things, on the belief that data does not merely “speak for itself” but also, when amassed in sufficient quantities, reveals patterns otherwise imperceptible. Therefore, data plays a central role in modern problem-solving rationales (Davis et al., 2012; Flyverbom, Madsen & Rasche, 2017). Governing through data, in this sense, is not new and is intrinsically linked to the drive for technological progress, which purportedly enhances societies’ capacity to understand and act upon the world and beyond (Jasanoff, 2015).

Datafication, defined as the conversion of any aspect of existence into digital data, is characteristic of our digital age (van Dijck, 2014). In the context of intertwined global climate and biodiversity crises, datafication, often coupled with advances in machine learning and AI, has become central to global environmental governance (Bakker & Ritts, 2018). At the core of these practices lie new methods of collecting and analyzing digital data, enabling innovative ways to capture, measure, track, and act upon climate and biodiversity. These include the emergence of biodiversity credits and the revitalization of carbon credits under the Paris Agreement, grounded in expectations surrounding digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) practices (Belenky, 2022; UNDP, 2023). Additionally, new mechanisms for benefit-sharing purportedly enable traceable and accountable links between actors at different governance levels (Scholz et al., 2022).

Digital data – often powering algorithms – is increasingly deployed in creating new objects of governance and relied upon as a resource for governing the present and predicting the future (Egbert, 2024; Lazaro & Rizzi, 2023). However, despite claims to core principles such as openness, transparency, traceability, objectivity, neutrality, universality, and resource optimization, the legitimacy of digital data often obscures the human and social dimensions shaping data-related decisions (Gabrys et al., 2022; Miller, 2001; Miller, 2014), warranting critical scrutiny (Dauvergne, 2020; Galaz et al., 2021).

For instance, while digital data and associated technologies are often expected to level the playing field among various actors, their seemingly apolitical nature has been argued to reinforce power asymmetries, entrenching hegemonic interests in unprecedented ways (Dauvergne, 2020; Gupta, 2023; Machen & Nost, 2021). In this regard, Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies and governmentality studies have been instrumental in deconstructing dominant imaginaries and discourses surrounding datafication. These studies shed light on datafication’s genealogies, rationales, and materializations (Crawford, 2021; Ruppert et al., 2017; Zuboff, 2019). They offer a critical lens to understand society and to explore means of solving contemporary crises.

Within these theoretical traditions, recent studies demonstrate how the control of digital data amplifies corporate power across multiple levels – from influencing individual decisions to shaping collective outcomes (Epstein & Robertson, 2015; Ndlela, 2020). They also reveal how governments act not only as users or regulators but also as facilitators of datafication regimes, enacting procedures and legislation driven by imperatives of economic growth and efficiency (Agar, 2003; Mergel et al., 2016; Reutter & Åm, 2024). Such studies emphasize the epistemic effects of datafication, which contribute to the creation of “regimes of digital truth” (Rouvroy & Stiegler, 2016), enhance the power to influence behaviors (Boyd & Crawford, 2012; Flyverbom & Garsten, 2021; Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; Peeters & Schuilenburg, 2021), and constrain “alternative ways of acting in the future” (Rouvroy, 2011). This productive power of digital data and technologies is stressed as underpinning contemporary governance and control methods. Consequently, datafication is deeply intertwined with how social and environmental problems are defined and managed, as digital data becomes a central means for rendering the world legible and actionable.

In this panel, we invite submissions that advance conceptualizations of datafication and associated technologies in relation to climate and biodiversity governance, while engaging with empirical material on the topic. Suggested analytical entry points, inspired by STS, governmentality, political ecology, and related critical lenses, include but are not limited to:

• (New) conceptualizations of the digital in environmental governance
• Emerging subjects and subjectivities
• Whether and how digital data and associated technologies constitute a qualitative shift in environmental governance
• Resistance to datafication
• Tangible and intangible effects of datafication

References

Agar, J. (2003). The government machine: A revolutionary history of the computer. MIT Press.
Bakker, K., & Ritts, M. (2018). Smart Earth: A meta-review and implications for environmental governance.
Belenky, M. (2022). Carbon markets: Why digitization will be key to success. Retrieved from World Bank Blog.
Boyd, D., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 662–679.
Crawford, K. (2021). The atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.
Dauvergne, P. (2020). AI in the wild: Sustainability in the age of artificial intelligence. MIT Press.
Davis, K. E., Fisher, A., Kingsbury, B., & Merry, S. E. (2012). Indicators as a technology of global governance. Law & Society Review, 46(1), 71–104. Retrieved from JSTOR.
Durkheim, E. (1982). The rules of sociological method (S. Lukes, Ed., & W. D. Halls, Trans.). The Free Press. (Original work published 1895).
Edwards, P. N. (2010). Thinking globally. In A vast machine: Computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming (pp. 1–26). MIT Press.
Egbert, S. (2024). Algorithmic futures: Governmentality and prediction regimes. In J. Jarke et al. (Eds.), Algorithmic regimes: Methods, interactions, and politics. Amsterdam University Press.
Epstein, R., & Robertson, R. E. (2015). The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(33), E4512–E4521.
Flyverbom, M., & Garsten, C. (2021). Anticipation and organization: Seeing, knowing, and governing futures. Organization Theory, 2(3), 1–25.
Flyverbom, M., Madsen, A. K., & Rasche, A. (2017). Big data as governmentality in international development: Digital traces, algorithms, and altered visibilities. The Information Society, 33(1), 35–42.
Ford, C. A., Graham, C. H., & Perkins, K. D. (2024). A technological biodiversity monitoring toolkit for biocredits. Journal of Applied Ecology.
Gabrys, J., et al. (2022). Reworking the political in digital forests: The cosmopolitics of sociotechnical worlds. Progress in Environmental Geography, 1(1–4), 58–83.
Galaz, V., et al. (2021). Artificial intelligence, systemic risks, and sustainability. Technology in Society, 67.
Gupta, A. (2023). The advent of ‘radical’ transparency: Transforming multilateral climate politics? PLOS Climate, 2(1).
Jasanoff, S. (2015). Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. In Dreamscapes of modernity.
Lazaro, C., & Rizzi, M. (2023). Predictive analytics and governance: A new sociotechnical imaginary for uncertain futures. International Journal of Law in Context, 19(1), 70–90.
Reutter, L., & Åm, H. (2024). Constructing the data economy: Tracing expectations of value creation in policy documents. Critical Policy Studies.
Machen, R., & Nost, E. (2021). Thinking algorithmically: The making of hegemonic knowledge in climate governance. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46(3), 555–569.
Mayer-Schönberger, V., & Cukier, K. (2013). Big data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. John Murray.
Mergel, I., Rethemeyer, R. K., & Isett, K. (2016). Big data in public affairs. Public Administration Review, 76(6), 928–937.
Miller, P. (2001). Governing by numbers: Why calculative practices matter. Social Research, 68(2), 379–396.
Miller, P. (2014). Accounting for the calculating self. In N. Thrift, A. Tickell, S. Woolgar, & W. H.
Rupp (Eds.), Globalisation in practice (pp. 236–241). Oxford University Press.
Ndlela, M. N. (2020). Social Media Algorithms, Bots and Elections in Africa. In M. N. Ndlela & W.
Mano (Eds.), Social Media and Elections in Africa, Volume 1 (pp. 15–33). Palgrave Macmillan.
Peeters, R., & Schuilenburg, M. (2021). The algorithmic society. An introduction. In M.
Schuilenburg & R. Peeters (Eds.), The algorithmic society: Technology, power, and knowledge (pp. 1–15). Routledge.
Roland, M., et al. (2015). Terrestrial animal tracking as an eye on life and planet.
Rouvroy, A. (2011). Technology, virtuality and utopia: Governmentality in an age of autonomic computing. In M. Hildebrandt & A. Rouvroy (Eds.), Law, human agency, and autonomic computing (pp. 119–140). Routledge.
Rouvroy, A., & Stiegler, B. (2016). The digital regime of truth: From algorithmic governmentality to a new rule of law. Le Deleuziana, 3, 6–27.
Ruppert, E., Isin, E., & Bigo, D. (2017). Data politics. Big Data & Society, 4(2).
Saad Saoud, A., et al. (2024). Beyond observation: Deep learning for animal behavior and ecological conservation.
Scholz, A. H., Freitag, J., Lyal, C. H. C., et al. (2022). Multilateral benefit-sharing from digital sequence information will support both science and biodiversity conservation. Nature Communications, 13,1086.
UNDP. (2023). Newly accredited digital public good: National carbon registry will help countries meet their climate targets. Retrieved from UNDP.
van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, dataism, and dataveillance: Big data between scientific paradigm and ideology.
Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.; E. Fischoff et al., Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1922).
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. Profile Books.

Panel organizers:
Mikkel Rask Pedersen, SHAPE – Shaping Digital Society and Dept. of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University
Patrick Heiberg Kapsch, SHAPE – Shaping Digital Society and Dept. of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University
Peter Lauritsen, SHAPE – Shaping Digital Society and Dept. of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University.
Peter Danholt, SHAPE – Shaping Digital Society and Dept. of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University, pdanholt@cc.au.dk

Digital technologies, data, algorithms and AI are increasingly transforming society and we experience that these technologies are promoted as necessary and inevitable instruments of modernization. At the same time, these technologies increasingly produce new types of problems and disasters that need to be mitigated.

In this panel, we invite papers that explore the transformation of social work and social welfare in relation to digital technology. While digital systems have been part of social welfare and social work for decades, primarily as systems for documenting and recording the citizen’s case, their scope has significantly expanded. Today, these systems are now vital infrastructures for public welfare institutions. They are used not only for documentation but also for collaboration and communication between different professionals and citizens. Additionally, digital systems play a pivotal role in managerial surveillance, enabling the monitoring of social work processes, case progress, and the datafication and quantification of citizens. For the last couple of years, imaginaries about how big data, AI, algorithms and machine learning can be used to predict vulnerability, for instance, in relation to the detection of children at risk of abuse, have also flourished. While these developments offer novel opportunities, they also raise a plethora of concerns regarding ethics and surveillance; “technical” questions about standardization of data, data pooling, and combination of data.  Furthermore, these innovations risk imposing significant organizational and administrative burdens,  particulaly within welfare systems faced with cut-backs and increasing demands for cost-effectiveness. All this occurs in the face of the troubling fact that removing  a child from their home and placing them in foster care or an institution is likely to produce vulnerability of a different sort than relieve the child from vulnerability.

The digital technologies in social work practice thus raise questions about how citizens are being datafied and managed by means of digital technologies and how citizens are included and able to contribute and negotiate their digital representations in those systems. It also raises questions regarding how social work as a profession is being transformed when social workers may be working more with the digital representation – the digital double –  rather than with the “actual citizen”. However, we may also acknowledge that digital systems play a key role in the formation, coordination, and execution of social work that benefits the citizen. As evident in the field of STS, technologies and the work practices they configure, are tools for producing knowledge and plans intended to help the vulnerable citizen. They are central in producing care in a specific way.

There is a long tradition in STS of studying technologies and their social implications for people, society and organizations. Drawing on actor-network and cyborg theory, the very meaning of concepts such as society, social, human, machine and technical, are not fixed terms but changes in the processes of materialsemiosis. With the increasing digitization of society, society as such changes, since how society is grasped is influenced by how it is digitally processed, monitored and managed. Problems that were hitherto unimaginable can now be imagined due to digital technologies and datafication. What was once uncountable may now be counted or be thought of as countable. The digital enacts the world differently and expands what can be imagined as managed by means of the digital, but at what expense?

The digital thus changes what it means to be a vulnerable citizen, to do and manage social work, to care for and help vulnerable citizens, to include the citizen in social work… and to be a welfare society.

The organizers of the panel will prioritize to organize the panel in such a way that they will be plenty of time for discussion and collective thinking and exploration of the questions and cases raised in the session.

The organizers invites contributions that may include, but not limited to, the following:

• Theoretical and conceptual contributions relating social work, STS and digital technology.
• Empirical studies of social work and digital technologies.
• Contributions concerning collaboration between social workers and citizens in the execution and organization of social work and/or development of digital technologies for social work.
• Studies that follows actors/objects in the formation of the vulnerable citizen and/or the practice of social work.
• Contributions on the digital double and the interelated configuration of the digital and actual citizen.
• Contributions concerning the use of AI, machine learning, predictions systems etc. in social work and social welfare systems.

Panel organizers:
Mie Seest Dam, University of Copenhagen (mda@sund.ku.dk)
Mette Nordahl Svendsen, University of Copenhagen (mesv@sund.ku.dk)
Tone Druglitrø, University of Oslo (tone.druglitro@tik.uio.no)
Iben Mundbjerg Gjødsbøl, University of Copenhagen (ibgj@sund.ku.dk)
Clémence Pinel, University of Copenhagen (clemence@sund.ku.dk)
Karoliina Snell, University of Helsinki (karoliina.snell@helsinki.fi)
Heidrun Åm, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (heidrun.aam@ntnu.no)

In fiction and mythology, the doppelganger is a ghostly double of a living person, often considered an omen of bad luck or death and causing confusion in the life of the living person. In the life sciences and data-driven healthcare, the notion of the doppelganger and related concepts of ‘data double’, ‘digital twin’, and ‘avatar’ have become central terms for models that aim to represent as close as possible the living person without becoming the same. ‘Standing in’ for the living person in the laboratory and beyond, the doppelgangers of the life sciences promise to reduce uncertainty, pre-empt unwanted futures, and become a resource for both health and wealth. Concurrently, we also witness public fears of doppelgangers—e.g. digital twins—no longer acting in accordance with the interest of the living person and the collective. How are doppelgangers constituted and governed at a moment in which they embody both promise and threat for individual and collective life? Given that doppelgangers are forms of representation, what is made visible and what is left out in their making? How do doppelgangers contest who and what the person is?

In this panel, we draw on empirical examples from across science and technology studies to explore the meanings and practices of doppelgangers in the life sciences, data-driven healthcare, and global economies. We are interested in how the concept of the ‘doppelganger’ is used and become meaningful in different settings, and what fears, potentials, and futures doppelgangers help to mobilize. We are curious about how doppelgangers are fostered, cared for, or ignored, and how they become part of flows of data and money. To understand the life of the doppelganger in knowledge practices and their applications, we also wish to explore settings in which the figure is absent. For example, we take an interest in how gene editing as a technology aiming at intervening in the ‘original’, and experimental organisms configured as ‘non-models’, come to direct the movements of life in and out of the life sciences.

Possible points of entry for these explorations can be data doubles, digital twins, genomes, synthetic data, organoids and stem cells, research animals, and AI-driven predictions. We invite papers which explore how different doppelgangers are built and come to circulate in the world, and with what consequences, as well as how they come to disappear from settings in which they used to live.

Panel organizers:
Cheshta Arora, Western Norway Research Institute, car@vestforsk.no
Debarun Sarkar, University of Bergen, debarun.sarkar@uib.no

Though the field of science and technology studies (STS) has been able to interrogate the messy contours of technoscience, the panel seeks to flip the tables, to re-deploy and re-think the methods and sensibilities that have been developed in relationship to the natural science and technological domains and turn the gaze towards humanities and social sciences. Even though humanities and social sciences, in particular the allied disciplines of anthropology/sociology, celebrate and defend self-referentiality, relationality and perspectivism as key sensibilities, there has been a reluctance to turn the gaze towards the labour one does (Arora and Sarkar 2022), the flow of capital that enables these disciplines in the contemporary, and the nitty-gritty of how knowledge is produced in these disciplines. Following Rabinow (1986) and echoing Sangren (2007), Hey notes the hesitancy of anthropologists/sociologists “in addressing the significance of ‘corridor talks’” (Hey 2001, 67) and how they appear or disappear in the “documents” (Smith 1974), or “inscriptions” (Latour and Woolgar 1986) emerging from these disciplinary practices. Similar to the ability of science and technology studies “to document and ask questions surrounding the practice of scientific knowledge-making in the lab and outside”, the panel calls for interrogating “knowledge-making practices in the fields of social science” and humanities (Sarkar 2022, 115).

The mandate for interdisciplinarity has been a long-standing one (Apostel et al. 1972) and has been formalised in the European Union due to the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development. However, this long-standing call and formalisation has not meant smooth integration, a strong tradition of cross-disciplinary collaboration or non- hierarchical collaborations (Bruce et al. 2004; Clark and Wallace 2015; Arora and Prabhakar 2023). Differences between trans-disciplinarity, inter-disciplinarity, and multi-disciplinarity are often noted to articulate the spectrum of collaboration between disciplines.

The changes in modes of knowledge production (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000) have also echoed in debates in the scientific method as complexity has emerged over the decades as the key problematic (Prigogine and Stengers 1997; Kitchin 2014). These changes have affected the everyday lives of social sciences and humanities as much as the natural sciences and engineering disciplines in terms of materials, interfaces, and infrastructures. However, an adequate global account of these changes within academic labour and knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences is lacking. The panel seeks papers and provocations that can think through the conditions of knowledge production, the process of hiring, grant- making, research-funding, tenure-track hiring, etc” (Arora and Sarkar 2022) and how knowledge is “assembled, accumulated, compiled and curated” (Jaton 2020) or practised and performed in these disciplines.

The list is non-exhaustive, and we welcome concerns that echo or resonate with the following list:

• How has the funding regime reshaped the contours of humanities and social science in recent decades in Europe and beyond?
• How has labour relations reshaped the contours of humanities and social sciences in recent decades in Europe and beyond?
• How has STS as a field been shaped by funding mandates in Europe and outside?
• How is knowledge generated, codified and evaluated in humanities and social sciences in Europe and beyond?
• How have mandates of interdisciplinarity shaped humanities and social sciences in recent years in Europe and beyond?
• How does knowledge production differ in non-governmental organisations, research institutes, universities and for-profit organisations in Europe and beyond?
• How can STS method and sensibilities be redeployed for unpacking knowledge production in humanities and social sciences?

We encourage writings from diverse geographical sites and particularly encourage comparative perspectives across different regimes of scientific knowledge production. We welcome texts that wish to experiment with varied forms of writing and sense-making.

References
Apostel, Léo, Guy Berger, Asa Briggs, and Guy Michaud. 1972. ‘Interdisciplinarity:
Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities’. Paris: OECD Publications
Center, Suite 1207, 1750 Pennsylvania Avenue, N. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED061895.
Arora, Cheshta, and Tarunima Prabhakar. 2023. ‘To Think of Interdisciplinarity as Intercurrence: Or, Working as an Interdisciplinary Team to Develop an ML Tool to Tackle Online Gender-Based Violence and Hate Speech’. Journal of Interdisciplinary
Methodologies and Issues in Sciences Vol 11-Thinking interdisciplinarity in practice (Subject Area 1: Interdisciplinarity as a field of research).
https://doi.org/10.46298/jimis.8915.
Arora, Cheshta, and Debarun Sarkar. 2022. ‘No Publication, No Degree: Of Knowledge Production in Anthropology/Sociology in India’. Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology 28:84–104. https://doi.org/10.36950/sjsca.2022.28.8003.
Bruce, Ann, Catherine Lyall, Joyce Tait, and Robin Williams. 2004. ‘Interdisciplinary Integration in Europe: The Case of the Fifth Framework Programme’. Futures, Transdisciplinarity, 36 (4): 457–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2003.10.003.
Clark, Susan G., and Richard L. Wallace. 2015. ‘Integration and Interdisciplinarity: Concepts, Frameworks, and Education’. Policy Sciences 48 (2): 233–55.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-015-9210-4.
Etzkowitz, Henry, and Loet Leydesdorff. 2000. ‘The Dynamics of Innovation: From National Systems and “Mode 2” to a Triple Helix of University–Industry–Government Relations’. Research Policy 29 (2): 109–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(99)00055-4.
Hey, Valerie. 2001. ‘The Construction of Academic Time: Sub/Contracting Academic Labour in Research’. Journal of Education Policy 16 (1): 67–84.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930010009831.
Jaton, Florian. 2020. The Constitution of Algorithms: Ground-Truthing, Programming, Formulating. Inside Technology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & Their Consequences. SAGE Publications Ltd.
https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473909472.Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1997. The End of Certainty. Simon and Schuster.
Rabinow, Paul. 1986. ‘Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology’. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 234–61. University of California Press.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1525/9780520946286-012/html.
Sangren, P. Steven. 2007. ‘Anthropology of Anthropology?’ Anthropology Today 23 (4): 13–https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2007.00523.x.
Sarkar, Debarun. 2022. ‘Toward a Feminism Without Scaffoldings: Mapping a Research Project, a Narrative from the Field, and a Draft Bill’. Journal of International Women’s Studies 23 (2): 103-118–103. https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol23/iss2/8.
Smith, Dorothy. 1974. ‘The Social Construction of Documentary Reality’. Sociological Inquiry 44 (4): 257–67.
https://www.academia.edu/49243314/The_Social_Construction_of_Documentary_Reality_1

Panel organizers:
Jonatan Nästesjö, Halmstad University, jonatan.nastesjo@hh.se
Jakob Lundgren, Halmstad University, jakob.lundgren@hh.se
Staffan Edling, Lund University, staffan.edling@soc.lu.se

A central topic in STS has long been to demonstrate how science and technology are implicitly political (e.g., Harding, 1986; Latour, 1993; MacKenzie, 1978; Martin, 1991; Shapin & Schaffer, 2011; Winner, 1980). While research in the field has frequently “identified politics in places where politics was not supposed to be” (Moore, 2010, p. 794), the roles of researchers explicitly engaging with governance, political organizations, and political movements have received comparatively less attention. In this Open Panel, we therefore invite scholars to explore what happens when scientists engage with politics.

STS attention to overt politics has often focused on the role of experts and expertise in democratic societies (e.g., Callon et al., 2009; Durant, 2016). Not seldom, these studies reflect an underlying assumption of tension between science and democracy (Guston, 1993), alongside a normative commitment to enhancing public participation (Jasanoff, 1990). Other scholars have emphasized the necessity of expert knowledge in democratic decision-making, seeking to refine definitions of legitimate expertise (Collins & Evans, 2002).

Whereas scientific expertise and expert knowledge may both displace and enable democratic processes, we propose broadening the scope to explore other empirical settings where scientists engage explicitly with politics. This will provide both challenges and complementary accounts of the interplay between science, politics, and democracy. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, expertise and expert knowledge in politics, academic activism and societal engagements, as well as how epistemic beliefs are produced in politics. For instance, how does the credibility of science shift when scientists become climate activists and engage in civil disobedience? How should we understand traditional structures and conventions of knowledge production when research is conducted within political organizations? And how do the boundaries between researchers, stakeholders, and politics blur as the role of science (natural and social) in society is renegotiated?

This Open Panel seeks to foster dialogue among researchers broadly interested in overtly politicized science. We welcome contributions from established fields such as expertise, democracy, and science policy, as well as from newer empirical settings where scientific practice intersects with explicitly political contexts and activities.

References
Callon, M., Lascoumes, P., & Barthe, Y. (2009). Acting in an uncertain world: An essay on technical democracy. MIT Press.
Collins, H. M., & Evans, R. (2002). The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience. Social Studies of Science, 32(2), 235–296.
Durant, D. (2016). The undead linear model of expertise. In M. Heazle & J. Kane (Eds.), Policy legitimacy, science and political authority: Knowledge and action in liberal democracies. Routledge.
Guston, D. (1993). The essential tension in science and democracy. Social Epistemology, 7(1), 3–23.
Harding, S. G. (1986). The science question in feminism. Cornell University Press.
Jasanoff, S. (1990). The fifth branch: Science advisers as policymakers. Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1993). The pasteurization of France (First Harvard University Press paperback ed). Harvard University Press.
MacKenzie, D. (1978). Statistical Theory and Social Interests: A Case-Study. Social Studies of Science, 8, 35–83.
Martin, E. (1991). The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16(3).
Moore, A. (2010). Review: Beyond participation: Opening up political theory in STS: Mark Brown, Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions and Representation. Social Studies of Science, 40(5), 793–799.
Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (2011). Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton University Press.
Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics? Daedalus, 109(1).

Panel organizers:
Ayşem Mert, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University (aysem.mert@statsvet.su.se)
Tatiana Sokolova, Department of Environment, Development and Sustainability Studies, Södertörn University (tatiana.sokolova@sh.se)

The Anthropocene concept has been critiqued for its homogenising, universalising, and anthropocentric tendencies. It has also been celebrated as an opportunity to break with universalism of Western onto-epistemology and modernist dichotomies. Yet, the Anthropocene condition can act as an invitation to embrace multiple non-Western onto-epistemologies; to leave the ‘global’ sphere and turn instead to the planetary; to engage in radical future-making, (re)storying, and (re)worlding. The geosciences have recently ‘voted down’ the Anthropocene as a geological era, which lends it even more to social science and humanities scholarship. This is because the polycrises associated with the concept of the Anthropocene throw the Earth’s diverse and unequally prepared communities into uncertain futures, raising the questions of socio-ecological justice and ecological democracy. To realise the Anthropocene’s transformative potential, societies are trying to embrace the actions it inspires, such as micro-level and small-scale reparative politics, everyday activism, radical democratic experiments, and post-apocalyptic environmentalism. Such actions increasingly compete in the social imaginary with international negotiations and top-down, one-size-fits-all technological solutions, which are often deadlocked or unable to address the crises at hand in a timely and just manner.

In the context of the Anthropocene, the STS epistemic community has provided vibrant critique and reflection, engaging with ontological politics, situated knowledges, epistemic cultures, more-than-human assemblages, communities of practice, actor-networks, co-production of knowledge and power, technoscience, and sociotechnical imaginaries. To build on such epistemic engagements, we invite papers that explore the role of imagination, emotions and affect in post-apocalyptic political thought and environmental governance; more-than-human theories, methodologies, and practices; empirical and theoretical accounts of polycrises such as diseases and tornados, forest fires and floods; democratic experiments of ‘work in the ruins’; and other investigations into diverse configurations of power and knowledge in the face of loss and regeneration.

Panel organizers:
Helene Friis Ratner, Aarhus University (helr@edu.au.dk)
Marie Ryberg Larsen, University of Copenhagen (mlr@ind.ku.dk)
Sara Mörtsell, University of Gävle (sara.mortsell@hig.se)

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, generative AI has become a pressing concern throughout educational institutions, from primary to higher education. The capacity of ChatGPT and similar applications to generate or evaluate text or solve mathematical problems has raised concerns about students cheating as well as the accuracy of generative AI outputs. At the same time, these tools have fostered a focus on developing a new set of competencies associated with their use, pointing for the need to develop AI literacies. This panel seeks to critically engage with these developments, examining their implications for pedagogy, institutional practices, human-machine relationships and the broader sociotechnical ecologies in which education and organizational learning practices are embedded.

Responses of education institutions to the emergence of generative AI has been characterised by a dual focus on rethinking assessment and AI adoption. As educators and administrators worry about how to detect students’ potential misuse of generative AI, they also confront its disruptive implications for traditional assessment methods, critical thinking, originality, Bildung, and the integrity of writing as a technique for both learning and assessment. Critics warn of existential threats to universities and the educational process itself, with the possibility of core elements of teaching, learning and knowledge creation potentially being outsourced to machines. On a more fundamental level, generative AI applications therefore are not only reshaping educational practices but has raised urgent questions about the very nature of and purpose of education.

At the same time, there are massive efforts to integrate generative AI into education pedagogy, focusing on developing digital and AI literacies among students and staff. In these efforts, generative AI is often framed as a learning enhancing too,l involving a new set of AI competencies that educational institutions need to provide for students to prepare them for the future’s labour market and society. Thus, in tandem with new exam formats and specifications of academic integrity, an avalanche of practical idea catalogues, frameworks and prompt libraries are being for educators to become familiar with and competent teachers of generative AI.

At the heart of these changes are emerging human-machine configurations that redefine teaching, learning, and academic labour. Generative AI is increasingly employed to prepare teaching materials, support writing processes, assist with grading, and even engage in chatbot-based dialogues with students. These tools are therefore not simply inert technologies; they actively shape educational practices, influencing how educators and students interact, how knowledge is framed and assessed, and what it means to learn, read and write.

These configurations are embedded in a set of infrastructures that raise wider questions about the political economy and the planetary impacts of generative AI. Tech giants are consolidating their power as generative AI systems depend on vast datasets and computational infrastructures that centralize control within a few corporations. These infrastructures are not only data-intensive but also resource-intensive, with significant environmental impacts, including high CO2 emissions and water usage for cooling data centers. In addition, their dependence on data annotators in the global South reproduces post-colonial inequalities. This makes it pertinent to explore the entanglements of humans and generative AI in institutions and processes of education, examining how the integration of such systems shifts the roles of educators, the practices of students, and the broader dynamics of power, labour, and agency in educational settings, and the wider and global infrastructures they depend on.

This panel seeks to critically examine emerging configurations, contestations and new dependencies of generative AI in education. What new human-machine companionships are emerging as processes of organizing, teaching, learning, writing and assessing are distributed across humans and generative AI? How do these new configurations reflect, diminish, exacerbate or introduce new inequalities in education? And what are implications of the reliance on these systems for the wider processes of global inequality and planetary strains? We welcome submissions focusing on both generative AI in education and generative AI as part of learning practices (e.g., organizational learning). Topics may include but are not limited to:

• The role of generative AI in reshaping educational practices and institutions.
• Socio-technical imaginaries and new visions of the future emerging with generative AI
• The implications of generative AI for assessment, critical thinking, writing cultures and academic integrity.
• Emerging human-machine configurations and relationships in teaching, learning, writing, and academic labour.
• The planetary and environmental impacts of generative AI in education.
• Political-economic perspectives on generative AI in education, exploring how generative AI adoption intersects with issues of power centration with Tech giants, data extraction, labour exploitation, and technological dependency.
• Questions of equity, accessibility, and sustainability in AI-driven education systems.

Panel organizers:                                                           

Mandy de Wilde, Leiden University, m.de.wilde@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
Miriam Waltz, Leiden University, m.h.a.waltz@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
Thomas Franssen, Leiden University, t.p.franssen@cwts.leidenuniv.nl
Rob Smith, Edinburgh University, robert.dj.smith@ed.ac.uk

As part of sustainability transitions a range of chemical elements are put into the public limelight; hydrogen is central to renewable energy regimes, carbon is sequestered and captured to mitigate climate change, and working with and on the nitrogen cycle to develop healthy soils is key to regenerative agriculture. A hopeful, open-ended engagement with chemical elements and compounds characterises many such sustainability transitions.                                                                    

This hopeful engagement aligns with recent work of STS-scholars that have started to flesh out ambivalences as part of chemical exposures, pointing towards chemicals as both potentially harmful and helpful, depending on what is at stake in the practice of use (Khalikova 2016; Balayannis and Garnett 2020; Hardon 2021). These ambivalences have led some scholars to probe whether chemicals can be explored outside of the framework of environmental injustice and as part of a more comprehensive relational framework that values chemicals – and their more-than-human companions – in varied ways. The concept of ‘chemosociality’ invites scholars to explore such “altered, attenuated, or augmented relationships that emerge within chemical exposures” (Kirksey 2020: 23). And instead of conveying normative claims as scholars, it invites us to explore how chemical normativities come about in practice as stakeholders liaise by means of chemical features.                                                                                      

This raises the question of what constitutes ‘good’ – or ‘bad’ – in the practices in which chemical elements and compounds are handled. How are judgments being made about ‘good chemicals’? Whose interests, concerns, and knowledges are considered when valuing chemicals? And how may we empirically and ethically explore this? To answer these questions, this panel solicits tools from the field of valuation studies. From valuation studies we learn that what is qualified as ‘good’ is an outcome of situated and practical undertakings (Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010). The ‘chemical good’, then, is not homogeneous nor an abstract good: depending on the stakes in a particular situation, there are different ‘registers of valuing’ (Heuts and Mol 2013) at play. These registers indicate a particular relevance, while what is or is not ‘good’ in relation to this relevance may differ from one situation to another. In carbon markets, for instance, ‘good carbon’ maybe the result of a trade-off between measurability and ecological value of different trees; in regenerative agriculture, ‘good nitrogen’ may be the outcome of an alignment between between soil health and public health; while in energy transitions, ‘good hydrogen’ may manifest itself through climate mitigation while simultaneously increasing the scarcity of water. Put differently, to value chemicals in practice entails drawing heterogeneous registers of valuing together, constantly, sometimes aligning them, often leaving them in tension, and at other times trading them off.                            

As part of those alignments, tensions, and trade-offs, some chemical relations will flourish, while others are marked as ‘bad’ and thus will not. This raises the question how alignments, tensions, and trade-offs between registers of valuing are navigated in practice by the stakeholders involved. Whose interests and which relations are at stake when navigating potentially contrasting registers of valuing? What are the controversies involved? And how may such practices of navigating different registers of valuing in practice help us (re)think the political potential of those altered, attenuated, or augmented relationships that are characterised by chemical features? 

For this panel we are particularly interested in case studies and ethnographies that:            

• Examine the ways a plurality of registers of valuing are negotiated in practice, with a

  particular emphasis on potential conflicts, tensions, or alignments among different

  registers;

• Highlight the modes of knowing – from tactile, embodied and affective knowledges to

  scientific standards, protocols, devices and formats – involved when engaging (with)

  chemicals;

• Focus on those chemicals that are currently in the political limelight because of their

  role in sustainability transitions, such as nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and phosphorus.                                                                                                                                

References                                                                                                                                                        
Balayannis, A., & Garnett, E. (2020). Chemical kinship: Interdisciplinary experiments with pollution. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. 6(1): 1-10.                                                                                                                                       
Hardon, A. (2021). Chemical Youth: Navigating Uncertainty in Search of the Good Life. Springer Nature.                                                                                                                                                      
Heuts, F., & Mol, A. (2013). What is a good tomato? A case of valuing in practice. Valuation Studies, 1(2), 125-146.                                                                                                                                                      
Kirksey, E. (2020). Chemosociality in multispecies worlds: Endangered frogs and toxic possibilities in Sydney. Environmental Humanities, 12(1), 23-5                                                                                                                                                   
Khalikova, V. R. (2016). “The Chemical Refrain: An #AmAnth2016 Panel Review.” Cultural Anthropology. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1012- the-chemical-refrain-an-amanth2016- panel-review                                                  
Mol, A., Moser, I., & Pols, J. (Eds.). (2010). Care in practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Transcript Verlag.

Panel organisers:
Anique Hommels, Professor of Sociohistorical Technology studies, Maastricht University, The Netherlands, a.hommels@maastrichtuniversity.nl (corresponding organiser)
Marc Dijk, Assistant Professor of Sustainable Mobility, Maastricht University, The Netherlands, m.dijk@maastrichtuniversity.nl
Martin Emanuel, Researcher of History of Technology and Cities, KTH Stockholm, Sweden, martinem@kth.se
Andrew Karvonen, Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Lund University, Sweden, andrew.karvonen@abm.lth.se
Denver Nixon, Researcher of Urban Geography and Sustainability, Maastricht University, The Netherlands, denver.nixon@maastrichtuniversity.nl

This panel focuses on the phenomenon of urban laboratories, or Urban Living Labs (ULLs). Over the past decade, ULLs have emerged as tools for developing sustainable practices through experimentation and for stirring urban transformation across the globe (Voytenko et al., 2016; Bulkeley et al., 2016). ULLs are set up as forums for innovation, aimed at the development of new systems, services, policies and processes in urban areas. Employing specific methods to integrate actors into the entire development process as users and co-creators, ULLs explore, examine, experiment, test and evaluate new and often creative ideas, scenarios, processes, systems and concepts in complex and everyday contexts. ULLs fit both into the longer-term discourse of innovation under the neoliberal logic of urban competitiveness, and into the promise of more inclusive and open forms of experimentation capable of addressing pressing urban policy agendas surrounding sustainability (Bulkeley et al., 2014; Karvonen & van Heur, 2014; de Lange & de Waal, 2019). They are claimed to have significant potential to influence existing urban governance structures, practices and networks in cities across Europe because of their ability to create highly context-sensitive knowledge. The often-heard claim is that, for innovations produced by ULLs, there is no reasons to ask: “But will it work in reality?”, because “it is already taking place in reality”.

Yet, in practice, there are many reasons why the full potential of the ULLs as transformative agents has not (yet) been realised. In most cities ULLs and other innovation projects tend to be operated as isolated projects (“projectification”), dominated by a relatively small group of “enthusiasts” that co-create novel solutions. Even at a local government level, ULLs are liaised with or coordinated by an exclusive group of civil servants, often disconnected from established government policy practices. At best, ULLs are followed up by new projects but hardly embedded and institutionalised in the broader governance structure. Hence, their context-specific lessons are poorly translated into citywide, integrated, transformative policy implications. Accordingly, despite the promise of wider impact across the city with potential transformative effects towards sustainability and resilience, both the practical impact on mainstream urban practices and scientific understandings of ULLs are still limited (Turnheim et al., 2018; Dijk et al., 2018; von Wirth et al., 2019). In addition, Living Labs tend to focus on the short-term, the near future and temporary interventions, while lacking explicit attention to the past. Historical and STS approaches to urban transformation can alert us to longer-term developments of urban space and historically produced path dependencies in cities and show us how things could have been otherwise.

This panel seeks to address, among other things, how the localised approach of urban living labs can benefit from perspectives that use longer time frames and a global perspective.

This panel welcomes papers related to the following themes:

• Case studies of urban laboratories and their contributions to sustainability (or other) transformation
• Critical appraisals of the phenomenon of urban laboratories as agents of change
• Comparisons between urban living lab approaches and other transformative approaches
• Analyses of the embedding of urban living labs in policies and institutions
• Urban laboratories as sites of knowledge production
• Urban experimentation in local and global perspectives
• Relations between urban living labs, imaginaries and futuring
• Urban labs as loci for studying urban pasts, presents and futures

References:

Bulkeley, H., A. Gareth, S. Edwards & S. Fuller (2014). Contesting climate justice in the city: examining politics and practice in urban climate change experiments, Glob. Environ. Change, 25 (Mars), 31-40.
Bulkeley, H., Coenen, L., Frantzeskaki, N., Hartmann, C., Kronsell, A., Mai, L., Marvin, S., McCormick, K., van Steenbergen, F. & Palgan, Y.V. (2016). Urban living labs: governing urban sustainability transitions. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 22, 13-17.
Dijk, M., De Kraker, J., & Hommels, A. (2018). Anticipating constraints on upscaling from urban innovation experiments. Sustainability, 10(8), 2796. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10082796
Karvonen, A., & van Heur, B. (2013). Urban laboratories: experiments in Reworking Cities.International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(2), 379-392.
Lange, M. de & Waal, de M. (Eds.) (2019). The Hackable City: Digital Media and Collaborative City-Making in the Network Society. Springer.
Turnheim, B., Kivimaa, P., & Berkhout, F. (2018). Beyond experiments. In B. Turnheim, P. Kivimaa, & F. Berkhout (Eds.). Innovating climate governance: Moving beyond experiments (pp. 1–26). Cambridge University Press.Von Wirth, T., Fuenfschilling, L., Frantzeskaki, N. & Coenen, L., (2019). Impacts of urban living labs on sustainability transitions: Mechanisms and strategies for systemic change through experimentation. European Planning Studies, 27(2), 229-257.
Voytenko, Y., K. McCormick, J. Evans & G. Schwila (2016). Urban living labs for sustainability and low carbon cities in Europe: towards a research agenda, J. Clean. Prod., 123, 45-54.

Panel Organizers:
Marie Eneman, Associate Professor in Informatics at the department of Applied Information Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. marie.eneman@gu.se
Vasilis Galis, Vasilis is Professor in STS at the Technologies in Practice section, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. vgal@itu.dk
Anja Møller Pedersen is PhD at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, Denmark. anpe@Humanrights.dk
Katarina Winter, Katarina is PhD in Sociology at the department of Criminology, Stockholm University, Sweden. katarina.winter@criminology.su.se

The Nordic countries are currently witnessing strong political pressure and willingness to rapidly enact laws and amend existing ones to provide law enforcement and other security forces with new powers to expand their legal arsenal. There is also a pluralization of policing that moves beyond the boundaries of traditional law enforcement agencies, now also delegating responsibility for crime fighting to regions, municipalities and private actors. At the same time, Nordic governments are procuring and deploying advanced police technologies, such as digital platforms, drones, body cameras, facial recognition technologies and so on, to support their operational capacity. Both the new legislations and technologies are politically justified by Nordic states as necessary means in the fight against allegedly increased gang criminality, failed integration of migrant populations, and an increasing geopolitical instability in the region.

Consequently, the deployment of police innovations combined with newly proposed policy and legal frameworks have given the police authorities in the Nordic countries significantly extended mandates that can be described as repressive: the use of facial recognition technologies, designating specific residential areas as ‘vulnerable’ or ‘parallel societies’, the implementation of advanced surveillance apparatuses in ‘vulnerable areas’ and establishing police search zones in demarcated areas, the so-called ghetto laws, and algorithmic profiling are some indicative examples. These techno-political developments in law enforcement are inscribed with high expectations of increased effectiveness in the fight against crime, while on the other hand, they raise serious concerns regarding fundamental democratic rights such as privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, etc. It should also be emphasized that the technologies should not be understood as individual tools related to certain practices, but rather a convergence of earlier discrete technologies into complex digital assemblages that is not under total control of any governmental actor. They are moulded by an intricate interplay between institutional forces that condition how the affordances of the technologies are materialized, which also involve private actors as the private sector develops and provides the major part of digital devices and software applications to be used in police practices.

Against this background, the aim of this open panel is to bring scholars working with and within STS into dialogue with each other to stimulate renewed critical thinking and engagement with the complexity and specificity of issues related to the new techno-police state in the Nordics. We are particularly interested in contributions that address the digitalization of the police, the legalization of digital platforms in law enforcement, media narratives on the deployment of facial recognition technologies – legal developments in regard to the Nordic urban environment or a combination of those. The organizers are in contact with the Nordic Journal of Studies in Policing and are investigating the possibilities to connect a special issue to the panel.

Panel organiser:
Jacob Hassler, email: jacobhas@chalmers.se

The influence, and relevance, of research for practice has received increasing attention in recent decades. The challenge for research, and for practice, has been characterized as one of ‘bridging the gap’ between the two. This gap has been referred to as different things, for example as a ‘know-do gap’ or a ‘research-practice gap’. Stemming etymologically from old Norse “chasm” or “empty space”, a gap would surely need bridging.

Researchers must often consider not only how to create information. They must also consider how to communicate it to the world outside the laboratory – or, how to “bridge the gap”. One researcher exemplifies what this bridging may entail, saying that “I simplify, although I wouldn’t believe the simplification, just because that is what (the politicians and the media) expect from us […] there are examples […] where simplifications and generalizations may be perceived as generally accepted facts and end up as a baseline for certain policies.” (Pihlajamäki & Tynkkynen, 2011). Data and information that was firmly entrenched in the structures of academia may take on new meanings as it is prepared for traversing the gap and later encounter practice. And then, it is interpreted by various actors. Outside of the laboratory, research findings become new ‘things’ depending on how they are interpreted.

The bridge, both as a spatial and a processual metaphor, is thus truly liminal. Conceptually, liminality can be viewed as “a prism through which to understand transformations in the contemporary world” (Horváth et al., 2015, p. 1). It captures in-between situations where normalcy and established structures are unsettled. Liminality, thus, is temporary and has its place within a sequence and requires a return to normalcy (Thomassen, 2014, p. 21). The liminal is “a world of contingency where events and ideas—and indeed, “reality” itself—can be carried in different directions.” (Horváth et al., 2015, p. 42). When in a liminal place the future is therefore uncertain and undecided. And while the concept itself cannot “explain” (Horváth et al., 2015, p. 42) it can denote the specific events and moments when new possibilities are (temporarily)made available.

Here, liminality has something to offer STS, in providing a way to pinpoint the moments or events of transformation and emergence. These can illuminate how research findings come to take on new (multiple) meanings after leaving the laboratory. Such events, in the words of Deleuze (in Smith & Somers-Hall, 2012, p. 26) “appear for a moment, and it is [such] moments that matters, it’s the chance we must seize”. Instead of viewing the gap as something that needs to be overcome, liminality offers a conceptual framework to view it as a moment to become. Liminal moments do indeed generate possibilities that did not exist a priori. Deleuze exemplifies this (without using the phrase ‘liminality’) reflecting on the 68’ Paris student revolts. Arguing that society failed to seize the possibilities produced by the revolts, he wrote, or rather lamented, that:

“[It] amounted to a visionary phenomenon, as if society suddenly saw what was intolerable in it and also saw the possibility of something else […] The event creates a new existence, it produces a new subjectivity” (Deleuze, 2003)

The visionary phenomenon can, perhaps, be understood as rays of light produced by the moment, which upon hitting the liminal prism creates scattering of lights and colors previously impossible. Liminality was originally coined by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in the early 20th century to study rituals of transition in traditional societies, and later picked up by another anthropologist, Victor Turner, in the 1960’s. Originally, the concept referred to human experience and transitions. More recently, it has received increasing attention in a range of research fields, such as geography (Banfield, 2022), international relations (McConnell & Dittmer, 2018) and education (Bright, 2021; Somerville, 2007). The ‘flat’ ontology of STS, allowing both human and non-human actants to be considered as experiencing liminality, opens up for further use of the concept.

Therefore, this panel seeks to bring together contributions that engage with the question of liminality and knowledge practices. Contributions may discuss questions such as; How do statements, presentations or any other form of research dissemination transform during the liminal period on the bridge, or in the gap, between academia and practice, in the transition in and out of the laboratory? What (multiple) transformations emerge in the transition, and how does that open up for new liminality? Can these processes be traced, and if so, how? Thus, we invite contributions of any kind that engage with the ‘gap’ or the ‘bridge’ as a liminal, transformative and creative place.  

References
Banfield, J. (2022). From liminal spaces to the spatialities of liminality. Area, 54(4), 610–617. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12791
Bright, C. (2021). Impostorism: Traversing Liminal Spaces as an Early Career Academic (pp. 111–126). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4439-6_9
Deleuze, G. (2003). May ’68 Did Not Take Place. In Two Regimes of Madness.
Horváth, Á., Thomassen, B., Wydra, H., & Thomassen, B. (Eds.). (2015). Breaking boundaries: Varieties of liminality. Berghahn.
McConnell, F., & Dittmer, J. (2018). Liminality and the diplomacy of the British Overseas Territories: An assemblage approach. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36(1), 139–158. Scopus. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775817733479
Pihlajamäki, M., & Tynkkynen, N. (2011). The Challenge of Bridging Science and Policy in the Baltic Sea Eutrophication Governance in Finland: The perspective of Science. AMBIO, 40(2), 191–199. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-010-0130-4
Smith, D. W., & Somers-Hall, H. (2012). The Cambridge companion to Deleuze. Cambridge University Press.
Somerville, M. (2007). Postmodern emergence. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(2), 225–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390601159750
Thomassen, P. B. (2014). Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Panel Organizers:
Björn Nordvall (bjorn.nordvall@humangeo.su.se), Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University
Elise Perrault (eepe@kth.se), Division for Urban and Regional Studies, KTH
Emilia Smeds (emisme@kth.se), Division for Urban and Regional Studies, KTH

Aligned with the Nordic STS Urban Lab, this paper session focuses on the formation and shaping of publics around urban infrastructures. The session intends to explore, on one hand, the intentions of decision-makers and systems designers when they design and construct urban infrastructures and, on the other hand, how individuals interact with, reframe, and repurpose these same infrastructures through their everyday interactions.

Both STS and Urban studies have paid increasing attention to the way technological and infrastructural systems are being used and, in particular, have problematised the agency of users in relation to how these systems are designed and practised. Research has shown how artefacts and user identities are being co-constructed and challenged (for instance the notion of script, see Madeleine Akrich 1992) and that defining user categories can carry stark political implications (Summerton 2004). When standardised and/or differentiated representations of users are being materialised, they implement different levels of services or access (Graham and Marvin 2022) as well as systems of user sortation and classification.

Inspired by Marres (2007), the title of this paper session, Making Publics, is intended to direct our thoughts to the political nature of projecting and designing intentionalities onto infrastructures and urban spaces, and how users interact with and within these environments. The lens of ‘making publics’ is a way of understanding how these intentionalities are contextualised in space and time, and how they feature in the production of publics. Additionally, this lens directs our attention to the way that infrastructures are produced through long-term political processes, taking place before any material change occurs, and continuing long after the project “is complete”. In short, publics are socially and spatially multiple and made at the interface between design and practice.

The usage of the term infrastructure is intentionally broad in this context, intended to be flexible enough to encompass state-led projects (i.e. public transit, mega-projects, parks), business interests (i.e. mobile data masts, app creation, firm clustering), and community-driven interventions (i.e. community gardens, art projects) that are all important in the production of urban environments. We are interested in any contribution that specifically looks at the public character of infrastructures (i.e. public space, public service, public good) where the idea of a design meets its actual implementation and use.

The session will be structured around paper presentations. We invite both theoretical and empirical contributions that explore one or more of these points:

• Address how users’ identities and practices have been imagined and negotiated in the context of public infrastructure environments
• Consider how users’ interactions and imaginaries of infrastructures inform the use of these spaces, and how infrastructures are (re)produced by users
• Problematise categories like “publics”, “users”, and “designers”, for instance by examining commonalities and differences in how they have been defined in urban studies and STS
• Examine the processes of making infrastructures and publics through a historical lens
• Discuss the methodological and ethical implications that these categorisations have for research related to infrastructures

Panel Organizers:                                                

Alexander Paulsson, Lund university alexander.paulsson@fek.lu.se
Oscar Krüger, Lund university oscar.kruger@hek.lu.se
Gisle Solbu, Norwegian University of Science and Technology gisle.solbu@ntnu.no         

The pursuit of efficiency and productivity has long shaped scientific and technological endeavors, often framed as universal virtues essential for progress and innovation. From the automation of manual tasks to the streamlining of industrial processes, science and technology have continuously redefined what it means to do more with less. In energy and environmental policy, efficiency has also become a key trope as illustrated by the push for resource efficiency and energy efficiency in industry, households and laboratories.                         

Yet, the drive for efficiency and productivity also invites critical inquiry: whose values do these processes serve, and what unintended consequences emerge in their pursuit? How do researchers and policy-makers relate to potential rebound effects, where increased efficiency in resource use leads to greater overall consumption? How are displacements of in/efficiencies across systems and scales accounted for in science, technology and policy?                         

Critical scholars of sustainability have also begun to complicate the narrative of efficiency as inherently beneficial by calling for sufficiency. Calls for ‘slowing down’ has emerged as a reaction to an acceleration-derived drive for efficiency. What does the focus on efficiency do to our understanding of work, home, nature, and socio-ecological relationships? How might a slower, more deliberate approach to work and technology shift our perspectives on productivity? How are alternative conceptualizations such as sufficiency and slowness to be understood in relation to efficiency?

This session invites scholars to explore (i) how science, technology and policy-making implicitly endorse efficiency and productivity, (ii) how these processual qualities are directly targeted through research and innovation, or (iii) how alternative conceptualizations (sufficiency, slowness etc) relate to, or presuppose, efficiency and productivity.

Contributions may consider topics such as:                                                                                                        

• How categorizations and sorting processes precondition efficiency                                                                                                         
• The role of metrics and standards in shaping perceptions of efficiency and productivity.                                                                                                         
• How different actors relate to efficiency and productivity                                                                                                         
• The situatedness of efficiency in workplaces, in households and in science and technology
• Case studies of technological innovation that prioritize productivity, and their societal or ecological impacts.                                                                                                         
• Tensions between efficiency and other values, such as sufficiency, equity, or care.
• Historical and cultural differences in how efficiency and productivity are valued in
  research and technological practices.                                                                                                         
• Alternative frameworks that challenge dominant paradigms of efficiency and productivity,focusing on degrowth, post-growth, or slow science.                                                                                                                               

We encourage contributions from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, including but not limited to Science and Technology Studies (STS), sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy of science, and organizational studies. This session seeks to critically interrogate the implications of prioritizing efficiency and productivity, fostering discussions about their limits and possibilities in shaping equitable and sustainable futures.

References                                                                                                                                                        
Alexander, Jennifer K. (2008). The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.                                                                                                                                                         
Berman, Elizabeth Popp. (2022). Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy. Princeton University Press.                                                                                                                                                        
Dunlop, Tessa. (2022). Energy Efficiency: The Evolution of a Motherhood Concept. Social Studies of Science 52(5): 710–732. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221096171.                                                                                                   
Gregg, Melissa (2018). Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy. Duke University Press                                                                                                                                                         
Guthman, Julie. (2022). “The CAFO in the Bioreactor: Reflections on Efficiency Logics in Bio- industrialization Present and Future.” Environmental Humanities 14(1): 71–88. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481440                      
Korsnes, M., & Solbu, G. (2024). Can sufficiency become the new normal? Exploring consumption patterns of low-income groups in Norway. Consumption and Society, 3(3), 235-253. https://doi.org/10.1332/27528499Y2024D000000009                                                                                                                                                         
Krüger, Oscar and Alexander Paulsson (2025, forthcoming). Bio-Efficiency: On the valorisation of innovation in the bioeconomy. Valuation Studies.                                                                                                                                                      
Solbu, G., Ryghaug, M., Skjølsvold, T. M., Heidenreich, S., & Næss, R. (2024). Deep experiments for deep transitions–low-income households as sites of participation and socio- technical change in new energy systems. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 52, 100865.

Panel Organizers:                                                 
Malissa Kay Shaw, shaw.malissa@gmail.com
Li-Wen Shih, lwshih@tmu.edu.tw                                                                          

“Why did care become an object of concern and what is it about care that warrants being studied and attended to in social science writing. This question cannot be answered by pointing to bare facts, but has to do with values.” (Mol et al. 2010:9)                                                                        

“What is happening when we imagine otherwise worthless, even dangerous, human wastes as informative and valuable viral sentinels?” (Anderson 2024)                                                           

Waste is traditionally something unwanted, or useless, that should be discarded—intrinsically defined in relation to things perceived as valuable or productive. Theorizations of waste often draw on Douglas’ (1984) framing of “dirt as matter out of place,” a means to explore social categorizations of polluting, taboo, and dangerous substances. This is useful when considering bodily wastes (substances commonly imbued with disgust and repulsion), especially when outside the body where they are “out of place,” which negates their potential capacities to be reimagined as valuable/useful.                            

Similar to other forms of waste, bodily wastes pose symbolic and material consequences, particularly in the embodiment of their social disgust, and their containment or disposal. How we care for bodily waste—both symbolically and materially—affects present and future individuals, networks of human and nonhuman actors, the environment, and multispecies generational collectives. This panel proposes engaging with the notion of care to reimagine bodily waste and its alternative relational influences.                                            

STS approaches, inspired by Celia Roberts, Annemarie Mol, and María Puig de la Bellacasa, frame care as collective, distributed practices that involve dynamic interactions between humans, nonhuman actors, and technologies. Care is neither static or tentative, but continual, sustained enactments that shape current and future worlds. By attending to the ways care is enacted through embodied, relational, and material processes, STS scholarship helps uncover the tensions, inequalities, and continual consequences embedded in care practices. Drawing on this, our panel aims to use care to mediate waste as an actor within various contexts and speculate on its value and lack thereof. Similar to waste, what is cared for and what is not, corresponds with what is valued and de-valued, and these values are passed onto and shape future humans and non-humans alike (Fredengren and Åsberg 2020:57).            

We invite scholars to use care to speculate on the value of bodily waste in diverse contexts. This may entail asking: what is the relationality of bodily waste; how may new technoscientific, biosocial, or political economic practices transform what waste is and can do. Our own research in the realm of reproductive health offers examples. For instance, when constituting the uterine lining, menstrual substance is useful, contributing to embryo development. But when expelled from the body, menstrual fluid is “dirty,” requiring discreet hygiene practices in many cultures. Symbolisms of menstrual filth shape these practices and acceptable menstrual products, curtailing the suitability of reusable products and creating additional waste that impacts the environment and future interspecies generations. Menstrual “filth” symbolism limits technoscientific ventures to reframe menstrual fluid as a biosensor— transforming “waste” into a valuable, informative substance. Miscarried embryos and aborted fetuses, once expelled from the body, are often similarly categorized as medical waste within biomedical systems. Those entangled with this “waste,” however, mourn an unborn child, or recognize a biosignificant substance that imparts knowledge of reproductive potential. In such remakings, what was previously deemed “waste” can become critical tools for advancing scientific inquiries in diagnostic techniques, stem cell research, developmental biology, or genetic studies. This shift highlights the relational nature of value, where the enactment of waste and non-waste is contingent on the “waste’s” context, capacity, and framing. Continuing to tinker with bodily wastes, of which there are many, and notions of care may offer a way to re-value “waste” and transform its engagement with more-than-human worlds, both present and future.                                                                                                            

References
Anderson, Warwick (2024) Excremental hauntings, or the waste of modern bodies. Society for Social Studies of Science. https://4sonline.org/news_manager.php?page=37981. Douglas, Mary (1984) Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo.                                 

Fredengren, Christina and Åsberg, Cecilia (2020) Checking in with deep time: intragenerational care in registers of feminist posthumanities, the case of Gärstadsverken. In Deterritorializing the future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene, Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling (eds). Open Humanities Press, pp 56-95.                                                                             

Mol, Annemarie, Moser, Ingunn, and Pols, Jeannette, eds (2010) Care: putting practice in theory. In Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms. Transcript Publishing, pp 7‑25.       

Panel Organizers:   
Anita Thaler (IFZ – Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture) anita.thaler@ifz.at
Anna Szlavi (NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology) anna.szlavi@ntnu.no

For decades, Europe promoted gender mainstreaming and gender-inclusive research projects. In 2021 the members states of the European Union (EU) endorsed the „Ljubljana Declaration on Gender Equality in Research and Innovation”, which emphasized the importance of gender equality in science and technology institutions (“gender equality plans”), and also considering gender in research itself (“gender-responsive innovation”). This followed the ‘gendered innovations’ approach (Schiebinger et al. 2011) of firstly “fixing the numbers” (aiming for gender-balanced research teams), secondly “fixing the institutions” (aiming for cultural change within organisations), and thirdly “fixing the knowledge” (aiming at challenging epistemology, the production of scientific knowledge and innovations).

Additionally, in the last years funding calls of the EU asked for “intersectionality approaches”, like in 2022, when the European Commission asked in their Horizon Europe research funding programme to include gender with an intersectional perspective in biodiversity research proposals to tackle the interlinkage of social inequalities in biodiversity decision-making.

In a European network (COST action “VOICES”), aiming at increasing the visibility of inequalities faced by early career researchers from a gender perspective, a working group (co-led by session proposer Anita Thaler) is dedicated explicitly to integrate gender as a dimension into research. In a summer school for international early career researchers from STEM fields, and the ongoing networking activities it has been a goal to broaden the scope from gender to intersectionality in research. Empirical examples from sustainability, computing and AI to health research all showed that most attempts were not able to exploit the full potential of the powerful concept of intersectionality (cf. Szlavi,et al. 2024). Intersectionality was and still is often mixed up with a superficial idea of diversity by adding as many social categories as possible. Or it is methodologically treated as a cross-categorial approach, by using two or three variables to explore statistically significant connections. What is often left out is the underlying feminist and political dimension of structural discrimination within those very concepts (Thaler & Karner 2024).

This session aims to set this focus on the politics of science again, looking closer at the core of knowledge making and doing, in laboratories and in the field. After all, we have known for a long time that not only do artifacts have politics (Winner 1981), but technology has a profoundly gendered character (Wajcman 1991). Queer-feminist STS can offer theories and methods to not only criticize heteronormative and binary gender concepts but moreover questioning the power mechanisms of scientific knowledge production and technological and innovation research. Queer-feminist knowledge theory can broaden the heteronormative epistemology of science e.g. by a greater plurality of possible genders in science (cf. ‘butch science identities’ by Armstrong & Danielsson 2023).

We are seeking to explore queer-feminist interventions into STS, whether they 1.) criticize empirical science from a queer-feminist point of view (cf. Schmitz & Höppner, 2014), 2.) conduct research from a queer standpoint of the person(s) doing the research (cf. Heckert, 2010), 3.) observe the queerness of the subject of their research (Leibetseder, 2012), 4.) use a methodology which can be defined as ‘queer’ or 5.) do queer-feminist interventions e.g. in transdisciplinary research or art projects (cf. Hofstätter et al. 2021). These different methods of applying queer-feminism can also flow seamlessly into one another (cf. Boellstorff, 2010).

References
Armstrong, Eleanor S. & Danielsson, Anna T. (2023). Science Butch Blues. In: Schlager, Jenny & Thaler, Anita (eds.). Queer-Feminist Science and Technology Studies Forum “Queer-Feminist Inclusion and Visibility”. Open Access Online-Journal, Vol. 8, Download: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376686552_Queer-Feminist_Science_and_Technology_Studies_Forum_8_Queer-Feminist_Inclusion_and_Visibility_-_Overcoming_Stories_of_Exclusion_and_Invisibility_in_Science_Education_and_Technology
Boellstorf, Tom 2010. (2010). Queer Techne: Two Theses on Methodology and Queer Studies In: Browne, K. and Nash, C., (eds.). Queering Methods and Methodologies: Queer Theory and Social Science Methods. Ashgate, London, p. 215-230.
Heckert, Jamie (2010). Intimacy with Strangers/Intimicay with Self: Queer Experiences of Social Research In: Browne, K. and Nash, C., eds. Queering Methods and Methodologies: Queer Theory and Social Science Methods. Ashgate, London, p. 215-230.
Hofstätter, Birgit; Scheer, Lisa & Thaler, Anita (eds., 2021). Queer-Feminist Science and Technology Studies Forum “Queer Interventions”. Open Access Online-Journal, Vol. 6, Download: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357747791_Queer-Feminist_Science_and_Technology_Studies_Forum_6_Queer_Interventions#fullTextFileContent
Leibetseder, Doris (2012). Queer Tracks. Subversive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music. Farnham/Burlington, Ashgate.
Schiebinger, L., Klinge, I., Sánchez de Madariaga, I., Paik, H. Y., Schraudner, M., & Stefanick, M. (2011). Gendered innovations in science, health & medicine, engineering, and environment. Available at https://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu
Schmitz, Sigrid & Höppner, Grit (eds. 2014). Gendered Neurocultures. Feminist and Queer Perspectives on Current Brain Discourses. In:“challenge GENDER. Aktuelle Herausforderungen der Geschlechterforschung”. Zaglossus: Vienna.
Szlavi, Anna & Jaccheri, Letizia & Conte, Tayana & Hansen, Marit & Husnes, Sandra. (2024). Designing for Intersectional Inclusion in Computing. 10.1007/978-3-031-60875-9_9.
Thaler, Anita & Karner, Sandra (2024). Can participatory action research deepen the understanding of intersectionality in the field of biodiversity research? In: Carmen-Pilar Marti Ballester (ed.). Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Gender Research, Barcelona , 378-387. https://papers.academic-conferences.org/index.php/icgr/issue/view/31/34
Winner, Langdon (1980). “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1. Reprinted in The Social Shaping of Technology, edited by Donald A. MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman. London: Open University Press.
Wajcman, Judy (1991). Feminism confronts technology. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Panel Organizers:        
Anders Buch, VIA University College, DK – buch@via.dk
Ylva Lindberg, Jönköping University, SE – ylva.lindberg@ju.se
Teresa Cerratto-Pargman, Stockholm University, SE – tessy@dsv.su.se

Discussant 
Lina Rahm, KTH, SE – linarahm@kth.se

We invite contributors to participate in an open panel centered on the theme: Revisiting Bildung in Science, Technology, and Society. This panel seeks to explore how the concept of Bildung—a complex and historically rich notion of education, self-cultivation, and societal engagement—can inform and challenge contemporary discussions around the purposes of education, the role of knowledge, and the intersection of science, technology, and society. By revisiting and reinterpreting Bildung, this panel aims to address critical questions about the cultivation of values, ethical responsibility, and human flourishing in an increasingly technoscientific world.

At its core, Bildung emphasizes holistic development, integrating intellectual, moral, and cultural dimensions of education and society. Historically rooted in German idealism and Romanticism, Bildung advocates for the cultivation of free and critical thinkers who can engage meaningfully with cultural heritage and societal challenges. However, this ideal has often been critiqued for its individualism, elitism, Eurocentrism, and limited applicability in practical or diverse global contexts.

In recent decades, neoliberal policies have redefined higher education, shifting its focus toward vocationalism, employability, and market competitiveness. These changes have sidelined Bildung’s ideals, reducing education to a utilitarian enterprise at odds with its transformative aspirations. Yet, amidst global crises—social inequality, environmental degradation, and the erosion of democratic institutions—Bildung has resurfaced as a counter-narrative. It challenges narrow, instrumental views of education and reasserts the importance of cultivating critical, ethical, and engaged citizenship.

Bildung offers a rich framework for rethinking the relationship between knowledge, society, and technology. It challenges the reduction of education to a mere tool for economic growth and instead emphasizes the cultivation of critical, ethical, and culturally embedded ways of knowing. This aligns with core STS concerns about the entanglement of science and society, the politics of knowledge, and the ethical responsibilities of technoscientific actors to foster desirable, sustainable, and just futures. Notions of sociotechnical imaginaries and co-creation put forward by STS-scholars have focused on envisioning the relationship between individuals, societies, and technologies within a cultural and historical context. However, compared to the concept of Bildung, these approaches have generally been more confined to descriptive and analytical purposes.

This panel seeks to interrogate the relevance and applicability of Bildung in contemporary (STEM) education and STS engagements. Contributions are encouraged to address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How can Bildung inform critical approaches to education in science, engineering, medicine, and other technology reliant domains?
• What is the role of Bildung in fostering ethical responsibility, awareness of sustainability issues and social justice within technoscientific professions?
• How might Bildung bridge the gap between scientific and technical expertise and broader societal concerns?
• In what ways can Bildung contribute to addressing global challenges, such as climate change, inequality, and the rise of misinformation and populism?
• How can Bildung be reimagined to include diverse cultural, historical, and epistemological traditions?
• What is the potential of Bildung in crafting sociotechnical imaginaries of desirable, just, sustainable, and democratic futures?

Themes for Exploration 

The panel is particularly interested in contributions that engage with: 

Bildung and Higher Education: Exploring the tensions between Bildung and the neoliberal university, including its implications for academic freedom, interdisciplinarity, and the integration of research, teaching, and engaged scholarship. 

STS and Bildung: Addressing the challenges and opportunities of incorporating Bildung in STS informed education and practice, focusing on holistic problem-solving, social responsibility, and ethical reflexivity. 

Cultural and Historical Perspectives: Examining how the concept of Bildung has traveled across cultural and disciplinary boundaries, adapting to different contexts while retaining its critical potential. 

Critical and Democratic Bildung: Proposing ways to merge Bildung with critical pedagogy, democratic education, and social justice frameworks, fostering inclusive and transformative learning environments. 

Bildung and the Anthropocene: Investigating the role of Bildung in cultivating ecological awareness and responsibility in the face of environmental crises and technoscientific disruptions. 

References
Buch, A. & Christensen, S.H. (Eds.) (in print). Bildung for Engineering Education and Practice: A New Agenda, Philosophy of Engineering and Technology book-series, Springer
Buch, A., Lindberg, Y. & Cerratto-Pargman, T. (Eds.) (2024). Framing Futures in Postdigital Education. Critical Concepts for Data-driven Practices, Postdigital Science and Education book-series, Springer.
Cheville, A. (2022). The C.P. Snow Controversy. In Christensen, S.H., Buch, A., Conlon, E., Didier, C., Mitcham, C. & Murphy, M. (Eds.). Engineering, Social Sciences, and the Humanities. Have Their Conversations Come of Age?, 95-110, Springer.
Christensen, S.H. & Buch, A. (2023). Dannelse og Ingeniørfaglighed, Tidsskrift for Professionsstudier, (34), 66-75.
Rahm, L. (2024). Bildung: An Exploration of Postdigital Education in the Anthropocene. In Buch, A., Lindberg, Y. & Cerratto-Pargman, T. (Eds.) (2024). Framing Futures in Postdigital Education. Critical Concepts for Data-driven Practices, 119-138, Springer.
Sjöström, J., Frerics, N., Zuin, V.G. & Eilks, I. (2017). Using the concept of Bildung in the international science education literature, its potential, and implications for teaching and learning, Studies in Science Education, 165-192.

Panel organizers:
Eva Lövbrand, Department of Thematic Studies: Environmental Change, Linköping University. Email: eva.lovbrand@liu.se
Martin Hultman, Science, Technology and Society, Chalmers. Email: martin.hultman@chalmers.se

We live in a time when the scale, intensity, and harmful effects of climate change are breaking new records every year. While state and non-state actors are asked to accelerate their climate efforts and embark on rapid and deep decarbonization across all sectors of society, we are witnessing a backlash against ambitious climate targets. Across Europe and North America populist rhetoric is on the rise and right-wing parties and think-tanks are fuelling a sense of public grievance to pause or even roll-back green regulation. To counter wavering support for progressive climate policy agendas, many green political scholars, practitioners and parties now seem agree that liberal democratic states need to deepen their democratic engagements and devise transition processes that are socially inclusive and just.

In this session, we invite papers that engage with these socio-political dimensions of climate change. Historical and environmental STS has detailed the four-decade long disinformation campaign against climate science, called out the fossil fuel industry, and insisted on climate justice as the way forward. However, we still need more critical STS engagements with rising climate distrust, resistance, and populism. How can climate-concerned STS scholars make sense of the politics of lifestyle, culture, and identity engendered by transformative policy agendas? What can STS scholarship add to the burgeoning fields of just transition research and green democratization studies? What are the new phenomena, relationships and settings with which climate STS is/must get entangled?

Panel organizers:
Stefanie Egger stefanie.egger@invisible-lab.com (corresponding)
Christian Lepenik, christian.lepenik@invisible-lab.com                                                                                             
Lisa Müllner, lisa.muellner@univie.ac.at                                    
Hannah Romano, hannah.romano@univie.ac.at          

The design of socio-technical configurations is informed by a multitude of disciplinary perspectives, encompassing fields such as engineering, social sciences, design, policy-making, law and numerous others. Educating students to understand and engage with these configurations is a critical challenge within the field of STS and may require an inherently interdisciplinary approach. STS provides distinctive perspectives on the intricacies of these entanglements. The emphasis on the co-construction of science, technology, and society highlights the need to bridge technical and social realms. Nevertheless, addressing the issues that arise from integrating the various disciplinary languages, methodologies, and epistemologies can present a significant communicational and pedagogical challenge.             

This panel will examine the potential of interdisciplinary teaching enabling students to explore, analyse and design socio-technical configurations. The panel invites exploration of pedagogical approaches, tools, and frameworks for teaching the “designability” of socio-technical configurations, as well as teaching tools and methods for identifying and defining the elements that can actually be designed. The intention should always be to cultivate the ability to critically engage with and intervene in the entangled configurations of technology, society, and the environment.                                                                                                         

The objective of this panel is to conceptualise socio-technical configurations as contingent and designable, thereby establishing a shared conceptual ground for fostering interdisciplinary dialogue while encouraging critical reflection on power, values, and ethics in socio-technical design practices. In alignment with the Nordic STS Conference theme, this panel welcomes submissions on pedagogical strategies or case studies of integrating them into technical or design curricula, as well as experiments that actively engage students in interdisciplinary collaboration. It aims to examine how diverse disciplinary approaches can be assembled through design exercises, collaborative projects, and participatory methods. Key questions include but are not limited to:                                                                                  

1. How can our way of teaching help reconcile the different priorities, tools, and epistemologies of disciplines while enabling students to engage in joint analysis and intervention?
2. How can teaching experiments in education address preconceptions or even power imbalances between (or within) disciplines that shape interdisciplinary collaborations?
3. What role might participatory design, speculative methods, or boundary objects play in interdisciplinary teaching?
4. What forms of scaffolding, frameworks or facilitation are required to enable meaningful interdisciplinary dialogue?

Contributions may include examples of interdisciplinary teaching experiments, case studies of collaborative teaching in projects, or theoretical reflections. The panel particularly encourages submissions of experimental work, multimodal presentations (including analogue and/or artifact-based presentations) as well as papers and posters. By focusing on the intersections and points of convergence of disciplines, this panel seeks to advance a shared understanding of how we can foster integrative, critical, and creative approaches to analysing and teaching the designability of socio-technical configurations. It aims to explore the potential of interdisciplinary STS teaching to equip students with the ability to navigate and shape complex socio-technical environments in a way that is both reflective and impactful.

Panel Organizers:
Devika Prakash (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm), devikap@kth.se
Manuel Jung (STS Department, TU Munich)
Sophia Knopf (STS Department, TU Munich)

Cities have always been seen as a place and an entity to be controlled (Scott, 1998). Overt technologies of control historically range from prisons and asylums (Foucault, 1975) to urban design stymieing protest  (Jordan, 1992). More subtly, spatial technologies such as zoning, and large urban infrastructure systems of water supply and sewerage have shaped cities and their residents to fit modern ideals (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Control, innovation and technology are intimately intertwined in the study of cities. Within the last few years, scholars from STS, urban studies and related fields have created a rich body of work on urban governance, both in terms of how urban innovation is governed (Joss, 2015) as well as how cities are rendered governable (Karvonen, 2020).  The purpose of our panel is to bring different ambitions on urban governance and technological transformations into conversation with each other by mobilizing the notion of “control” as an analytical lens to think about how technologies restructure life in the city, while often promising radical change.

In recent decades, such discourses have gained importance in the context of novel and emerging technologies deployed in the urban context. In the narrative of “smart cities”, for instance, the city is conceptualized as a system of systems that can be integrated and controlled from one centralized node (Goodspeed, 2015). City subsystems are expected to function as ‘oligopticons’ that neatly separate and bundle urban functions and allow them to be managed scientifically (Hermant and Latour, 1998). A similar promise comes from the emerging technology of Digital Urban Twins: digital representations of urban spaces and their operations (Dembski et al, 2020). However, these twins also come with a second promise: functioning as virtual laboratories for cities, in which future scenarios can be simulated in the safe environment of a digitally represented city. In turn, the proliferating test bed landscape has to navigate the tension between openness and the constitution of controlled spaces, for example while supervising experiments with autonomous driving (Engels et al. 2019). In broader terms, technologies like these streamline human agency, while they are expected to innovate urban life and governance.

With our panel, we aim to open up the topic of control in the urban context in two ways: First, we open up the notion of control to a broader perspective that allows us to examine what “control” might mean corresponding to current discussions around a governmentality based on discipline to one based on control (Gabrys, 2015; Krivy, 2016). What are the political implications of more implicit forms of control, such as nudging, real-time feedback and self-monitoring of citizens? Who exercises control in this way, based on which knowledge practices and which legitimacy? How do these mechanisms shape the different parts of our lives? Through which mechanisms is control stabilized or destabilized and what does this mean for the actors’ ability to act? We want to discuss these questions in the light of the omnipresent promise of urban transformation. Secondly, we broaden our perspectives to think about different technological domains that enact control. This panel invites investigations on“cutting-edge technologies”, such as those mentioned above, but also on low-tech innovations and their political implications as well as historical experiences exploring the intertwinement of technologies and control. What have historical attempts to control the city looked like? What peculiarities of urban life today are shaped by technologies that control people, spaces, and urban metabolisms?

Combining historical studies and present day examples, we hope to collectively gain insights into the theme of urban control. We invite a variety of perspectives to help recognize continuities and broader principles that are rearticulated over time in the context of different technologies, while acknowledging the narratives around the novelty and revolutionary character of new technologies and the performative nature of such claims.

With this collection of ideas, we hope that this panel allows us to explore different ideas, articulations and empirical insights, and to see in which ways the conceptualization of the city as a “controlled environment” can be fruitful for thinking about urban transformations.

Panel organizers:
George Cusworth, University of Oslo, george.cusworth@ifikk.uio.no
Anna Krzywoszynska, University of Oulu

Agriculture has long featured as a site of study for STS scholars. Of particular interest has been the metrics and measures used to both represent the food systems and act on it. Despite the long history of critical actors articulating the need for alternative land management practices and re-imagined eating habits, the overall trajectory has been towards power consolidation and agricultural intensification. This trend has undermined the complexity and resilience both of agricultural livelihoods and the more-than-human configurations that form farming landscapes.

Reductive scientific and economistic representations have helped drive this trajectory. Soil fertility has become a function of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium levels; a foodstuff’s healthiness has become knowable through its macro-nutrient content; and agricultural policy has been organised around food security concerns and consumption-production balances. Whilst these representations have played their part in driving huge hikes in agricultural productivity (at least for some), they have also contributed to the entrenchment of power imbalances, the degradation of agro-ecological health, and a reinforcement of the gendered and racialised distribution of the harms of agricultural pollution. Despite the fact that agricultural landscapes and rural lives have become ever more ‘known’ through datafication, we see no progress in transforming the environmental footprint of agricultural production, or in the highly selective ways that the benefits of food production accrue. In diverse ways, STS work in this area has shown how justice has not been served well in the food system.

This panel asks STS scholars to reflect on the directions the food system is being taken in today, and how emerging modes of representation and knowledge production are reshaping its orientation. As new publics seek to highlight the ecological and epidemological harms associated with contemporary food production, and as new scientific and cultural representations are working to depict socio-ecological systems with higher degrees of resolution, we might wonder what role scientific and other forms of knowledge production are playing in the creation of new rural realities. And how alternative food system actors are scavenging, hacking, and repurposing the ideals and technologies of modernity in service of more just and sustainable futures. We might also speculate as to how STS might help realise this potential. Less optimistically, we might also wonder whether powerful food system actors are absorbing new ways of thinking about and representing the food system to shore-up their ongoing position in it.

We therefore invite papers engaging with questions around the representation of agricultural places, landscapes, systems, processes, products, and livelihoods. We especially encourage papers which go beyond critique by seeking to understand what forms of knowledge-making might advance social, environmental, and multi-species justice. Our empirical scope, here, is broad, and encompasses the diverse actors and places implicated in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food: fertiliser plants, market gardens, plant nurersies, biofertiliser labs, agricultural fields, local food markets, machinery manufacturers, farming app-developers, the offices of agricultural extension workers, supermarkets, food marketing agencies and so on. We are particularly interested in research grappling with the contribution the food system makes to socio-ecological crisis, and the new data infrastructures and scientific methods that are (re)shaping how the food system is represented in social and political life. These lines of inquiry lead us to wonder whether and how new approaches to knowledge production are themselves becoming the site of food system contestation; contestations that are drawing in actors with highly divergent visions for the future of food all of whom are looking to advance their cause through data, representation, and knowledge.

Although not limited to them, we are interested in the following questions:

• How are calls for justice being honoured or obscured by new modes of scientific representation?
• What sub-altern modes of knowing and relating to food have been excluded in mainstream food system settings? And how might they be positioned to enjoy a more prominent place in how food is known and governed?
• How are different actors articulating and advancing particular food system futures via specific modes of measurement and representation v specific approaches to representation?
• How can complex agroecosystems be represented in ways that can yield just food system outcomes?
• How do powerful actors seek to reproduce their hegeominc place in the food system via particular approaches to knowing and representing?
• What are the justice consequences of the accumulation of agricultural data?
• How are food system models changing, and what impacts are those changes having on food system governance at a local, national, and global scale?

Panel organizers:
Wim Carton (LUCSUS, Lund University, wim.carton@LUCSUS.lu.se)
Tatiana Sokolova (Environment, Development and Sustainability Studies, Södertörn University, tatiana.sokolova@sh.se)
Eva Lövbrand (Thematic Studies – Environment, Linköping University, eva.lovbrand@liu.se)

Is climate science complicit in the techno-managerial trajectories of the green transition? Critical STS scholarship has suggested so and challenged the modern ontologies and epistemologies that underpin green innovation practices and policy trajectories. In this session, we build upon such critical STS engagements to assess the knowledge politics of the green transition, and to envision epistemic practices which may support viable alternatives. We ask: What ‘technologies of delay’ are at work in climate policy-making? How do practices of carbon accounting, technological anticipation, and climate modelling interface with questions of climate justice? What situated knowledges and ontologies are overlooked or subsumed in green transition projects? What theories, epistemologies and methods do scholars themselves invent, borrow and steal, and from what sources? We invite papers which address these and other questions related to the socio-epistemic and politico-ontological aspects of the green transition and climate justice.

Panel organizers:
Mikaela Sundberg, Stockholm University, mikaela.sundberg@sociology.su.se
Susanne Bauer, University of Oslo, susanne.bauer@tik.uio.no
Aaro Tupasela, University of Helsinki, aaro.tupasela@helsinki.fi

The production of population statistics through registers and health and welfare databases is an important stream of STS-research. History of statistics and more recently datafication has dealt with how political institutions for the production of population knowledge have shaped the “objects” they are counting (e.g. Desroisières 1998, Hacking 1990). More recently, scholars have explored in-depth the practices of making statistics (e.g. Ratner and Ruppert 2019) and how different populations emerge from different modes and technologies of counting (e.g. Ruppert et al 2017, Grommé and Ruppert 2019) but also how population registers have been instrumental for developing disciplines like epidemiology (Bauer 2014).  The emergence and construction of health data spaces have generated new questions on how data subjects are being constructed. These topics are particularly pertinent in a Nordic setting, during a Nordic STS-conference: The Nordic countries have a unique place in the European and global health data economy because of the extensive and nationally maintained and centralized registers (Helén et al., 2024; Hoeyer, 2023; Tupasela et al 2020, Bauer 2014, Cool 2022).

While papers on all these topics are welcome, we are particularly interested in presentations dealing with the production and use of official statistics and the infrastructures, such as health data spaces, that are constructed to make that possible. Given the common focus on public health and welfare, papers addressing other areas including statistics (e.g. work, education, crime, environment) and data governance are especially invited.  Papers can address empirical questions such as: How is official statistics generated in terms of how data is collected, classified, and registered, by whom and with what consequences? What conflicts between different producers of similar statistics occur? Papers can also discuss new perspectives or concepts by which to address the topic. For example, a Foucauldian perspective on governance and biopolitics has inspired much research on statistics and populations, what are the alternatives? How do recent AI technologies take up, relate to and alter usages of official statistics? As new modes of data sourcing and computational techniques put official statistics to new tests, how can STS address the changing use practices of public data infrastructures.

Panel organizers:                                                                                          
Angeliki Balayannis, Wageningen University & Research, Knowledge Technology and Innovation Group, angeliki.balayannis@wur.nl
Emma Pavans de Ceccatty, Wageningen University & Research, Knowledge Technology and Innovation Group, emma.pavansdececcatty@wur.nl                                                       

This panel assembles research that is enacting and examining pollution interventions oriented towards justice. The UN Environment Programme is currently establishing a new intergovernmental science-policy panel (SPP) on chemicals, waste, and pollution prevention. Largely modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, this new SPP is on a trajectory to inherit and re-produce the epistemic injustices of its predecessors (see Byskov and Hyams, 2022). As dominant science is performing a central role in shaping negotiations, our panel aims to create a space for articulating the role of the humanities, social sciences, and arts in pollution interventions. In particular, we invite papers working with Indigenous, anticolonial, queer, and feminist epistemologies to enable more just interventions (e.g. Ataria et al., 2023; Liboiron, 2021).                                                                                     

Our panel has a normative ethos which foregrounds ethical and political concerns in pollution interventions. It considers a variety of sites, processes, and practices, in addition to a broad range of in/justices – environmental, social, racial, and epistemic. In doing so we aim to think across multiple pollution issues and problem domains, confronting the limits of the molecular bureaucracy (see Hepler-Smith, 2019; Murphy, 2017; Shapiro et al., 2017), and creating a space for building epistemic alliances.                                                                       

We welcome papers from any discipline, institution, or location – within and beyond academia. Papers can be conceptual, empirical, methodological, and/or practice-based. The session is structured in two key parts: 1) the first is a set of short regular papers interrogating and reflecting on pollution interventions, and 2) the second is a practice-based workshop, where participants engage with a range of pollution interventions in-practice. Activities for part two might include (but are in no way limited to) design-led approaches; arts-led practice or installations; or citizen science activities. In submissions, please indicate whether the paper is a regular presentation, or if you would like to lead a practice-based activity. We encourage those wishing to make a practice-based submission to reach out to the panel organisers if they have any questions.                     

References
Ataria JM, Murphy M, McGregor D, et al. (2023) Orienting the Sustainable Management of Chemicals and Waste toward Indigenous Knowledge. Environmental Science & Technology 57(30): 10901–10903.                                              Byskov MF and Hyams K (2022) Epistemic injustice in Climate Adaptation. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25(4): 613–634.                                                                     
Hepler-Smith E (2019) Molecular Bureaucracy: Toxicological Information and Environmental Protection. Environmental History 24(3): 534–560.                                                                                  
Liboiron M (2021) Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press.
Murphy M (2017) Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations. Cultural Anthropology 32(4). 4: 494–     503.                                                                                                     
Shapiro N, Zakariya N and Roberts J (2017) A Wary Alliance: From Enumerating the Environment to Inviting Apprehension. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 3: 575–602.

Panel organizers:
Chakad Ojani – Stockholm University, Sweden – chakad.ojani@socant.su.se
Nina Holm Vohnsen –  Aarhus University, Denmark – nina.vohnsen@cas.au.dk
Eleanor Armstrong – Leicester University, UK – ea377@leicester.ac.uk

In this panel, we examine the potential of outer space research to trouble the notion of the “laboratory,” both with regard to its conceptual and socio-material boundaries. What happens to the laboratory when refracted through outer space studies? How can outer space help to elicit the possibilities and limitations of the laboratory as a heuristic in STS? Research and development in the space sector is replete with laboratories of various kinds, and what takes the form of a laboratory can shift depending on who you ask. Whereas for some the laboratory takes the form of the analogue research site, for others it is the setting where a particular subsystem is being developed to then be sent off to the next laboratory setting, test bed, or launch site. For yet others, the laboratory takes the form of an entire spaceport, with all its supporting infrastructures and socio-material relations. Indeed, low Earth orbit, conditions of microgravity, and outer space more generally are sometimes thought of in terms of laboratories to STEM researchers, thus signaling that, in the space sector, the laboratory emerges as a multisited and potentially distributed and interscalar phenomenon – as an ecology of laboratories or, perhaps, as a series of laboratories within laboratories. But besides this multiplicity of the laboratories themselves, and the wholes they do or do not comprise, we are also interested in the spaces that appear between them, including the generative work of their slippages and overlaps.

In outer space research, scholarship has documented how these laboratory ethnographies make visible the organisation of programmes of research, to funding, to the systems of meetings (Vertesi, 2016, 2020). Following foundational studies in the field, we understand the laboratory as a bundle of tasks, administrative and professional tasks – where research focuses on the process of knowledge production, the activities of the laboratory (Latour & Woolgar, 1985). We encourage contributions that engage with the ways that labs, experiments, and tests happen in milieus, and the way they modify those milieus, or generate altogether new ones (Marres and Stark 2020).  We seek to understand these outer space contexts as Laboratories – sites of labour, care, maintenance – and their expressions of the interplay of power within actors along gendered, racialised, and other intersectional characteristics (e.g. Traweek, 1988; Knorr Cetina, 1981); and are enthused to receive papers that build on this research already being undertaken in the contexts of outer space (Deerfield, 2019).

The focus on regulatory regimes of laboratories (Sims 2005) offers scholars of outer space research a point to consider how practices of boundaries of Earth both shape the development of specific types of clean labs and protocols for sending and receiving materials, humans, and technology from outer space (Helmrich, 2009); as much as regimes that limit launch windows, practices at analogues sites, and international collaboration on outer space. Through outer space research, these practices of the laboratory are distributed across global (and extra-global) collaborations making it possible for scholarly contributions on outer space to speak back to theorising on distributed cognitive systems (Neressian et al 2003), and how distributed encultration can take place (Pinch, 1986).

Situating these outer space research engagements in their wider sociopolitical context has enriched the field of outer space studies significantly (e.g. Mitchell, 2016; Redfield, 2001), and we encourage papers that critically focus on the the colonial practices and imperatives of the outer space laboratory and its transformation of the natural environment, and if/how the post-colonial laboratory emerges in the context of outer space research (Anderson & Adams (2007); especially against the place- and volumetric- turn in social studies of outer space (Bennet and Dodds 2024; Damjanov 2016; Klinger et al 2024; Ojani 2024).  Finally, we encourage a focus on the materiality of the laboratory: how do these materials in outer space laboratories offer new insights into the materialisation, negotiation, production, and dissemination of knowledge, subjectivities, concepts (Cohn, 2017); especially under regimes of reusability, “green” research, and NewSpace? What too of the role of material infrastructure that underpins these distributed sites and the actions that are undertaken at them (Jensen and Morita 2017)? This panel seeks to draw both on wider scholarship in STS that can offer insights into how to tackle the pluralised laboratories of outer space research; but also encourages applicants to speak back to STS disciplinary concerns about the laboratory with insights from the domain of outer space.

Panel organizers:
Ida Schrøder, Aarhus University, Denmark, idsc@edu.au.dk
Niels Joseph Lennon, Aalborg University, Denmark, njl@business.aau.dk                                                                                  

Whether we are in a laboratory, a daycare, a multinational firm, at home, in a hospital or any other form of organization or work setting, there is always money at play. Nonetheless, money matters are curiously absent from most of the seminal and recent STS research about technology in organizations. Mol (2002), for instance, studied how the body multiple was coordinated across several hospital practices, but she did not follow the body to the practice of accounting for the costs of treatment. A recent case in point is the Winthereik (2024) paper on managers’ trouble to connect data as fact and data as relation in their attempts to make data drive decision-making. Whilst Winthereik (2024) hits the nail on why more data does not solve the problem of uncertain decision-making, her analysis does not include accounting information – such as financial statements, budgets, business cases, contracts, and investment proposals – as data. This is certainly not because money matters are irrelevant in public management. Have STS scholars simply gotten accustomed to not including – ignoring or even forgetting – money matters?

The ambition of this panel is to explore and discuss how money matters in organizational practices. We propose to do this by bringing together scholars from the STS community with scholars from Social Studies of Accounting to engage in conversation about how the two fields of research can cross-pollinate each other.

Within Social Studies of Accounting, scholars have been inspired by ideas from STS and in particular Actor-network theory, in their studies of the effects of accounting technologies on individuals, organizations and society for more than 30 years (Chua, 1995; Miller & O’Leary, 1987; Miller & Rose, 1990; Robson, 1991, 1992). It is for instance debated whether managers organize ontological multiplicity through accounting as a mediating instrument (Busco & Quattrone, 2018), through the flaws in measures (Dambrin & Robson, 2011), inscriptions at a distance (Robson, 1992), through separation (Schrøder, 2020; Schrøder et al., 2022), or delegation (Lennon, 2019). Such debates and theoretical developments might help STS scholars in bringing money matters into the periphery of the practices they study.

Similarly, the recent turn in STS to study flaws, breakages, leaks, frictions, failures, and repair work might help accounting scholars in their research about the effects of incompleteness, while accounting research on the effects of incomplete and flawed measures might also be an inspiration for these newer turns in STS research.

We propose that more than 30 years of STS inspired accounting research can provide STS researchers with substantial insights about the performative effects of accounting technologies and that new developments in STS research can deliver fruitful insights to accounting scholars, exactly because it is free from domain specific concepts and sensitivities.

Bearing the overlaps and differences in mind we call for researchers

• who are keen to explore how their STS studies can bring money matters to the fore
• and how novel STS approaches can offer new approaches to study the effects of management accounting.

We suggest that papers have a thematic interest in public sector organizations, for instance within one of the following themes 

• Situated ethics
• Decision-making
• Performance measurement
• Accountability and responsibility
• Calculative infrastructures
• Budgeting and financial reporting
• Social investments
• Digitalization
• Development and implementation of artificial intelligence

 References
Busco, C., & Quattrone, P. (2018). In Search of the “Perfect One”: How accounting as a maieutic machine sustains inventions through generative ‘in-tensions’. Management Accounting Research, 39, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mar.2017.02.002
Chua, W. F. (1995). Experts, networks and inscriptions in the fabrication of accounting images: A story of the representation of three public hospitals. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 20(2/3), 111-145. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0361-3682(95)95744-H
Dambrin, C., & Robson, K. (2011). Tracing performance in the pharmaceutical industry: Ambivalence, opacity and the performativity of flawed measures. Accounting, Organizations and Society.
Lennon, N. J. (2019). Responsibility accounting, managerial action and ‘a counter-ability’: Relating the physical and virtual spaces of decision-making. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 35(3), 101062. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2019.101062
Miller, P., & O’Leary, T. (1987). Accounting and the Construction of the Governable Person. Accounting Organizations and Society, 12(3), 235-265. <Go to ISI>://WOS:A1987H790500002
Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing Economic Life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1-31. <Go to ISI>://WOS:A1990CP19200001
Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220nc1
Robson, K. (1991). On the Arenas of Accounting Change: The Process of Translation. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 16(5-6), 547-570.
Robson, K. (1992). Accounting numbers as “inscription”: action at a distance and the development of accounting. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 17(7), 685-708.
Schrøder, I. (2020). Making professional decisions account-able. Journal of organizational ethnography, 9(1), 110-124. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-08-2018-0037
Schrøder, I., Cederberg, E., & Hauge, A. M. (2022). What is good work in a hybrid organization? On the efforts of sequencing registers of valuation. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 35(3), 917-949.
Winthereik, B. R. (2024). Data as Relation: Ontological Trouble in the Data-Driven Public Administration. Comput. Supported Coop. Work, 33(3), 371–388. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-023-09480-9

Panel organizers:
Clémence Pinel (University of Copenhagen, Denmark): clemence@post.bgu.ac.il
Karoliina Snell (University of Helsinki, Finland): karoliina.snell@helsinki.fi
Heidrun Åm (NTNU, Norway): heidrun.aam@ntnu.no
Klaus Hoeyer (University of Copenhagen, Denmark): klho@sund.ku.dk

Discussant:
Francis Lee (Chalmers, Sweden): francis@francislee.org

This panel invites empirical and theoretical investigations of cross-border data sharing initiatives with a specific focus on elaborating on the concept of border. Today, public as well as private initiatives are being set up in order to facilitate various forms of data sharing, and increasingly these initiatives are framed as a matter of crossing borders. Such borders can be conceptualised as national borders, but this is not always the case, and not all initiatives involve the same conceptions of nation and state. In some instances, the Nordic countries are presented as a region suggesting a form of relativity of national borders. Sometimes borders are also conceptualized as technical barriers that demand work to be overcome. Borders can also be organizational divisions, or divisions created by diverging interests and incentives. Often borders emerge discursively as a form of legal, social, or cultural “barriers” standing in the way of data sharing, and thereby as something that must be removed or transgressed. Borders can also be an expression of the attachment of data to certain places, people, or materials, and envisioned border crossings can be seen as efforts to detach data from these.

What does it take to conceptualise something as a border; what does the concept of border in turn do for each initiative? Which valuations are articulated in these initiatives to facilitate the types of interoperability and data sharing encapsulated in the notion of cross-border data sharing? Which work is required to facilitate cross-border data sharing, and how does this work differ to or resemble other types of data work? What does cross-border data sharing tell us about the relationality of data? We hope with this panel to invite empirical investigations of the current data economy in the field of healthcare and bioscience, in particular, but also in relation to other forms of welfare data. We also hope to engage reflections on the notion of border and the types of problems of interoperability it suggests.

If your paper does not fit any of the panels, you can submit your abstract to this open panel and the conference organizers will organize a session with these presentations. 

If you wish to present in the same session as other participants, please include their names in your abstract submission. The conference organizers will try to arrange these presentations into thematic sessions.