Calendario eventi
Conference theme
How might we work towards achieving ‘good’ technoscience? How can we – with our various technologies and ways of knowing, in diverse environments facing different challenges, across disciplinary boundaries and wide distances both geographical as well as socio-cultural, together with Others of all sorts – achieve good relations?
To address what might count as technoscience for good – and for whom – we need to question our methodologies and concepts, interrogate our epistemological and ethical frameworks, and redesign our technoscientific landscapes, institutions, infrastructures, and practices.
In recent decades, STS has emphasised the complex and at times conflicting entanglement of the various social, ethical, and political aspects involved in the making of technoscience in more-than-human worlds and naturecultures. Furthermore, as a field we have become increasingly willing to critique the intersectional harms that technoscientific developments can create for marginalised social groups as well as society at large. STS scholars are starting to confront questions of what ‘good’ certain socio-technical developments are serving, who gets to define what counts as ‘good’, for whom technoscientific developments might be ‘good’ (or not), how actors and institutions have historically worked towards defining and achieving the ‘good’, and how such a goal might be collectively accomplished, upheld, and contested.
To address the issue of what ‘good’ technoscience can or should be, we need to break down old and emerging boundaries as well as open up new cross-disciplinary and trans-cultural debates. Adjacent academic fields and disciplines, for example, have undergone a similar shift towards thinking about the relationship between ethics, care, epistemology, and materiality. Philosophers of science and technology have started to engage with questions of epistemic (in)justice as well as care and repair; historians have examined how technoscientific actors have sought to achieve overtly social and political goals; and designers and developers are increasingly acknowledging the sociomaterial impacts of their practices and their consequences for fairness, equality, diversity, and justice.
STS Italia seeks to provide space for a renewed engagement across disciplines in order to rethink the enactment of ‘good’ technoscience.
Call for panels
We are pleased to announce the Call for Panels for the upcoming 10th STS Italia Conference “Technoscience for Good: Designing, Caring and Reconfiguring” which will be held on 11-13 June 2025 at the Politecnico di Milano, Milan (Italy).
We welcome proposals for open panels, which will be opened to paper submissions during the general call for abstracts. Panel organizers are asked to submit only a title and a brief description of the panel’s topic. Depending on the number of paper submissions, panels can consist of more than one session.
Along with conventional panels and paper presentations, we encourage engagement with alternative or experimental formats. These can include (but are not limited to) roundtables, workshop-style sessions, meet-ups, and performances of all sorts. Please include details on the panel format in the panel description.
Applicants are encouraged to engage with the general theme of the conference covering a wide variety of topics and domains including (but not limited to) the following:
• Reconfiguration, regeneration, and recuperation
• Political participation and grassroots movements in technoscience
• Feminist, post-/decolonial, and crip technoscience
• Ethics of care, repair, and maintenance
• Work, labour relations, technology, and automation
• Moralising technology and the ethics of design
• Politics of artefacts, life and infrastructures
• STS as intervention and activism
• Adaptation and appropriation of science and technology
• Practices of resistance, subversion, and transformation
• Inter- and cross-disciplinarity between STS and associated disciplines
• Technoscience and/from the Global South
• Critical studies on AI, digital media and algorithmic imaginaries
• Historical conceptualizations of ‘good’ technoscience
• Research and materiality in History of science
• Philosophy and History of science in practice
• Openness, porosity, and trading zones
• Fairness, equality, equity, and diversity
• Epistemic (in)justice
• Design/data/climate justice
• Positionality of STS research in hegemonic institutions and methodological implications
- Opens: 23 September 2024
- Closes: 21 October 2024
Instructions
Panel proposals can be submitted through the new STS Italia website, which features a dedicated platform for the conference. Each panel organizer can propose and organize only one panel. The person submitting the panel (even in the case of co-organizers) will be the ‘corresponding panel organizer’ and will be responsible for communicating with the other co-organizers and panel participants. The procedure is straightforward and consists of the following steps:
1. Register as a user: Complete the form by filling in your affiliation, position, and preferred contact details.
2. Activate your user account: Once your account is activated, you will be able to submit a panel proposal.
3. Complete the form: You will need to provide a title, a panel description of up to 500 words, and keywords. Please include in your proposal a brief description of the panel format.
4. Author information: You are required to add all panel organizers involved in the proposal, yourself included. However, please note that we will communicate only with the corresponding panel organizer.
5. Terms and conditions: Please read the terms and conditions carefully before submitting your proposal.
6. Submit your proposal: Please click on the “Submit” button and that’s it!