Slightly late, but better late than never here are some impressions from our panel “Colliding theories, cultures, and futures. STS view(s) beyond the horizon. Or: STS diaspora” at the EASST 2018 conference “Meetings – Making Science, Technology and Society together”:
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- Kaoru Miyazawa: “Doing ethnography at home: a reflection from post-disaster Fukushima”
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- Sophie Toupin presenting “Anticolonial STS”
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- Ursula Caser proposes a middle way between sociotechnical imaginaries in bringing things together and the implementation and mediation of plurilogue in the “real world out there”
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- Katharina Losch: “Potentials of a widened concept of culture for gender research in STS. The example of Chinese and Indian female doctoral researchers in computer science at German universities”
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- Wen-Ling Hong: “When engineering practices encountered the unacceptable, unpredictable, unthinkable: how STS can shed light on engineering education reform in Taiwan”
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- Ali O. Ilhan: “Uses of ANT in design research: towards a critical dialogue”
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- Malcolm Ashmore & Olga Restrepo Forero with an educationally entertaining presentation of “Why Bogotá? The local, the global, and the interesting. Or: STS, here and there”
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- Amishi presenting her phd project “Banking on Blood”
Panel description
We invite contributions that focus on practices of Science and Technology in Society in different cultural, historical and theoretical settings (especially outside of the US and Europe), shedding light on heterogeneous ways S&T can be studied in Societies and be (per)formed now and in the future.
Long abstract
Insofar as the US and Europe, especially the UK, represents the “centre” of STS as a discipline, so does a canonical literature. The boundaries of the centre is shaped by its peripheries, multiple and fluctuating: research students in the centre who undertake their case studies in the elsewheres, new PhDs going back home to teach, local STS experts and its neighboring disciplines who aspire for international recognition; as well as academics in disciplines that are not traditionally associated with STS literatures who benefit from and hope to contribute to theories and debates of STS. The special session aims to bring up for discussion the centre-periphery relations that make up STS scholars together with its political implications.
Heterogeneous practices and interpretations in different cultural settings thus shape our understandings of Science and Technology in a wide variety of ways. Against this backdrop, we invite papers dealing with (i) STS meeting within the fieldworks’ situation, (ii) how STS researchers themselves influence their societal context (if so, is there a Western normativity in the way “doing STS at home”), (iii) how do S&T develop under colliding or meeting aspects of Western STS and “(Middle)Eastern” or “African”, etc., (iv) what differences in the understanding of S&T can be identified regarding this clash, (v) which socio-technical practices are developing under which previously unseen “new religiosities”, and finally (vi) we would like to find out how new alliances and forms of cooperation across borders can be possible, and how this may create new futures for STS.
You can find the abstracts for the #stsdiaspora panel here: STS_diaspora.
Convenors
- Melike Sahinol (Orient-Institute Istanbul)
- Arsev Aydinoglu (Middle East Technical University)
- Harun Kaygan (Middle East Technical University)
- Cansu Guner-Birdal (Technical University of Munich)