I am very happy and honored to have been invited as a keynote speaker to the 1st STS-CAT International Conference, “STS Encounters in the Mediterranean,” organized by the Associació Catalana d’Estudis de la Ciència i la Tecnologia (STS-CAT). The conference will take place from 3–5 February 2027 at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans in Barcelona.
I am particularly pleased to support this conference because I find its focus on STS encounters in the Mediterranean both timely and important. The Mediterranean is not a homogeneous region, but a space shaped by different scientific and technological traditions, infrastructures, political economies, mobilities, borders and inequalities. It is also a space in which knowledge, technologies, materials and practices circulate across very different institutional, cultural and geopolitical settings.
For STS, this opens up important questions about how science and technology are produced, translated, negotiated and contested across such heterogeneous contexts. It also offers an opportunity to move beyond perspectives that continue to take Northern European or North American settings as their implicit point of reference, and instead to take seriously the specific histories, epistemic asymmetries and sociotechnical transformations that characterize Mediterranean societies and their transregional connections.
This is also why I am very much looking forward to the conversations that the conference will bring together around sociotechnical controversies, health, digital transformations and environmental challenges.
The Call for Abstracts is now open. The Scientific Committee has selected 17 thematic panels, and researchers, early-career scholars, practitioners and collectives are invited to submit paper proposals of up to 300 words.
Submission deadline: 23 September 2026
The full list of panels and further information can be found here:
https://www.sts-cat.org/?page_id=113
Abstracts can be submitted here:
https://forms.gle/uPcRSsZPMB6W6KXz5
I am very much looking forward to Barcelona, to meeting colleagues working across different STS communities and to contributing to these Mediterranean encounters.