EASST Review Volume 33 (4) European Association for the Study of Science and Technology Dec 2014 EASST Review (ISSN 13845160) is published quarterly, in March, June, September and December. EASST Editor: Vacant Guest Editor: Ignacio Farías (WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany) Tel:(+49) 30 2514927 email: farias@wzb.eu Distributed digitally to all EASST Members Subscription: Full individual membership fee (waged and resident in high income countries): EUR 40 annual. Students, unwaged or resident in all other countries pay a reduced fee of EUR 25. Library rate is EUR 45. Please note that subscriptions can be made through the EASST website by following the ‘Join EASST’ link. EASST Review on the Web: http://easst.net/easst-review/ Cover Illustration: “EASST Fireworks”. Photo by Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, Torún, Poland, September 2014 The Association's journal was called the EASST Newsletter through 1994. EASST Review's Past Editors: Ann Rudinow Sætnan, 2006 2014; Chunglin Kwa, 1991 2006; Arie Rip, 1982-1991; Georg Kamphausen, 1982. President: Fred Steward (University of Westminster) Council of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology: Elected members: Marton Fabok (University of Liverpool, Student representative) Ignacio Farías (WZB Berlin Social Science Center) Maja Horst (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen) Pierre-Benoit Joly (National Institute of Agronomic Research, Paris) Laura Watts (IT University of Copenhagen) Attila Bruni (University of Trento) Fred Steward, President (Westminster University) Estrid Sørensen (Ruhr-Universität, Bochum) Harro van Lente (University of Utrecht) Co-opted members: Samsa Hyysalo (editor of Science & Technology Studies) Ingmar Lippert (manager EASST Eurograd list) Krzysztof Abriszewski (organizer of 2014 EASST conference) Gary Downey (President of the Society for Social Studies of Science, ex-officio) EASST's Past Presidents: Christine Hine, 2005-2008; Sally Wyatt, 2000-2004; Rob Hagendijk, 1997-2000; Aant Elzinga, 1991-1997; Stuart Blume, 1987-1991; John Ziman, 1983-1986;Peter Weingart, 1982. Member benefits: EASST organizes a biennial conference and supports a number of “off-year” events such as workshops, PhD summer schools and national/regional STS meetings. Members are offered reduced registration rates for the biennial EASST conference and many other EASST events. EASST funds and awards three biennial academic prizes for excellence in various aspects of community-building – the Olga Amsterdamska award for a creative collaboration in an edited book in the broad field of science and technology studies, the Chris Freeman award for a significant contribution to the interaction of science and technology studies with the study of innovation, and the John Ziman award for an innovative venture to promote the public understanding of the social dimensions of science. EASST publishes the EASST Review and offers member access to the journal Science & Technology Studies. Editorial Ignacio Farías Recognize the picture on the cover? Our conference in Toruń. A beautiful medieval old town in Northern Poland. Catching up with good old friends. Making new friends. A timely conference theme: Situating Solidarities: social challenges for science and technology studies. Long lunch breaks in a sunny inner yard. Running into each other in between sessions. Good buildings for community building. Serious discussions about the coffee. Conference dinner in a fortress. Archery lessons. Desperado, a bizarre heavy metal pub. Astonishment about the number of routes and flight-train combination taken to get to Toruń. Rumours about a broken flight information display at Gatwick impeding friends and colleagues from coming. Ovation for the three collectives winners of EASST awards. Hat off to Krzysztof Abriszewski from the Nicholas Copernicus University and the organization. And, of course, the fireworks. An image that is also good when thinking about the kind of object we are enacting every two or four years (depending on how you define the ‘we’): the conference as a fire object. Fire objects invite us to think about ontological multiplicity, about the conference as a multiplicity, not simply differently experienced by the individual participants, but involving differing sets of practices, concerns, infrastructures, topologies. The issue, of course, is not simply ascertaining difference, but understanding the politics of coordinating differing, sometimes even mutually exclusive enactments. The notion of fire objects thus invites critical thinking, as it underscores the impossibility of making everything present and the inevitable production of otherness and absences. It is provocative to think about our conferences along those lines: How to coordinate the multiple enactments of a conference, how to hold it together, while taking into account the inevitable production of absence? One strategy, I think, is producing overtly incomplete archives. Archives are interesting knowledge devices, as they attempt to produce neither synthesis nor coherence, but to collect multiplicities and let them overlap, interact, intra-act. Normally, however, archives do have the pretension of completeness. But what about an archive that presents itself as being incomplete, that forces us to think about absences, to long for ‘other voices, other rooms’. I hope the pieces collected in this and the coming issues of the EASST Review about the Toruń conference will produce an incomplete archive of this kind, one that is capable of bringing together multiple ways of practicing our conference, while making us aware of not just of absent presences, but also of present absences. A second strategy involves engaging with the politics of conference organization, which involves among many other things a politics of size and numbers, as well as of atmospheres and interiorities. What happens to EASST when we move from a conference with 600 participants to conferences with almost 2000? When does an academic community become a population to be governed? How do conference fees take into account not just North and South, East and West, but also the precarization of academic labour or the inclusion of non-academic researchers in science and technology? Or, more generally, which conference atmospheres do we aspire to? Which type of scholarship do they inspire? As with atmospheres more generally, the question here is about the type of interiority enacted by our conferences. Is it an issue-oriented one, based on heterogeneous and multi-disciplinary problematizations of science, technology and traditional social science accounts thereof? Or is a discipline-oriented interiority emerging as a consequence of an increasing institutionalization of the field? Are we seeing the contours of a post-STS landscape, as recently discussed at http://installingorder.org/? Or is the other way around? STS as a generative multiplicity being currently risking disciplinarization? Generative questions, I hope, which could guide us when shaping the future of the EASST Review as an incomplete archive and engaging with the ontological politics of conference organization. Contents PAGE 5 Postsocialism and STS Susanne Bauer, Marija Brajdić Vuković, Endre Dányi, Márton Fabók & Ivan Tchalakov PAGE 21 Situating agencies and solidarities in environmental sustainability News from the Council Astrid O. Andersen Calls for Papers PAGE 9 PAGE 24 Technology and academic virtues in Ukraine Square pegs and round holes Olga Kudina Mhorag Goff PAGE 12 STS and politics Ivana Damnjanović PAGE 15 On the intertwinements of care and temporalities Kay Felder & Susanne Oechsner PAGE 18 Situating shifts Josefine Rassch PAGE 36 PAGE 26 Early career scholars’ expectations and obstacles in doing STS Nina Amelung PAGE 31 Caring for a displacement in meeting formats Tomás Sánchez Criado & Nerea Calvillo PAGE 36 PAGE 38 Opportunities Available PAGE 39 New Publications Postsocialism and STS. A subplenary at EASST Susanne Bauer, Marija Brajdić Vuković, Endre Dányi, Márton Fabók & Ivan Tchalakov The ‘Postsocialism and STS’ subplenary at this year’s EASST conference in Toruń grew out of an EASST-supported STS workshop held in Budapest in January 2014 (see Márton Fabók’s report in the previous issue of The EASST Review). The main focus of the Budapest event was a double blind spot: the relative absence of postsocialist cases in STS and the relative absence of STS works in postsocialist studies. As far as the first part of this double blind spot is concerned, it is worth highlighting that the postsocialist transition has mostly been described in political and economic terms (i.e. democratisation and market making), while science and technology have been considered rather unimportant and unproblematic. This is quite surprising, especially if one considers the central importance of science and technology in the selfunderstanding of socialism as a hyper-modern project. (Nothing illustrates this better than the Palace of Science and Culture in the centre of Warsaw, which testifies the centrality of science and technology in the promise of socialist modernisation.) Summary: STS has sometimes been accused of ‘presentism’: a tendency to study configurations, assemblages, arrangements, sets of material practices that take place here and now, in the present. How would our key concepts, methods, analytical strategies change if we blurred the boundary between the past and the present, the here and the there, and sensitized ourselves to half-presences? This subplenary aimed to address this abstract question by initiating a discussion about the postsocialist condition. More specifically, we aimed to explore remembered and forgotten narratives of modernism, sources of enthusiasm and scepticism towards technoscientific promises, and various configurations of the public and the private in sociotechnical innovations in order to discuss how the concept of postsocialism might contribute to ongoing debates in STS, and vice-versa, how insights from STS might help us better understand the postsocialist condition. Figure: Palace of Science and Culture, Warsaw, Poland Source: http://roman-shymko.com/digest/palace-of-culture-and-sciencein-warsaw/ As for the second part of the double blind spot, STS has been strongly influenced by postcolonial works, many of which have aimed at EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 5 Susanne Bauer is associate professor in sociology of science at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research interests include the sociology of infrastructure, databases and biobanks in biomedicine and environmental health, hybrid ecologies, and the Cold War history of risk assessment. bauer@soz.uni-frankfurt.de Marija Brajdić Vuković is assistant professor of sociology the the University of Zagreb. Her current research focuses on local practices of knowledge production in the context of science and technology policies and evaluation practices. Marija is chair of the Section for Science and Technology Research of the Croatian Sociological Association. mbvukovic@hrstud.hr 6 decentring or provincialising Europe and North America. As Katherine Verdery (2002: 20) argues, however, it makes little sense to address the relationship of the former ‘First World’ and the former ‘Third World’ without also talking about the former ‘Second World’, since many if not most anti-colonial struggles were also significant episodes of the Cold War, the traces of which are still very much visible today. If this is right, then postsocialist studies has a lot to offer for STS, and vice-versa. The subplenary in Toruń was our initial attempt to articulate what such offers might entail and come up with a (necessarily incomplete) inventory of possible topics and themes for future events and research projects. The subplenary was divided into two parts. In the first part, Ivan Tchalakov, Marija Brajdic Vukovic, and Susanne Bauer made a series of interrelated observations about postsocialism and STS. Drawing on his own experience in Bulgarian and Russian academic institutions, Ivan started the subplenary by situating STS in Eastern Europe before and after the collapse of state socialism (see also Mitev and Tchalakov 2007). He argued it has been difficult for STS to be established in the former eastern bloc because it repeatedly drew attention to the ‘taboos’ of science – a move that was appreciated neither in the scientific socialist context of the 1970s and 1980s nor in the neoliberal climate of the 1990s and early 2000s. As far as the latter is concerned, Ivan mentioned two important difficulties for STS scholars in Eastern Europe. The first is concerned with the agenda of STS: while conducting ethnographic research in laboratories and other scientific settings has been one of the strengths of science studies, what mattered most for scientists in the former east in the 1990s was mostly de-industrialisation, the growing importance of entrepreneurship, the impact of increasing direct foreign investments, and the short- and long-term implications of brain drain. The second difficulty had more to do with the methods of STS: to carry out STS-inspired research in Eastern Europe required – and requires still – historical research, which (despite some important exceptions like Bruno Latour’s study on Louis Pasteur or John Law’s research on Portuguese colonialism) did not quite fit with most STS scholars’ presentist approach towards scientific practices and processes. In a way, Marija’s and Susanne’s contributions to the subplenary could be seen as elaborations on Ivan’s two points about the agenda and the methods of STS. In her talk, Marija concentrated on her experience in the Croatian academic system in order to point out to some of the difficulties that former socialist academic systems face during their transformation into ‘competitive’ entities. According to the most common indicators, for instance, the Croatian academic system appears to be a ‘poor performer’ in terms of scientific productivity and impact of scientific research. Some factors contributing to its poor performance are associated with the constant decrease in R&D investment, the devastation of different parts of the academic system during the social and economic transition, along with a constant reduction of research personnel and a lack of well thought-through reforms. Marija argued that one of the major obstacles of the initiation and implementation of reforms has been a lack of consensus regarding the direction, depth and wideness of those reforms due to disciplinary differences, normative differences related to the acceptance of norms of neoliberal capitalism, and norms and habits connected to the ways of ‘doing science’ stemming EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 from the socialist past. As Marija pointed out, while following the transitology literature it is tempting to conceptualise post-socialist transition as a linear process, in practice, this transition has been negotiated and contested on a day-to-day basis in different settings, in different ways. The problem of temporality also played central role in Susanne’s presentation. As she emphasised, postsocialist STS and the history of technoscience in the former eastern bloc have the potential to complicate linear accounts of the transition from state to market economy. Rather than telling a story of progress, they may open up the possibility to study post-socialist neoliberal assemblages (Collier 2011). This can sensitise STS for heterogeneous temporalities and entanglements of various pasts in the here-and-now. Post-Cold War Kazakhstan, for instance, while new oil economies take over, deals with the legacies and impact of socialist modernity, such as large-scale irrigation projects, nuclear testing and the space program. Beyond the parallel history of Cold War science and technology, the postsocialist case shows how there are more than one versions of modernity, technoscientific utopia and disenchantment. Moreover, to post-Soviet countries in Central Asia, this includes both postsocialist and postcolonial concerns, given the much longer history of Russian colonialism, early Soviet anti-colonialist visions and policies as well as colonial continuity and a recent uptake of pan-Eurasianism in post-Soviet nation building. In light of this, Susanne suggested that STS scholars also ask the question that has already been raised in literary studies: is the ‘post’ in postcolonial the same as the ‘post’ in postsocialist? (Moore 2001) She then argued that case studies from STS might explore how such entanglements and temporalities look like and work, and sensitise us to the half-presences of various colonial and statesocialist pasts in post-Soviet economies. This way, along with the postcolonial challenges, STS-inspired studies of postsocialism might help further provincialise dominant western epistemologies and trouble the analytical categories in the study of technological modernity. Endre Dányi is postdoctoral research fellow in sociology at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His PhD at Lancaster was a materialsemiotic analysis of liberal democracy in Hungary, using the Hungarian parliament building as a methodological device. Endre is also one of the founder-editors of Mattering Press. danyi@em.uni-frankfurt.de Marton Fabok is a PhD Student in Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool. He is EASST Student Representative marton.fabok@liverpool.ac.uk Discussion In the discussion that followed Ivan’s, Marija’s and Susanne’s presentations (and the conversations that preceded it) a number of fascinating topics and themes came up, the elaboration of which is beyond the scope of this short report. At the same time, however, we find it important to at least list them here, hoping that some of them will be taken up in prospective STS meetings, within EASST and beyond. - - Lack of trust: a persistent lack of trust within and among scientific communities in Eastern Europe has made STS-inspired ethnographic research on scientific practices more difficult. What role does trust play in various scientific settings, and how does it change due to increased competition, standardisation, institutionalisation, etc.? Naukovendenie: What is the relation of STS to its Soviet counterpart ‘naukovendenie’ (science studies), an important (mostly philosophical) project at the intersection of science and politics/state planning? The project of naukovedenie originated in the 1920s as part of scientific socialism and resurfaced in the EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 Ivan Tchalakov is head of the Department of Institutional and Applied Sociology and of the Technology Transfer Office, both at the University of Plodvdiv. Hs latest book is titled Innovations and Entrepreneurs in Socialist and Post-Socialist Societies (coauthored by Jouko Nikula). tchalakov@sociology.bas.bg 7 Cold War context (Aronova 2011). According to Aronova (2011: 185), the ‘cold war was, among many things, about different visions of how to organize science’. If both movements, science studies in the west and ‘naukovedenie’ in the east, somehow responded to similar concerns related to the Cold War, how do these differences play out in the post-Cold War era? What are the peculiar fusions and politics of late socialist and postsocialist science, technologies and economies in different countries? Here STS can provide more complex empirical stories about these postsocialist assemblages and help overcome simple analytical binaries themselves to be located within the Cold War condition. References: Aronova, Elena (2011) The Politics and Contexts of Soviet Science Studies (Naukovedenie): Soviet Philosophy of Science at the Crossroads. Studies of Eastern European Thought 63, pp.175202. Collier, Stephen (2011) PostSoviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Mitev, Tihomir and Ivan Tchalakov (2007) ‘From Sociology of Science to STS: The Bulgarian case’ in Ivan Tchalakov, Harald Rohracher, Frank Mali et al. (eds.), Governing sociotechnical change in Southeastern Europe: contributions from a science & technology studies perspective. East-West Publishers, Sofia, pp. 228 Moore, David Chioni (2001) ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Postin Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique.’ PMLA 116(1), pp. 111-128. Verdery, Katherine (2002) ‘Whither postsocialism?’ in Chris Hann (ed.) Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies and practices in Eurasia, Routledge, London & New York, pp. 15-28. 8 - Utopias after the Cold War: does the collapse of state socialism also indicate the end of utopias? Or did utopias merely change their form and content? What does the (post-)socialist experience tell us about our belief in accounting practices and technological fixes in relation to climate change, the financial crisis, or other matters of concern? - Failure: the collapse of state socialism has mostly been framed in terms of failure, that is, the failure of socialist economies to remain sustainable vis-à-vis capitalist economies. Nowadays, many Eastern European countries are accused of failing to live up to certain economic and political expectations (often within an EU context). What can STS say about the technologies of expectations? How does failure figure in / is figured by such technologies? - What’s the post in post-socialism? In asking this question we would like to bring to the fore the specific temporalities at work in the postsocialist condition and invite empirical case studies on these heterogeneous relations. Close empirical studies are important to map out the dis/continuities and half-presences in specific technoscientific assemblages that we encounter as postsocialist present. - The continued importance of stateness. Attempts to overcome the socialist state seem to go together with the persistence of socialist elites and the emergence of refashioned authoritarian states. How do developments in neoliberal economies co-shape regimes of accounting and governance in social justice, welfare policies elsewhere? EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 Technology and academic virtues in Ukraine: Escaping the Soviet path dependency Olga Kudina More than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union there still remain a lot of gaps in understanding how the societal transformation towards a postsocialist society occurred and what contributed to this process. Some aspects of this change were discussed during the EASST Plenary session on the relevance of the postsocialist condition for STS. While Ivan Tchalakov provided retrospective analysis of the science politics in the Soviet Union and explained how its unintended consequences assisted socialist modernization, Marija Vukovic looked into youth academic migration as inspiring re-evaluation of science foundation in Croatia and Susanne Bauer elaborated how Soviet nuclear ecologies unfolded environmental changes. The speakers and audience purported that such a complex process as a/the transition to a postsocialist society cannot be fully captured by political and economic reforms. Society had to gradually adjust (and is still adjusting) to a more open and democratic way of life, something that can only be achieved by the bottom-up rationale, as witnessed by the speakers’ presentations. In this short essay I want to build on the results of the Plenary session and continue reflection on the postsocialist transition drawing from the fields of STS and Philosophy of Technology. I shall argue that in order to achieve a better picture of the societal transition to a postsocialist culture it is necessary to trace a change in the landscape of human beliefs, values and norms. In the speeches of all presenters, technology was always involved as a direct or indirect factor of change, enabling new ideas and reflection on dominant values. The concept of techno-moral change (Swierstra et al., 2009) can be a useful theoretical tool to reflect on the postsocialist transition period as a gradual process of review and reconceptualization of societal values and norms, accompanied by technological innovation. I would like to particularly inquire how the introduction of ICT challenged the moral landscape in the sphere of education in Ukraine. I chose to concentrate on education because this sector is especially relevant in the context of postsocialist transition, being entitled to produce critical reflective individuals whose actions will shape the future of the country. Since the aim of this essay is a preliminary reflection on postsocialist conditions, I will draw on existing academic scholarship and my own experience as I have obtained full higher education in Ukraine. Building on the methodology of techno-moral change, I will first explore the promises and assumptions regarding the education sphere that new technologies bring with them. Then I will sketch the educational practice in Ukraine prior to introduction of ICT and outline some of the dominant values in the field. Finally, I will analyse how ICT played out in Ukrainian EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 Summary: Inspired by participation in the EASST Panel on postsocialist condition, in this essay I tried to look into postsocialist transition in the sphere of education in Ukraine as influenced by introduction of Information and Communication Technologies. Utilizing Swierstra’s (2009) concept of techno-moral change, I trace how new technologies gradually assist renegotiation of the moral landscape in Ukrainian education sphere, whose integrity has been often questioned since the Soviet times. STS and Philosophy of Technology can be useful frameworks to further enhance existing knowledge on postsocialist transition and generate new one as to how this change can be facilitated. 9 educational and moral context and what it signified for a postsocialist transition. Olga Kudina is a Research Intern at Maastricht University, FASoS, Philosophy Department o.kudina@student. maastrichtuniversity.nl It has been widely accorded in STS that technology can inspire and coshape societal change and progress. New information and communication technologies (ICT) started to penetrate Western world already in the 60s-70s, gaining access to Easter Europe mostly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s. Following Osborne and Hennessy (2003), the introduction of Internet, computers and in the following decade of smartphones echoed the utilitarian “everybody-willbenefit” idea. Firstly, new technologies promised to expand and enhance educational practice, offering a cheap, fast and effective access to information and new educational tools. Secondly, they also carried a promise of forming a new generation of motivated and self-regulated students, who would promote responsible and honest learning and research practices in the age of cross-cultural connectivity and knowledge exchange. Therefore, the introduction of ICT led to expect a drastic change in the knowledge production practices. Despite of the optimistic nature of promises that accompanied the introduction of ICT, it took more than a decade for such technologies as personal computers to become ubiquitous in Ukraine and be included in the everyday practices. The educators, however, still struggle to incorporate new technologies in their work, constrained by formal and practical factors, such as lack of regulatory framework, skills to operate technology and time to obtain those skills as well as hesitance to change their routine practices. However, the young generations are eager to use the promoted benefits of ICT and have embraced new technologies quickly. Notwithstanding numerous obstacles that constrain the effective implementation of ICT in the domain of education, teachers have to take ICT into account when designing learning material and assessing the work of students. According to Swierstra (2009), promises carry certain conditions that need to be fulfilled in order to be realized. This technomoral change principle can be illustrated by the case of the ICT introduction in Ukraine. On top of practical and formal conditions, also the moral landscape inhibits an effective integration of ICT into the educational sphere. As mentioned earlier, ICT are said to promote productive learning and the practices of academic honesty. However, it is assumed that such norms and values are ubiquitous and desirable everywhere. As we shall see further, the Ukrainian educational context is somewhat different. Academic integrity was often a matter of concern in the Soviet Union, when practices of plagiarism would be referred to not as borrowing and cheating but as a noble act of helping your comrade (De Witt, 1961). Ethical beliefs regarding academic dishonesty in independent Ukraine have not changed much since the Soviet times. Recent surveys report a high rate of academic misconduct among Ukrainian undergraduate students who mostly find it morally justifiable (Yukhymenko-Lescroart, 2014). These results are supported by Western educators teaching in Ukraine, who say that cheating in Ukrainian high-schools and universities is considered to be a part of collective battle for the better grade and a form of caring for your groupmates. The dominant reproductive model of education indirectly supports such behaviours and teachers often tolerate academic misconduct (Earich, 2008; Brand and 10 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 Rist, 2013, p.51). Therefore, a moral landscape in the sphere of education in Ukraine, still tightly correlated with the Soviet principles of collectivity, does not directly fit with the values promoted by ICT. However, there is a need for further reflection. On the one side, a famous STS claim that users often appropriate technology in other ways than foreseen by the designers proves to be fruitful in regard to ICT and education in Ukraine. ICT do provide novel ways to access and generate information, but Ukrainian students often use them to blindly copy reports and whole dissertations from the Internet. Looking for such “academic agencies” online, I was amazed by their number, range of services and flexible payment options, ranging from standard to overnight tariffs. On the other hand, the co-shaping of the educational sphere and ICT also generated positive changes in the mindset of students and educators. For instance, in the early 2000s some Ukrainian universities started using software to detect and discourage students and staff from plagiarism as an attempt to address numerous complaints on the quality of education in Ukraine and to better assess academic content. When I was submitting a master’s thesis in Ukraine some years later, department staff demanded that all works be screened by university’s anti-plagiarism software. Academic work would be accepted only if the software detected less than 30% match with other sources. Consequently, some students had to re-submit their work. Not being a legal condition, anti-plagiarism technology became a de facto widely accepted voluntary practice in educational institutions, inviting students to review their ethical beliefs. This initiative was recognized by the newly elected minister of education Serhiy Kvit (a former president of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, a national university that is rendered as the least corrupt in the country), who promised to stimulate and support best local and Western practices regarding academic integrity on the national level (Onyshchenko, 2014). However, as witnessed earlier by YukhymenkoLescroart (2014), students who have been nurtured in the academic culture of cheating will not easily accept the new moral framework. Thus, dishonest academic practices still pertain. But the sole fact of questioning dominant norms is already a promising development in the gradual and contingent process of change in academia. Therefore, introduction of ICT in the sphere of education in Ukraine not only highlighted the dominant ethical beliefs of the scholars but also contributed to their reflection and re-evaluation, assisting the bottom-up gradual change in Ukrainian academic sector. Inspired by participation in the EASST Panel on postsocialist condition, with this essay I tried to show that postsocialist transition, just like techno-moral change, is always a process, never linear and subject to renegotiation. Looking into the sphere of education in Ukraine as influenced by introduction of ICT offers many insights into society in transition and challenges it faces along the way. STS and Philosophy of Technology can be useful frameworks to further enhance existing knowledge on postsocialist transition and generate new one as to how this change can be facilitated. References: Brand, R. A. & Rist, D. W. (2013). The Export of Legal Education: Its Promise and Impact in Transition Countries. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. De Witt, N. (1961). Education and Professional Employment in the U.S.S.R. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office for the National Science Foundation. Earich, G. (2008). Accomplishments and obstacles in Ukraine: Continental divide. Peace Corps Online. [Blog entry]. Retrieved on November 13, 2014 from http://peacecorpsonline.org/messag es/messages/467/3210290.html. Onyshchenko, O. (2014, June 13). Serhiy Kvit: Na reformy navazhusia. An interview. Dzerkalo Tyzhnia. Ukrayina.[Online archive] Retrieved on November 13, 2014 from http://gazeta.dt.ua/EDUCATION/s ergiy-kvit-na-reformi-navazhusyaa-scho-meni-mozhe-zavaditi_.html. Osborne, J., & Hennessy, S. (2003). Literature review in science education and the role of ICT: promise, problems and future directions. Bristol: NESTA Futurelab. Swierstra, T., Stemerding, D. & Boenink, M. (2009). Exploring techno-moral change: The case of the obesity pill. Evaluating New Technologies. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology. Vol. 3, pp. 119-138. Yukhymenko-Lescroart, M. A. (2014, March). Ethical beliefs towards academic dishonesty: A cross-cultural comparison of undergraduate students in Ukraine and the United States. Journal of Academic Ethics, 1(12), pp. 29-41. Before turning it in, this essay was screened for plagiarism with 0% match result. EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 11 STS and politics: new encounters Ivana Damnjanović Summary: Can STS be used as political theory? Two tracks at the EASST 2014 conference especially concerned with political issues invited us to seriously consider this question. One of them examined the role of the state as a political superstructure, while the other investigated uses of Internet among grass-roots social movements. Both demonstrated that all facets of politics can and must be taken into account when analyzing the coproduction of technology and society. As its title made apparent, the last EASST conference in Toruń Situating solidarities proposed to focus on political issues. Being a political scientist who went astray and tumbled into STS, I was impatient to see how this major theme would translate into papers, and I was not disappointed. While many tracks did, to some extent, make connections with politics, in two of them politics was in the spotlight. STS and “the state” This track aimed to shed some light on the role of the state for the coproduction of science, technology and society. But interestingly this concern was overshadowed by a more fundamental question – what/who is the state? There is no consensus. The very concept of the state, it seems, is additionally challenged by ever accelerating technological developments, and has to be de-constructed and re-constructed in order to become relevant and operationally useful for STS studies. This important issue was further explored by questioning STS perspectives on the concept of state, the transformation of traditional role(s) of the state in the face of changing socio-technical environments, and the changing relationships between “the state” and “the people”. In a paper entitled ‘Is the state an actor or not?’, Jeffrey A. Knapp and Sarp Yanki Kalfa challenged the view of the state as a plexus of “multiple discrete connected together in complex ways” (Carroll 2006: 4). Instead, their research of the press coverage of 1974 “Cyprus Dispute” shows that, at least in the view of the press, the state is conceived as an actor. Approaching a similar topic from a different perspective, Nicholas Rowland and Jan-Hendrik Passoth, continuing their previous work, focused on the proliferation of “states” in state theory, concluding that “the state” remains a sort of black box in political science. Their investigation of the multiplicity of “the state” was complemented by the Matt Spaniol’s paper ‘The future state: When the future multiple and the state multiple meet’. Papers presented by Astrid Mager (‘Absence and presence of “the state” in sociotechnical imaginaries of search engines’) and Daniela Schuh (‘Reproducing citizenship: Challenges of cross-border surrogacy to the nation state’) questioned the regulatory role of the state in a world dominated by transnational developments. Both papers shared a common theoretical framework based on the notion of “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Jasanoff & Kim 2009), and used it to investigate how states cope with new challenges, be it universal search engines or transnational surrogacy. Focusing on the issues of governance and lawmaking, these two papers tried to untangle the difficult relationships between the national and international levels, as well as between technological, political and social actors. 12 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 Another two papers, interestingly, clearly posited “the state” as something distinct from, or even opposed to, “the people”. From this perspective, “the state” is an alienated entity that acts according to its own particular interests instead of the interests of the people who, presumably, comprise it. Andrzej Wojciech Nowak’s presentation ‘Situating de-solidarities: State as a container and container settlements as an “exception state”’ addressed this very directly. His analysis of the Polish state acting not as the protector of the poor, but as something to be protected from the poor offered a very powerful image. Nowak discussed, for example, how instead of building social housing, state resources were rather utilized to build container settlements heavily under surveillance and certainly more expensive. Keith Guzik’s paper ‘Ni con cola: How agencies give state surveillance the slip in Mexico’ demonstrated that state programmes, even when well-intended, mostly fail as a consequence of not taking into account citizens’ attitudes, institutional arrangements and the various materialities involved. Another interesting question that stems from this paper is whether corporations can succeed where the state cannot. It seems possible that people would trust corporate entities more than government or, at least, that we need to conceptualize these kinds of trust differently. The presentation ‘The center of election – bureaucratic practices at Danish municipal election’ by Anne Kathrine Pihl Vadgaard showed, on the other hand, how, at least in one instance, the people and the state actually do become one. Drawing on Latour’s (1987) concepts of centres of calculation and acting at distance, her paper investigates the emergence of democracy through technical and bureaucratic tools. Ivana Damnjanović is Assistant Professor at Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade. Her research is focused on mutual shaping of technology and politics. ivana_damnjanovic@yahoo.com Practising politics online This track was very compact, with papers nicely complementing each other. Compliments are due to the conference organizers, since the track was composed from the papers originally submitted to the Open track section. Three out of four papers focused on the same issue: how groups and social movements are using online tools to debate, organize, disseminate information, make political statements, and, in short, promote their political goals. Marcial García, Pablo Cortés-Gonzáles and Alfonso Cortés-Gonzáles’ ‘Communication, education, and social movements online: New imaginaries, old utopias’, Vasilis Galis and Christina Neumayer’s ‘The reclaiming of online media by civil society: Greece & Sweden’ focused on social movements using Internet to build on their offline activities: protests like in Greece and Sweden or self-organized networks providing services government no longer provides in Spain. Characterized as attempts to control the narrative by reclaiming social media and to find adequate pedagogical tool for organization, debate, broadcast and social mobilization, this online presence was understood as embedded in the totality of movements’ functioning, or as an extension of its offline activities into cyberspace. A key question discussed was the relative efficiency of online activism compared to offline, “real” activism. Ivana Damnjanović's ‘Hacktivism in Serbia: from patriotic hacking to social media (ab)use’ showed, however, a different course of action; one that starts in cyberspace, and, despite EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 13 References: Carroll, P., 2006. Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, Berkeley/London: University of California Press. Jasanoff, S. & Kim, S.-H., 2009. Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva, 47(2), pp.119–146. Latour, B., 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Morozov, E., 2011. The Net Delusion, New York: PublicAffairs. Thorpe, C., 2008. Political Theory in Science and Technology Studies. In E. J. Hackett et al., eds. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Cambridge/London: MIT Press, pp. 63–82. 14 occasional efforts to spill over to offline politics, stays confined to it. In terms of publicity, political influence and overall impact in society, the latter does not seem as a very effective strategy. Inevitably, Morozov’s (2011) notion of “slacktivism” was mentioned and, to some extent, challenged. The fourth paper ‘Inside digital music distribution: Changing dynamic and paradoxes of the music industry’ by Hyojung Sun showed that political concerns, such as state laws on intellectual property and stances on piracy, played a role in the development of various distribution models. Final remarks Building upon the general theme of the Toruń conference, the papers presented at these two tracks showed that STS approaches can be very useful for study of politics in a very broad sense, and that even political science itself can be a viable subject of study for STS. In a sense, these papers demonstrated that STS can indeed be used as political theory (Thorpe 2008). Unfortunately, there seems to be little interest from political scientists to explore opportunities that STS approaches present, since most authors in the field still usually adopt positions of instrumentalism or technological determinism. EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 On the intertwinements of care and temporalities. Shared reflections on some of the conference themes Kay Felder & Susanne Oechsner This reflection piece on the conference is the product of a dialogue between the two of us at the EASST 2014 that was continued at lunchtime and coffee breaks. We are both currently working in projects led by Ulrike Felt at the Department of Science and Technology Studies in Vienna and went to the conference excited to present our projects, looking forward to getting some inspiration from the different conference talks and themes. While both of us work at the same department in Vienna, on a first glance our research is situated in quite different fields. Susanne just recently started her PhD in which she investigates how - in the case of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies - the collective good for aging societies is being negotiated in local research and development practices. Kay on the other hand is already in a well-advanced stage of her PhD in the area of health, biomedicine and public understanding of science. She worked with focus groups from the larger project “Perceptions and Imaginations of Obesity as a Socio-scientific Problem in the Austrian Context“ (led by Ulrike Felt between 2009 and 2012) and analyzed the role time - in forms of temporal narratives - plays in the ways people understand and perceive obesity and body-weight as matters of (non-)concern in their own lives as well as society. Summary: This collective reflection piece grew out of our shared observation that notions of care and temporalities continuously surfaced in a number of panels we visited at EASST 2014. We trace the intertwinements of these notions through different locations and set them in relation to our own work that we presented at the conference. While our topics do not seem to be related on a surface level, the conference inspired us to think about analytical similarities as well as certain kinds of sensibilities that are connected to both our topics. In Kay’s project, the ways people “care” and reflect on their and others’ bodies and lives, as well as how they understand things to be matters of concern is intrinsically connected to how people imagine pasts, futures and present temporalities to align. In preparation for the panel “Nonconcerns about science and technology and within STS“ Kay tried to push her reflection further in order to think about what this might mean for how temporalities and matters of concern are connected on a more general level. Reflecting through and with time was something that also Susanne felt is very much present in the ways Ambient Assisted Living is conceptualized and worked on. Similar to dominant ways of thinking about obesity, in her case too imaginations of a collective and endangered future give shape and meaning to the ways people think about solutions, problems and concerns. Thus we became interested in how similar analytical sensibilities in relation to time as “an integral part of the deep structure of taken-for-granted, unquestioned assumptions” (Adam 2003:60) take form in other themes and talks at the conference. This piece grew out of our dialogue, since we observed that care and EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 15 temporalities were two notions being taken up and worked with throughout the conference. When we attended the plenary discussion on Horizon 2020 we encountered a continuation of our own reflections in the ways the framework was discussed. Time and society are explicitly linked in Horizon 2020, since its key structural approach to research is challengeled: The outlined challenges are expected to be tackled proactively, which implies the normative demand to act now in order to care for the future. By linking our reflections to STS work on the performative role of time, we want to point out that within the Horizon 2020 framework the anticipated near-future of 2020 becomes not only imagined and discursively constructed but also “creates material trajectories of life” (Adams et al. 2009:248). Thus, the future-oriented ways in which we think about societal concerns strongly shapes our present and also how we can conceptualize our future as well as potentially affected collectives and individuals. Engaging with the challenges proposed in the Horizon 2020 framework in relation to our reflections on time, we want to point to the ways in which past, present and future always are linked and align in specific assemblages. We further argue that this can be understood as a process of not only formulating and constructing the matters we care about, but also how we want to take care of them and who we care about. Kay Felder and Susanne Oechsner both write their PhD and work at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. Kay works as a researcher and lecturer and has her focus on biomedicine and public understanding of science, Susanne works as a researcher and is interested in co-production processes of technology and society. kay.felder@univie.ac.at susanne.oechsner@univie.ac.at Thinking about these questions and inspired by the Horizon 2020 plenary, we started wondering what these considerations could mean for the concrete local contexts these challenges and frameworks might affect. How do these big promises get translated into local practice? How might this framework influence for example funding structures? How are understandings and conceptualizations of what we care about shaped by such frameworks and in what ways? AAL is funded in Horizon 2020 under the Societal Challenge theme “Health, demographic change and wellbeing”. In addition to producing material artefacts, in AAL the exploration and production of future users and markets is linked through the establishment of project consortia that consist of research institutions, user organizations and business partners. User participation normatively is seen as key for the development of good systems for a well aging society. In practice, user participation has its own temporalities, since there are good and bad times for their involvement, and participation can lead to precarious results. What happens, if the users say at the end, that the initial project idea that has further been developed over the course of the project is not relevant for the future they care about? Can bad results be good results in this framework and can they feed into a ‘logic of care’ (Mol 2008) for the future common good? One particular location, where temporalities of participation and diverse articulations of care became visible, was the remarkable presentation by Laura Navne in the panel “Practices of participation: Temporal alignments in life-and-death decisions in neonatology”. She presented one case of (parental) participation in decision-making in a neonatology intensive care unit in Denmark. Drawing on rich material from an ethnographic field study, she highlighted the distributed work of aligning 16 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 different temporalities which are at stake in these life-and-death decisions and how they shape understandings of what good care means. Questions of concerns and of care usually relate to things we find important, things we hold dear, and caring is especially related to finding ways to keep living things living (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011). Sometimes, though, some actors may find that at some point in time good care can mean quite the opposite. Good care can have a multiplicity of articulations, one of which might involve ensuring a good death (Law 2010). In Navne’s case, while the parents’ participation in caring for their terminally ill babies was for the longest time seen as essential, there was a point where the doctors felt the need to try and push the participation out in order to ensure a good death for the child. They moved from “getting the parents on board” to “hurry up slowly”, indicating, that they have to be brought on board in a different way, to redefine what it means to care well. So also here, depending on the timing, good participation (of parents) can become bad participation, from something enabling and valued to something disabling and hindering. What it can mean to provide good care was also prominently taken up in the panel “Technological innovations in caring communities: New solidarities”. In her presentation “Networks of memory as caring devices for people with dementia” Lorena Ruiz explored networks of memory consisting of heterogeneous actors and materials and the role they play for good care for people with dementia and for holding their identity in place. Good care, here, meant to be made and remade by others which brings up the question of how (well) they hold us and the materials that too make us, and of what it means to find good ways of enacting the subjectivity of ‘the other’. Dick Willems’ contribution “A caring community for things: Loving 404s together” sparked a heated debate. Willems read caring as a form of knowing and applied this to old collectors’ cars. One of his critics protested against the - from his point of view problematic - use of the notion of care that Willems was mobilizing or ‘caring for’. He was accused of sentimental and preservationist motives which, according to the critic, was starkly contrasted by the dense, moving account the previous speaker provided the audience with. Yet, this differentiation between the carer’s “giving memory to keep identity in place” and the practices of a collector of 404s, who cares to hold the car together, has one striking resemblance (the great apparent difference between a person in need of assistance and a car and one’s moral obligations notwithstanding): In both cases an identity, a configuration or an assemblage of materialities is held in place, in order to hold together, align and navigate the past, the present and, if possible, a future. References: Adam, B. (2003). Reflexive Modernization Temporalized. Theory, Culture & Society 20(2), 59-78. Adams, V., Murphy, M., Clarke, A. (2009). Anticipation: Technoscience, Life, Affect, Temporality. Subjectivity 28, 246265. Felt, U., Felder, K., Öhler, T. and Penkler, M. (2014). Timescapes of Obesity: Coming to Terms with a Complex Socio-medical Phenomenon. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 18 (6), 646-664. Law, J. (2010). Care and killing. Tensions in Veterinarian Practice. In: Mol, A., Moser, I. and Pols, J. (eds.). Care in Practice. On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 57-69. Mol, A. (2008). The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011). Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things. Social Studies of Science 41(1), 85-106. Coming back to our collective reflection on the conference themes and topics, we were reminded how human capacities to care and to imagine are deeply intertwined. In our piece we thus wanted to reflect on the conference against the background of “how questions of time and temporalities play an important role for understanding phenomena and for acting upon them in late modern societies” (Felt et al. 2014: 661). Tracing these intertwinements throughout the conference and the various presentations we saw was an inspiring exercise. EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 17 Situating shifts. Reflecting on the presentation of change Josefine Raasch Summary: In this paper I present a short analysis of how shifts were examined in several presentations at the EASST conference in Toruń, Poland. I compare and generalize on my understandings of these shifts when I ask who was assumed to have brought the shifts into existence, what features were attributed to the shifts and what resulted from talking about shifts in these particular ways. In laying open my decisions of the writing process and positioning myself within this paper, I want to emphasize that I do not re-present these shifts, but produce specific academic shifts myself. I had been looking forward to the conference in Toruń for a long time. Having completed a Ph.D. in STS in Australia in 2013, this was my first Science and Technology Studies conference in Europe. I had already decided to attend at least two tracks completely, one related to the research I am doing now, ‘Epistemic issues in the play of governance’, with Ger Wackers and Rolf Andreas Markussen as convenors, and another related to a future project that Estrid Sørensen and I are working on at the moment, ‘Technologies of care and participation: Shifting the distribution of expertise and responsibilities’ (with Hilde Thygesen and Ingunn Moser as the convenors; Ger Wackers jumped in as host of the panel for most of the sessions). Although the presented talks covered very different issues, I noticed that many of them dealt with changes, which were called ‘shifts’. Far from defining ‘shift’ as a buzzword, I became curious about the different shifting objects, the different ways of framing shifts in research projects and the different ways of approaching them. Being back on my desk in Germany, I now follow up on my curiosity and write about these different shifts. I will share my memories, draw on the notes that I meticulously scribbled down at the conference and on information of the EASST conference web presentation. By making this explicit, I hope to clarify from the outset that my textual presentation of the enactment of shifts is anything but representative. The shifts multiple Vicky Singleton was the first to evoke my curiosity about shifts. She had curly hair and looked smaller than I had expected and for some reasons both surprised me. Her kind appearance and her elucidated clarity impressed me. I remember many details of her presentation about a shift in health policy by promoting common values in compassionate care. These common values had been written into the National Health Service Constitution. How did Singleton approach the shift? She examined the discourses around the promotion of common values, investigated the values considered to be common and the consequences of their promotion for caring practices and patients. Drawing on her ethnographic research on the care of patients with Alcoholic Liver Disease, Singleton argued that two of the promoted values, respect and dignity, assumed patients with aspirations. These patients were believed not only to be interested in living a healthy lifestyle and taking responsibility for their lives, they were also imagined to strive for it. However, based on her research she claimed that not all patients had aspirations and instead of taking care of 18 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 themselves, some actually needed to be taken care of. The situations, in which caring professionals worked, were thus more complex than assumed by policy makers and a fixed set of values wasn’t necessarily of much help. It is important to emphasize that the lack of care Singleton could observe was not necessarily caused by a lack of values among caring professionals, but rather an effect of the socio-material arrangements that did not support a caring practice. Singleton described that shifting the expertise for care from the professionals to the patients occurred together with a shift in the responsibility for care. Through this shift in responsibility, however, the relationality of situated caring was lost. Being realized in compassionate care, Singleton situated the enactment of this shift in health policy. Yet, policy makers did not understand the promotion of these values as situated and enacted as they did deny that putting common values in action was a collective achievement. However, understanding the implementation of common values as collective achievement is crucial for taking responsibility for it. Singleton warned that the promotion of common values in compassionate care might result in a denial of the collective responsibility to alleviate suffering and in reduced capacities for care. After working for thirteen years as a physiotherapist, Josefine Raasch studied Social Anthropology and Education at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. She then moved to Melbourne, Australia, to complete a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies in 2013. In her current post-doc research fellow position she investigates how different professions document children and what results from that. josefine.raasch@rub.de Singleton pointed to three shifts, all intrinsically entangled with each other: a shift in health policy, a shift in expertise and a shift in responsibility. I remember my enthusiasm when hearing about different shifting objects, a variety of different practices that caused the shifts and also about different results of these shifts, while Singleton made clear that they were all related to and dependent on each other. Attending my first European STS conference, I noticed that I witnessed the enactment of more than one, but less than many shifts. Enacting shifts at the EASST conference in Toruń There were other researchers who talked about shifts and enacted them through their talks. Listening to some of them I got enthusiastic again, but only a few presenters enacted a multiple shift. Yet, my interest in shifts was evoked. How were the shifts enacted? What did they do and what resulted from them? I tried to find out more by focusing on the shifting objects, the things that were happening together with the shifts and the orderings resulting from shifts. The shifts described at the panels ‘Epistemic issues in the play of governance’ and ‘Technologies of care and participation: Shifting the distribution of expertise and responsibilities’ covered a huge range of fields: shifts from an epistemic culture of teaching medical students based on medical concepts to another, based on educational concepts (Wallenburg et al.), shifts in handling nanoparticles caused by new legal regulations and ‘quasi-governmental guidelines’ (Pfersdorf), shifts in standards in research assessment (Rushforth et al.), shifts of Dutch society (Mundbjerg Gjodsbøl and Nordahl Svendsen) and in the meaning of Dutch citizenship from entitlement to obligations and responsibilities (van Hees et al.), and recurrent shifts among patients/elderly people from being taken care of to having aspirations or practicing autonomy (Singleton, Wackers, Aune, Lassen). EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 19 As much as the objects of shifts varied, the actors doing the shifts did not. Guidelines and policies (Singleton, Wackers, Markussen, JerakZuiderent, Zuiderent-Jerak, Lawaetz, Wimmelmann), including legal regulations (Pfersdorf, Gellert et al.), were the actors mentioned most often. Handbooks and technologies (Niezen, Lucivero, Broderson, Lindegaard) were also considered to enact shifts. Often, the shifts presented in the papers carried a critical argument. The criticism was directed to policies and discourses, employed regulations, guidelines and big claims. Sometimes the shifts were accompanied by suggestions on what to do differently to act in a more effective way. Rarely, the shifts were the stars of the presentation, as the shifts contained all kinds of values and criticism, actors, and socio-material arrangements, which were analysed and discussed in more detail. Rather than highlighting the shifts, they were described as situated processes or results of different actors coming together, acting in a particular way. The speakers at the Toruń conferences enacted shifts with specific features. Some of them are listed below: - Being attributed to a vast amount of objects - Being enacted by guidelines, policies, legal regulations, handbooks, technologies - Carrying and/or containing criticism, actors, values, and sociomaterial arrangements - Being a continuous process or a stabilized result of practices observed in specific empirical fields - Appearing sometimes as more than one, but less than many, and at other times as singularized. Conclusion I definitely do not claim that my situating of shifts is a representation of the conference reality. Rather I chose and defined the shifts, their enactors and characteristics according to my interpretation of the conference reality, in order to describe knowledge as enacted. Other ways of analysing the described presentations would have been possible. I was also fascinated by the discussions of the methodological issues and by the ontological politics of the presented papers. For the purpose of this paper, however, I have decided to write about the situated enactments of shifts at the biannual EASST conference in Toruń, Poland. I am grateful that I had the chance for both attending and reflecting on the conference and I want to express my gratitude to the EASST who made this possible by organizing the conference and by providing funding for the conference fee. Thank you. 20 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 Situating agencies and solidarities in environmental sustainability. Reporting from EASST14 in Toruń, Poland. Astrid O. Andersen On Tuesday September 16, which in Copenhagen was a beautiful early autumn day, I left towards Poland, to discover for me yet unknown geographical and intellectual territories. I was travelling to the medieval town of Toruń to participate in the biannual conference of EASST for the first time. As I stepped out of the airplane in Warsaw, my paper “Purification: Engineering water and producing expert knowledge in Arequipa, Peru” was almost ready, yet a little too long, which often seems to be a problem when preparing for 15-minutes presentations. After a few hours in the Polish capital, another three hours in a train packed with Polish teenagers, I arrived in Toruń, where Nicholas Copernicus was born (so I learnt from the conference materials) and where the conference was set, (I later learnt that the location was carefully selected with the objective of decentring STS from Northwestern Europe). Since it was my first time to attend an EASST conference, I was rather blank on what to expect – would it be like mega-conferences I attended earlier – AAA Meetings or LASA? My paper and I were to participate in a track called “Situated agency in environmental sustainability”; L2 was its orderly affix in the conference program. It took place in room AB 3.10, on the third floor of the recently built humanities building of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Summary: This short text provides a first hand commentary from this year’s EASST conference: Situated Solidarities, which took place in September in Toruń, Poland. The author deploys an ethnographic STS sensibility to the question of what is a conference. Taking as point of departure the track ‘Situating agencies and solidarities in environmental sustainability’, the author argues that the format of the EASST conference – with tracks going on over several sessions, producing continuous collective reflections and discussions, and with extended time and space for engaging in informal communication over lunch and coffee – is very well suited for building intellectual thought and relations. There were about 15 of us in the room when the first session of the track started, on September 17 at 10.30 a.m. The two conveners, Brit Winthereik and Ingmar Lippert, both STS scholars from the IT University of Copenhagen, welcomed us to what they qualified as a first step of some yet unknown collaborative work of theirs. We would have four sessions of each 90 minutes; 12 papers that all responded to the call for papers engaging “how people participate in reconfiguring environments”. Responding to the overall conference theme, Situated Solidarities, the two conveners asked us to, throughout the sessions, think about and discuss “to whom we offer what kind of solidarities?” How do we practice solidarity as (STS) scholars? And where do we situate it? Solidarity with different practices? With different entities…? The welcome had an open, explorative, positive tone. In contrast to other larger conferences, where sessions are short, time is utterly compressed EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 21 and collective thoughts are most often cut off as session participants walk out of the room where the papers are given, I felt a relief knowing that I would be able to think continuous thoughts with which to engage in a continuous dialogue and discussion. Astrid O. Andersen is postdoc at the Department of Anthropology at University of Copenhagen; her research centres on humanenvironmental relations. astrid.andersen@anthro.ku.dk Throughout the four sessions a path was paved through a variety of empirical settings; we travelled through corporate carbon accounting, a Chilean copper mine, Swedish corporate care for sustainability, naturemaking through coast protection in New Zealand, Greek river expertise, responsible climate adaptation in Denmark, optimization in environmental management in an international NGO, wastewater management in Peru, design and ontology of noise in England, buildings as nature-machines in Norway and Swedish smart grids. The papers were weaved together by the physical setting where they were presented – a teaching aula at a Polish University; curtains, electronically interconnected with the projector, cut the daylight from entering the room, and an air-conditioning system prevented us from feeling the pleasant autumn temperatures in the outside world. We were crafting an academic conference by aligning the material practices with those going on in other rooms next to ours, and by gathering our thoughts and reflections around each other’s papers. Throughout the path along these many ethnographic sites, a rich landscape of concepts and possible analyses was drawn out for us to tumble and play in: ontic achievements, erroneous environments, making STS travel, care as practice, multiple sustainabilities, infrastructures – and infrastructuring, politics of expertise, governance of natural commons, infraconceptual critique, creative redefinitions, overflows, assemblages and holistic vagueness… Solidarity was played out as a concept and a notion that shifts the engagement and relation we as analysts / scholars practice in the realities we engage with when we do our work. It may mean shifting the level of commitment towards a less distant form of analysis towards one that is closer to the idea of collective world-making. In the final session, our visionary and realist conveners made us go together in groups and discuss what we had learned from the sessions. Some of the questions that circulated along the track, and in the final discussions: 22 - Does reality-making need people who think of reality-making? - Is there a difference between ontic solidarity and ontological solidarity? - What comes after being troubled? - Where is solidarity located? How can we invite people to make social analysis? - What actually qualifies as critique? - What kind of treasons are we afraid of? EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 - What are the connections and disconnects between care – solidarity – critiques? Can we think of scholarly practices in which we shift between these? - How can design be used as ethnographic method when engaging with environmental controversies; a way to build new relations, physically? - Can we (scholars) work towards daring to risk or de-stabilize our own position? Finally, we opened the curtains, let light in, changed the way of seating and got together in small groups that after a while gathered in one, to summarize the discussions and make the reflections collective. Instead of summing up the contents of the discussion, I leave you a glimpse of the notes I took of our collective reflections: Coffee breaks, two-hour lunches, plenary sessions, and a spectacular social event in the Toruń fort made our conference track cross those of other participants, and weaved the EASST experience together as a dense meshwork of presentations, discussions, sharing and reflections. I appreciated these spaces, which made the conference a place where it was possible to meet and connect with new and already known people. When returning to Denmark, by train, with my papers full of notes and ideas, track convener Ingmar Lippert - a passionate STS scholar and activist – was sitting in front of me, clearly satisfied with the EASST experience: “this is the third time I come to this conference feeling genuinely at home, it is like my community”. I understood why, and thought that I look forward to my path crossing that of others at future EASST conferences. EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 23 Square pegs and round holes: research funding and disciplinary legitimacy in STS Mhorag Goff Summary: The current round of European Commission funding represents an opportunity for the STS discipline, with greater alignment to the concerns and dispositions of STS research. If we are to win bids there are challenges to address in terms of negotiating an implicit agenda and hidden success criteria, and perennial tensions in terms of how we present a coherent story to market STS research. The plenary emphasized community building as a means to develop understanding of what STS scholars can offer and made a call to arms that as EASST members we must do what we do best by engaging with other worlds, if we are to achieve good ‘bar presence’ and support our research agendas. The subplenary of Pierre Benoit Joly, Maja Horst, Robin Williams and Fred Steward as chair presented their perspectives and invited the audience to discuss the challenges and opportunities for STS scholars in seeking successful engagement with Horizon 2020, the new European Commission funding framework for 2014-15. The call for bids is framed as an appeal for responses to societal challenges, of which it was suggested that challenge 6, “Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective societies” is a likely target for the STS community. This observation came out of the Vilnius conference “Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities” earlier in the month (for which Fred Steward’s report is on the EASST website), which outlines the strategic goals for integrating social sciences and humanities research with those of Horizon 2020. The plenary opened with the broad question about how EASST can influence these programmes. It spoke strongly to the conference theme of “Situating Solidarities: social challenges for science and technology studies”, echoing the challenge of tackling the tensions that arise from the identity and legitimacy issues in STS whilst exploiting the community’s interdisciplinary strengths. Horizon 2020 recognizes that new modes of research and knowledge creation associated with scientific and technological innovation must include interdisciplinary research. This gives EASST members a unique advantage in the sense that they may be ‘pushing an open door’ where the experience of the STS community in handling epistemic diversity, and the multi-domain expertise of members can be a source of value. It was noted by Pierre Benoit Joly that there is a predictable tension arising from the perceived dominance of economically driven research agendas in the European Commission - seen as influencing the success of funding bids. Competing on this basis creates a requirement to fit within these frames of reference. It was enlightening as an early career researcher to hear Robin Williams speak about the harsh realities of chasing research funding in that there is evidently significant work involved in bridging the gap between stated and ‘real’ success criteria for projects the European Commission is willing to fund. He observes a need to be able to interpret the bid criteria around this implicit agenda and to identify the people in the Commission who can support this. Accessing the expertise of advisory groups is easier than in the past, with opportunities to get involved with the public consultation exercises in some strands, and it was suggested that having more reviewers in the system would improve understanding of how the system works among the EASST community. 24 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 Overall, bidding demands engagement with a complex policy network and pro-active management of the process, requiring that we as a community establish and expand our footholds in the Commission in order to focus our efforts effectively. Suggested strategies include sharing the costs of engagement activity as a means of supporting collective action, and accounting for bid development costs within bids. In this respect standalone projects are vulnerable and there is a need for capacity building in STS so that projects can be turned into a stream to build sustainability. Maja Horst highlighted a perception among STS researchers of a lack of understanding outside the community about what STS is, and in relation to bidding this is manifested in the challenge of communicating how the community can add value. There is a sense among STS scholars that it is hard to find collaborators for bids and that STS is seen as ‘PR’ for other people’s projects. Investing time in building informal links with other departments in our own universities is one approach to raising our profile in terms of engaging with research communities with whom we could potentially collaborate. Much of the discussion centred on the double-edged sword of STS researchers’ interdisciplinary expertise, noting that the STS community, unlike natural science, can be seen as somewhat fragmented, with researchers coming from backgrounds as diverse as history and environmental science, and this discontinuity might undermine our ability to influence. There is therefore a need to integrate the community to provide ‘strength in numbers’, with the potential for EASST to act as a hub in coordinating members’ responses to Horizon 2020. There is a need to target areas to invest efforts and we must be wary of losing opportunities to contribute by neglecting less obvious strands. Mhorag Goff is a researcher and Associate Lecturer at the University of Salford; imminently completing a PhD in the Information Systems, Organisations and Society research group. Her PhD thesis is a critical investigation of electronic patient records in the NHS in England using Actor-Network Theory to understand how they benefit clinical work practices. She has a particular interest in research topics related to ethics, philosophical and critical approaches to understanding information systems. m.goff@edu.salford.ac.uk Whilst this kind of integration is more challenging for some STS scholars than others depending on our disciplinary allegiances, we are of course not isolated in the sense that they are part of research communities within our universities, and might fruitfully frame our potential contributions as providing the ‘missing ingredient’ in bids in other disciplines. We might, for example, smuggle STS into research agendas in other guises and expand ‘shadow’ research projects. It is also important to build relationships with those in university administration who support bids. This means not only to valuing those who write papers but also individuals involved with the project development, bidding and project management ecosystem that supports successful bidding and delivery of projects. Finally, there is a need for EASST to support pathways for those at the start of academic careers to get access to and involved with EC funding bids, by facilitating networking and strengthening the ability of EASST members to collaborate. We need to be clear in communicating the STS research agenda and understand the market for our research interests, and in this respect presenting a strong sense of disciplinary identity can be a vehicle for generating more widespread understanding of STS. In approaching Horizon 2020 this demands critical assessment within the community with respect to what we do, and ‘getting our hands dirty’ in taking up opportunities to demonstrate our value. EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 25 Early career scholars’ expectations and obstacles in doing STS – within academia and beyond Nina Amelung Summary: “Doing STS – within academia and beyond” was the theme of the preconference doctoral workshop at this year’s EASST conference. The article begins with introducing theoretical perspectives of STS scholars and theirs visions of doing STS, in order to reflect on the workshop theme. Furthermore, selected concerns of participants are addressed such as the interaction with the empirical field, communicating STS research and the demands of the job market. The article ends with examples of good practices of doing STS presented in the workshop and encourages to take up the ideal of “avant-garde” as a stimulus for doing STS. “Doing STS – within academia and beyond” was the theme of the preconference doctoral workshop at this year’s EASST conference. While the issue definitely matters to early career scholars, as they try to find their own way of doing STS as scholars within academia, it also matters to them as scholars interacting with the world beyond academia and as future professionals working outside of academia. In this article I offer some reflections on the workshop, but will begin by approaching the workshop theme from selected theoretical perspectives on doing STS, as they provide inspiration for (early career) scholars to reflect on their ambitions and visions of how to do STS. Such ideals implicitly and explicitly floated in the discussions during the workshop. However, this doctoral event brought together more heterogeneous expectations, as well as rich experiences of participants and discussants. The second section focuses on some of the concerns and obstacles raised by participants about doing STS, offering insights into how early career scholars are affected and perceive the particular challenges of doing STS beyond academia. The article ends with examples of engaging STS in the particular ways of publishing and communicating research as good practices in order to encourage experimentation with the yet “unspeakable” in John Laws’ sense. 1. Doing STS beyond academia: perspectives from theory Key figures in STS have already articulated their visions of how STS can matter or contribute beyond academia and derived suggestions on how STS should be done. Let us recall some of these ideas. Wiebe Bijker (2001) suggested two strategies of doing STS when he argued for the reinvention of the “public intellectual”. One strategy is acting as a critical observer and making “political interventions” by offering a mirror to scientific and technological cultures and the actors involved: “doing case studies is a way for individual STS researchers to conduct political interventions. […] Another metaphor to describe this kind of intervention via a case study could be “the STS mirror”: STS studies present mirrors in which actors see their cultures and actions in new ways. And again, seeing themselves in these new ways may lead to self-conscious changes in behaviour.” (Bijker 2001: 446). Another is to act as a social engineer: 26 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 “STS research needs to reestablish close collaboration with the science and engineering communities. […] I argue that STSers can contribute to making things, to changing the world. In doing so, they inevitably will dirty their hands, for there is no free ride here.” (Bijker 2001: 446) Obviously, both strategies can potentially conflict with each other. For example some scholars feel uncomfortable with the latter because they fear losing their critical distance or becoming instrumentalised for the wrong ends. The way scholars interact with their empirical field, but also with the public and policy makers links up with what John Law (2004) wrote about how STS can matter and how he defines particular modes of contribution. Instead of giving an appropriate summary of his six modes, I recommend a full reading of his paper and here only selectively pick out some points of inspiration. He suggests “interference” as one mode which offers an explanation as to why it is rather challenging and demanding to make contributions as an STS scholar beyond academia: “[…] interference is a mode of matter-ing that is awkward, rough, and broken. […] It does not generalise. It does not smooth out. It does not offer general calculative possibilities. In short it is specific, a form of located practice. Mattering in interference is something that is re-done, re-enacted, instance by instance. […] Its contributions are local. So there is no overview. Instead there are specific problems and specific constellations, and specific possibilities. All in specific places.” (Law 2004: 7). Nina Amelung, PhD candidate at Department of Sociology at Technische Universität Berlin, currently visiting scholar at department of Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg nina.amelung@gmail.com While such lofty ideals were aired here and there in our discussions, the overall approach of the doctoral workshop was hands-on and rooted in participants’ own practical experiences. The aim was to learn from exchanges on ambivalent experiences about how to turn ideals, such as “using the STS mirror” or “interference”, into practice. Yet ideals remained implicit. 2. Doing STS beyond academia: concerns of early career scholars The objectives for the workshop were promising. The organizer Marton Fabok, student representative in the EASST council, had drafted a call inviting to “critically engage with what STS researchers practically do” and “to address how STS can be used in the context of practitioners, policy-makers, activists or even business consultants” 1. In retrospect, the key question addressed involved the obstacles and visions of EASST’s early career scholars about doing STS. Before addressing some of the concerns raised during the workshop, I would like to note that since I’m writing based on my subjective experience of selective discussions, these reflections are eclectic and self-evidently do not necessarily represent the perspectives of other participants. Starting with the range of obstacles, one issue raised was the challenge to communicate and make research understandable beyond STS insiders. A participant described his interest in the workshop based on: “experiences on how I previously have found it quite difficult to discuss my research with people outside academia not familiar with STS concepts. So far they have found it too theoretical to actually be useful for implementation. […] Another experience is that I have EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 27 found that STS theories very often focus on finding problems rather than solutions, and this is also something which makes it troublesome when trying to reach a broader audience and actually achieve a change.” (participant A) Other participants were interested in discussing the challenges of how STS engages with the public and politics. Therefore they wanted “to hear if and how others succeeded in communicating their research to actors involved in the policy process or to 'the public'” (participant B) and “to engage in conversations about using STS doings and knowings in political ways and with political goals” (participant C). Another area of interest was how to interact with the empirical field. Bijker’s notion of “political interventions” by the researcher turns out to be a rather complicated and difficult endeavour in practice. As one participant described it: “The company had little experience with the anthropological approach and it was therefore a challenge to communicate my findings to the designers and programmers at the company in a useful way. Not only did I try to make the programmers and designers interact with the ethnographic field site in new ways. In doing so I constantly had to challenge the normal ways of knowledge transfer in the company.” (participant D). A recurrent theme pointed to the issue of how to make STS ‘useful’ – for practitioners, for policy makers, for engineers, but also for their own careers (in order to be competitive with others on the job market). Depending on the country around 20 to 75% percent of PhD candidates will leave academia after they have finished their thesis (Auriol 2010: 15)2. It is common for various scholars to see their future contribution in other working areas beyond academia. Furthermore, the younger generation of STS researchers is in many countries confronted with increasingly precarious working situations within academia, which makes them increasingly concerned about what they can contribute outside of academia. Due to massive and complex changes (linked with a trend in the marginalization of social sciences in some countries and increased competition for constantly limited resources in academia) the future prospects for PhD candidates in Europe (especially but not only in East and South Europe) are under pressure (Cyranoski et al. 2011). This could be a driver for increasing demand from early career scholars in STS for more reflection on what kind of skills STS researchers gain and how these are unique qualifications demanded on the job market outside of academia and enrich the employability of young researchers: “When it comes to STS as a profile that qualifies you to get a job in business or public sector, I have little clue what important aspects are that make you look qualified. I hope to gain knowledge about whether there are specific methods or knowledge bases that are significant for the STS-approach and that can be translated to applied problem-solving competencies. Are there actually companies that look for the STS-competencies?” (participant E). This points to a dilemma regarding controversial expectations in STS. A legitimate demand articulated by young scholars is to clarify the particular skills and competences of STS in order to use STS as a unique selling point when they compete with others on the job market. However, requests and competences deriving from STS scholarship 28 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 might be different and even contradictory to what is demanded by the worlds beyond academia. Or put differently: challenging traditions of thinking might be welcomed or at least heard in some niches and under certain conditions – and in others not. STS scholars will continue struggling to find a balance between these requests, but should explore further which are these niches and conditions, in order to make a better impact with their interventions and ways of doing STS. If they succeed, they will become more and more demanded beyond academia. To me, this includes developing reflection skills, collecting experiences of how to intervene in a critical but responsible way, and learning how to deal with the ambiguities of getting our hands dirty while still keeping a critical distance in order to avoid becoming instruments for the wrong ends. 3. Doing STS beyond academia: examples of good practices The workshop approached the theme of what STS researchers practically do by addressing the actual work practices of STS researchers: how they publish and engage with the publishing industry, how they communicate their research, how they work with practitioners, but also if and what kind of impact STS research has beyond academia. Doctoral candidates and selected senior researchers (who acted as facilitators and discussants) discussed their views and experiences in doing STS in working groups. Small group discussions addressed the issues of “social media” facilitated by Jan-Hendrik Passoth and Nicholas Rowland; “open access publishing” supported by Endre Dányi; “working with practitioners” facilitated by Ingmar Lippert; “academic careers” assisted by Jan-Hendrik Passoth and Nicholas Rowland; “science communication” facilitated by Sarah Rachel Davies, “digital interventions” helped by Paolo Magaudda and an ad hoc small group on “working with policy makers” facilitated by Marton Fabok. Les Levidow was originally scheduled to facilitate two workshops on “co-operative research” and “academic journals”, but had to cancel due to external circumstances. Inspiration was derived from “good practices” of enacting STS in publishing and communication platforms, which can be also seen as materialized visions of doing STS. One example is based on the idea that the process of writing and publishing can be addressed by alternative forms of engaging with how texts are produced and distributed. The initiative taken by the young publishers Mattering Press is motivated by the belief that the way in which this takes place matters.3 Founded by a collective of formerly early career scholars in STS, they have now started to produce high quality, peer reviewed, open access books featuring relational research on science, technology and society and based on a collaborative and mutual supporting basis. The ambition is to experiment with the ways of producing academic books that break with the often asymmetrical relationships between publishers, authors, readers and networks of distribution. Instead, as Endre Danyi (co-general-editor of mattering press) explained, taking care of the publishing process and caring for all involved is the key to a different and STS inspired approach of publishing. EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 29 References: Auriol, L. 2010. Careers of doctorate holders: employment and mobility patterns, OECD Publishing. Bijker, Wiebe E. 2003. „The Need for Public Intellectuals: A Space for STS: Pre-Presidential Address, Annual Meeting 2001, Cambridge, MA“. Science, Technology, & Human Values 28(4):443–50. Cyranoski, David, Natasha Gilbert, Heidi Ledford, Anjali Nayar, and Mohammed Yahia. 2011. „Education: The PhD factory“. Nature 472(7343):276–79. An example of how to experiment with communicating STS is the blog “installingorder.org”. Founders Jan-Hendrik Passoth and Nicholas J. Rowland shared their blogging experiences with participants. Their blog provides a public platform for discussing STS themes and is realized by a core group of bloggers and guest bloggers, but is open for participation. Additionally, it offers recommendations of literature to read and of lessons to teach (including teaching material). Discussions focused on what kind of writing style reaches out to specific audiences (such as either the wider public or STS scholars). Participants shared the motif of mobilizing alternative forms and pushing the limits of communicating, presenting and exchanging STS thoughts. A source of inspiration for stimulating experiments in enacting STS can be found in what Law calls “avant-garde” – another ideal so heroic yet so difficult to enact in practice: “Avant-garde works by undoing taken for granted assumptions […] it also tries to undo the groundings for policymaking, criticism, and puzzle-solving, and to show that these are not really foundations. That means that it proposes the unthinkable, or at least the unspeakable. […] Avant-garde never fits with established enactments of the real world. This means that it is inconsistent with the apparatuses of discipline with its journals, its institutions, and its funding bodies. […] But avant-garde, that loose cannon, must be protected. It matters in ways that start out by being unthinkable – and then, at least sometimes, come to matter in quite other, transportable ways.” (Law 2004: 8, 9, 11) Law, John. 2004; ‘Matter-ing: Or How Might STS Contribute?’, version of 28th June 2004, available at http://www.heterogeneities.net/publ ications/Law2004Matter-ing.pdf (downloaded on 4th February 2010) Participant A, B, C, D, E: quotations from statements of motivation letters for the workshop (anonymized) Relevant themes and related issues have been raised, but there will need to be more spaces to reflect on early career scholars’ contributions mediating between STS visions and external constraints. Therefore I hope the workshop is the beginning of discussion rather than an isolated event among early career scholars and across the scholarly generations in EASST. Notes 1 EASST Website: http://www.easst.umk.pl/easst-pre-conference-doctoralworkshop-torun/, accessed on 25th of November 2014. 2 These numbers reflect PhD candidates across all disciplines. Since STS scholars can be found across diverse disciplines it is difficult to specify how they are affected by that. 3 Mattering Press Website: http://www.matteringpress.org/, accessed on 25th of November 2014. 30 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 Caring for a displacement in meeting formats Report on the 4th meeting of the STS Spanish Network, 4-6 June 2014, Salamanca1 Tomás Sánchez Criado & Nerea Calvillo 1. The #4esCTS meeting: Diaspora and care in an STS network The 4th meeting of the Spanish STS Network (Red esCTS) took place between June 4th-6th 2014 in Salamanca, hosted by the Institute of Science and Technology Studies2 of the University of Salamanca in two beautiful buildings from the 16th century (Colegio Arzobispo Fonseca and the Faculty of Translation and Documentation). The meeting could be seen as a moment of consolidation for the network with an attendance of more than 80 people from very different professional and disciplinary backgrounds, presenting papers, distributed in parallel sessions, on the most diverse topics, ranging from contemporary urban, cultural or health/care issues to the reflection of forms of citizen science and participatory interventions in technoscientific issues3. In a productive and ironic stark contrast with the historicity and solidity of the buildings, the meeting wanted to gather STSers from inside and outside of academia to analyse the outmost contemporary predicaments and frailties affecting knowledge production institutions. Indeed, the call ‘If you love me, go away! Deploying diasporas and activating care from the backroom’ played ironically4 not only on the complicated career prospects of young STS academics in Southern European countries but also on the ‘brain drain’ rhetoric (that usually depicts the structural problems in R&D as one in which ‘the best minds’ are escaping the country). The idea of the call was to build an alternative framework to this construction of a diasporic academia, which sometimes forgets about those who cannot travel, usually neglects those producing relevant knowledge in places different from academia (e.g. health activists, collective architecture networks, cultural producers and artists, etc.), and almost never signals the important forms of backroom care-work that have to be deployed and activated to maintain professional and personal bonds at a distance, or to be able to overcome fear and frustration to produce relevant changes in the present day sociomaterial conditions affecting us. Summary: Our meeting ‘If you love me, go away! Deploying diasporas and activating care from the back room’ not only reflected on the complicated career prospects of young STS academics in Southern Europe, but also aimed at challenging traditional ways of producing and sharing knowledge within STS. Besides discussing at great length the prospects of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network format with Francesca Musiani (our keynote speaker), we sought to experiment with different meeting formats, ranging from dramaturgical performances, the cooking of workshops to an online call for manifestos or videointerventions addressing how to engage with non-academic knowledge producers. In sum, this meeting has signaled for us an interest in the promotion and exploration of more inventive formats for the encounter of academics and non-academics not only addressed at sharing papers, but also at stimulating the production or testing more interventionist projects, ideas, and research devices. Building on the idea of ‘diaspora’ and highlighting the necessary care networks put to work to reduce its impact, one of the most important aspects of the programme reflected on how to keep on doing as a decentered and non-structured STS network in post-austerity times. Besides streamlining meetings’ budgets and eliminating fees to grant access–as has been the regular practice of the network in the past four years–, an important strand of organizational worries laid on the modes of governance and free tools available to sustain our horizontal practices. Given the inspiration in and the parallels with other peer-to-peer (P2P) EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 31 Tomás Sanchez-Criado is Lecturer in Social Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia. He is a Social Anthropologist interested in the ethnographic study of the material politics of care, currently doing research on grassroots mobilizations for independent living and practices of participatory/activist design of personal and urban care infrastructures. networks, the organizing committee invited Francesca Musiani as a special guest for the opening conference ‘Of dwarfs and giants: The networks of today and their politics of architectural design.’ Francesca kindly agreed to reflect on the prospects of how a P2P scientific network might look like departing from her studies (Musiani, 2013) on the fluid yet stable forms of P2P governance in decentralized digital architectures (dwarves sitting on the shoulders of other dwarves, not giants). A very interesting debate ensued, focusing on whether the use of open-access publishing strategies might be the most important avenue to enable our network’s activities or if other more hybrid and material forms of opensourcing might have to be invented to bring to life such an experimental idea of a P2P scientific network (cf. Corsín Jiménez, 2014), experimenting with its formats and ways of building encounters. The opening ceremony closed with the video-intervention We, the guinea pigs by the influencing open design community ColaBoraBora5, portraying explicit scenes of a laboratory rat vivisection with a voiceover of an enraged lab rat denouncing the utilitarian uses of either people or animals by scientists in their empirical work, hence contesting scientific expertise and the institutionalisation of research as well as calling for a more hybrid and co-produced fabric of science, caring for other forms of knowledge production. The first day ended with the presentation of a speed-dating dynamic See no evil, hear no evil6 by ColaBoraBora, searching to frame first encounters between academics and nonacademics present at the meeting. 2. #4esCTS’s special workshops: Towards more hybrid and inventive ‘ways of doing’ STS? Indeed, many efforts were put in the previous months to deploy and make available in the programme relevant forms of caring for STS7 and, more especially, to turn its more hybrid and inventive potential futures into a ‘matter or care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) for our network. A wide gamut of special workshops were carefully put to test during the meeting. Each workshop challenged ‘ways of doing’ STS, testing alternative discussion and communication formats, as well as inquiring not only what the field ‘is’ but also on how we want it collectively to be. For the Demo-WHAT? A dramatechnic experiment in democratic productions8, organized by the GESCIT research group at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, we gathered in a pub downtown –the meeting spaces were challenged too!–. The workshop started with a dramaturgic performance, featuring a voiceover by Democritus of Abdera, in which participants were presented with different figurations of democracy and the roles of experts encountered by the group in their recent research exploring participatory STS methods, such as a year-long consensus conference and diverse focus groups. Paper fragments featuring different ‘voices’ –i.e. anonymous quotations– were distributed to participants divided in groups, and each group was asked to create a dramaturgic representation of what democracy means inspired on them, resulting in one of the most hilarious moments of the whole meeting (with several groups acting on stage, be it representing the everyday democracy through conversations on a bus or proclaiming, without mumbling a 32 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 word and refusing to speak, a constitution for an inclusive democracy of the shy). Research accountability and the circulation of knowledge were explored in the Publish like you give a damn, careful experiments in academic publishing9 workshop, convened by the Mattering Press collective10. Julien McHardy dynamised a discussion about open access publishing formats and different forms of academic writing registers and genres, based on small writing samples that participants had been asked to share. It served as a starting point for the exploration of what care and experimentation in academic publishing could mean. Quoting McHardy’s contribution to the network’s blog a few weeks later11: “Talking to people at the meeting, I gained the impression that being outside institutional accountability is both difficult and what makes esCTS a productive and exciting initiative. Like esCTS, books are not easily accounted for, because they are not easily counted, ranked and evaluated. In addition, according to our workshop discussion, books offer greater freedom compared to the stricter editorial, disciplinary and formal requirements of articles. And even where books count, for tenure for example, they do not register on a scale, but as singular achievements, either published or not (perhaps with the exception of prizes and awards). If books and the esCTS network share that they are not easily accounted for, we can start to consider that books might be valuable because they evade evaluation.” The workshop was also a means to share textual practices to participants with non-textual backgrounds. Nerea Calvillo is an architect at C+arquitectos, researcher at Citizen Sense at Goldsmiths University of London and Design Critic in Architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She is currently working on feminist environmental monitoring, ontologies of the toxic and how to take air pollution into account from an architecture perspective. For the TEO goes to the kitchen12 workshop, convened by some of the members of TEO (Taller de Experimentación Objetual, or Objectcentered Experimentation Seminar) in Barcelona, there had been a call for ‘research objects’ (any sort of trace or material from a research endeavour) some people wanted to share and experiment upon. The proposal was for all attendants to take part in the cooking of a taylormade ‘Mediterranean diet’ seminar that might suit very particular research objects: avoiding ‘heavy fat’ conceptual seminars impossible to digest or ‘too messy’ cooking methods, as well as pointing at the crucial aspect of committing to good practices in seminar ’commensality,’ ensuring that all relevant human or nonhuman parties involved in research were sat at the table for dinner. The workshop resulted in a very funny creative marathon where the two seminar proposals were collectively developed. Last but not least, Diasporic Science13, promoted by Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado, sought to promote an online call for manifestos, putting forward STSers’ most purposive and imaginative skills to rethink academia and social science through statements. That is, inspired on the proliferation and creativity of both activist and artist manifestos14 and thinking from the manifesto as a particular accounting technique (a ship’s log), the idea was to think of possible routes into the future, refiguring diaspora into a movement of displacement of our very institutions and knowledge practices. The call resulted in proposals addressing the need for more collaboration with research counterparts or the transformation of our knowledge production through the use of other media (e.g. architecture, industrial design and illustration), or the EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 33 References: Corsín Jiménez, A. (2014). The right to infrastructure: A prototype for open source urbanism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(2), 342–362. vindication and exploration of non-hegemonic forms of research and knowing. Lury, C., & Wakeford, N. (Eds.). (2012). Inventive Methods: The happening of the social. London: Routledge. Musiani, F. (2013). Nains sans géants: Architecture décentralisée et services Internet. Paris: Presses de Mines. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011). Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85–106. Thévenot, L. (2009). Governing Life by Standards: A view from Engagements. Social Studies of Science, 39(5): 793-813. Collage: Publishing workshop in the Colegio Arzobispo Fonseca, by Julien McHardy. 3. Caring for a displacement in STS meeting formats? To conclude, we would like to highlight that despite their rather ‘entertaining’ features these different workshops and formats should not be seen as side aspects of the programme in Salamanca. Rather, they were nuclear moments where all the network’s participants gathered to think together. Indeed, they could be seen as interesting forms of producing a slight displacement of conventional formats, seeking to expand their prospects, their scope and to broaden their publics. Indeed, we believe that here lies the most interesting aspect of this 4th Spanish STS Network meeting: besides ‘investing’ (to borrow the figure from Thévenot, 2009) in more or less standardized and readymade conference forms, this meeting has signalled an interest in the promotion and exploration of alternative and more inventive methods (Lury & Wakeford, 2012) for the encounter of academics and non-academics, formats that might be helping us to experiment with other forms of meeting not only addressed at sharing papers, but also at stimulating or testing projects and ideas. Inventive formats that might be useful for the expansion of more caring forms addressing knowledge politics in STS, and which might be projecting a different meeting landscape for STS gatherings for the years to come… Many of these things remain yet unexplored and will certainly define the experimental agenda of the forthcoming 5th meeting–which will take place, as decided in the network’s assembly, in Madrid next June 2015– to keep challenging diasporas and encountering new displacements on the way. 34 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 Acknowledgements We would like to thank Adolfo Estalella, Antonio Montero, Carmen Romero, Daniel López, Guillem Palà, José Carlos Loredo, Liliana Oliveira, Lucía Liste, María G. Aguado, Pablo Santoro, Rubén Gómez Soriano, Santiago López García, Rebeca Ibáñez, and Vincenzo Pavone for taking care of our networked things preparing the call or organizing the meeting and its spaces, as well as commenting and making suggestions in the writing of this report. We would also like to thank Ignacio Farías for his careful help and comments in the process of drafting it. Notes 1 There have been other previous reports on the network, its philosophy and its previous meetings available in Vincenzo Pavone and Adolfo Estalella “«Making Visible the Invisible» STS Field in Spain”, EASST Review Vol 30(3), September 2011; Adolfo Estalella, Rebeca Ibañez and Vincenzo Pavone, “Prototyping an Academic Network. Three years of the Spanish Network for Science and Technology Studies”, EASST Review Vol 32(1), March 2013, this last article providing a more personal view on the network as an experiment in “prototyping” a new modality of academic association. The 3rd meeting was also reported by Pablo Santoro in the EASST Review 32 (4). 2 Instituto de Estudios de la Ciencia y la Tecnología, see http://ecyt.usal.es/ 3 See the final programme and abstracts here: http://redescts.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/4escts-programa-definitivo-finalprogramme/ 4 The first part of the title is an ironic reference to a popular quote from the 90’s by a Spanish flamenco and copla singer. See the CfP here: http://redescts.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/iv-annual-meeting-of-the-socialstudies-of-science-and-technology-network-red-escts-call-for-papers/ 5 ColaBoraBora have specialized in the reflection and production of creative and collaborative knowledge practices. “Nosotras las cobayas” http://www.colaborabora.org/2014/05/21/nosotras-las-cobayas/ 6 “No me chilles que no te veo” http://redescts.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/4escts-formatos-especiales-delencuentro-4-no-me-chilles-que-no-te-veo/ 7 Such as the CareReview process (a peer review process of all presentation proposals submitted to the meeting, seeking to collaboratively enhance the paper), part of the interest of the network’s members to develop more careful ‘recipees’ for the ‘cooking’ of the meetings, see: http://redescts.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/encuentros-de-la-red-escts-plantillade-cocina/ 8 “¿DEMO-qué? Un experimento dramatécnico de producciones democráticas” http://redescts.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/4escts-formatos-especiales-delencuentro-2-demo-que-experimento-drama-tecnico-de-produccionesdemocraticas/ 9 See http://redescts.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/4escts-formatos-especiales-delencuentro-3-publish-like-you-give-a-damn-careful-experiments-in-publishing/ 11 See http://matteringpress.org/ 12 See http://redescts.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/why-books-matter/ 13 TEO va a la cocina: http://redescts.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/4esctsformatos-especiales-del-encuentro-1-teo-va-a-la-cocina/ 14 Ciencia Diáspora: http://cienciadiaspora.wordpress.com/ 15 See http://backspace.com/notes/2009/07/design-manifestos.php EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 35 News from the Council Election of EASST Council Members 2015-2018 Closing date for voting is Monday 15th December (23.30 UK time). Statements from each of the candidates can be found on our web site at easst.net/wpcontent/uploads/2014/11/EASST-Council-Elections2014-candidates-statements.pdf. Please read this before voting. EASST Support for 2015 Activities The call for application that closed November 28, 2014 was a success. We received 18 applications from all over Europe, almost the double number of applications than for the last call in 2013. The country distribution of the applicants is the following: Denmark (2), Ireland, Belgium (2), Russia, the Netherlands (2), Germany, Greece, UK, Austria (3), Spain, Italia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The council has set a four members committee to evaluate the proposals and select the awardees. All applicants will be notified of the results in mid-January 2015. Calls for Papers. Current Deadlines Source: Eurograd Dec 19, 2014 Conference: Closing the Door on Globalization: Cultural Nationalism and Scientific Internationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lisbon, Portugal: July 15-18, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011532.html Jan 09, 2015 Conference: 6th European Conference on African Studies: Digital Technologies and Global Health in Africa. Paris, France: July 8-10, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014November/011549.html Jan 10, 2015 Conference Panel: Defining sustainability in the built environment, Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference. Trondheim, Norway: June 9-11, 2015. 36 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011560.html Jan 15, 2015 Workshop: Investigating Interdisciplinary Practice: Methodological Challenges. Helsinki, Finland: June 1517, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011528.html Jan 15, 2015 Workshop: Governing the Inorganic: Materials, Infrastructures and Care. Santiago, Chile: Sept 14-15, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011539.html Jan 15, 2015 Conference: Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies. Graz, Austria: May 11-12, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014November/011544.html Jan 30, 2015 Conference: The Future of Open Building. Zürich, Switzerland: Sept 09-11, 2015. Source: http://www.openbuilding2015.arch.ethz.ch/ Jan 30, 2015 Conference: ISCRAM 2015: Getting ready for the unexpected – IS for Crisis Management in a complex and uncertain world. Kristiansand, Norway: Apr 24-27, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-December/011569.html Jan 31, 2015 Journal: Call for Special Issue and Focus Section Proposals. Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal (IxD&A). Contact: info@mifav.unioma2.it; Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014October/011521.html Feb 01, 2015 Conference: Social Sciences and Medical Innovations: Doing Things together. Tomsk, Russia: May 21-23, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011538.html Feb 06, 2015 Conference: European Conference on ComputerSupported Cooperative Work – ECSCW. Oslo, Norway: Sept 19-23, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014November/011526.html Feb 09, 2015 Conference Panel: Hegemony or Resistance? On the Ambiguous Power of Communication. Annual Conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. Montreal, Canada: Aug 20-22, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014November/011556.html Mar 01, 2015 Conference: Experimenting with New Technologies in Society. Delft, Netherlands: Aug 20-22, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014November/011547.html EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 37 Mar 16, 2015 Conference: Encountering alcohol and other drugs. Lisbon, Portugal: Sept 16-18, 2015. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014November/011567.html Apr 01, 2015 Special Issue. Technology and Innovation Policies for Inclusive Development. African Journal for Science, Technology, Innovation and Development. Contact: astridszogs@gmail.com and MuchieM@tut.ac.za. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014October/011488.html Career Opportunities Source: Eurograd Dec 15, 2014 Post-doc and PhD positions in Labs “Energy & Society” and “Digital Media”. Munich Center for Technology in Society. Technical University of Munich. Contact: bewerbungenwissenschaftssoziologie@edu.tum.de. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011551.html Dec 15, 2014 Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Technology and Science Technology Studies. Arizona State University. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011530.html Jan 1, 2015 Post-doc for research-action project on "Social Innovation and Living Lab"SPIRAL Research Centre, University of Liège. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011531.html Jan 6, 2015 Permanent Research Position in Sociology of Science, Technology and Innovation at Centre for sociology of innovation (CSI) of Mines ParisTech. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014December/date.html Mar 01, 2015 Call for Proposals for visiting researchers by Brocher Foundation residencies 2016. Geneva, Switzerland. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011541.html 38 EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 New Publications Source: Eurograd Journal of Peer Production #5: Shared Machine Shops. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014October/011520.html Eä - Journal of Medical Humanities & Social Studies of Science and Technology Vol. 5 N° 1. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014October/011509.html African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, Special issues on "Informal Sector Innovations", Volume 6, Issue 3, 2014. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014November/011546.html Economic and Social Transformation: An Empirio -Theoretical Review of Indian Initiatives. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011552.html CJC, 2014, Vol.39 No.4: Bridging Communication and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/2014November/011559.html Journal of Scientometric Research (J Sci Res)* 2014 | May-August | Volume 3 | Issue 2. Source: http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurogradeasst.net/2014-November/011564.html The announcements below have originally appeared on the Eurograd email list. Messages are also included in EASST Review if they are still relevant at the time of publication. To receive messages as they are posted (and to be able to post to the list yourself) you need to join by sending an email to eurogradsubscribe(at)easst.net with subscribe in the Subject line. You can then post by sending an email to Eurograd(at)lists.easst.net. Please try to avoid attachments and instead add links. Unsubscribe or edit your subscription options at http://lists.easst.net/listinfo.cgi/eurograd-easst.net. It is also possible to view the EASST-Eurograd archive via http://lists.easst.net/pipermail/eurograd-easst.net/ If you have any questions or remarks, please do not hesitate to contact us at Eurograd-owner(at)lists.easst.net. Kind regards, Ingmar Lippert (Eurograd list manager, IT University, Copenhagen) EASST Review 2014 Volume 33, Number 4 39