Paper short abstract:

The call for ethico-onto-epistemologies in STS research generates new ways of knowledge and reality production. Slow Science, Contact Zones and Intra Activism are here explored in order to shift into a different register where the performativity of research are articulated, sensed and questioned.

Paper long abstract:

The evolving complexity in global, digital, multicultural, diverse societies put increased pressure on viable ethico-onto-epistemologies. Alternative frameworks, theories and educations are needed in order to equip researchers with different strategies for coping with responsibilities for futures to come.

Slow Science is here suggested in response to our need of exploring other possibilities. Slow Science is an academic respond to the pressure to ''publish or perish, and allows questions of responsibility and accountability to appear. We need to build stronger ties with specific communities; slow ways of talking, thinking and exploring together. In Slow Science, new Contact Zones need to be enacted.

In Contact Zones we meet and share our concerns, we clash and grapple with each other. Within Contact Zones there are plentitudes of asymmetrical power relations, but there is, no one expertise that determines the conditions of particular concerns or responsibilities. Rather, collaboration across traditionally distinct disciplines and realms of expertise is imperative. Situated knowledge and partial perspectives rule.

Slow Science and Contact Zones are concepts with an ambition to approach the real differently in an intra-active manner. In intra-Activism close attention is paid to diffraction patterns, noticing differences in how we relate to each other and to the world. Faces, cuts, screens, marks on bodies and identities to name a few. Intra-Activism is an epistemic practice that at the same time is dispersed and connected; dispersed by transversal stories, connected by learning by-doing, making, thinking and seeing the real differently; always paying attention to power, differences and others.