Short Abstract:

The workshop invites participants to use the conference as an empirical site to reflect on the roles STS researchers play and the figures they play with. It creates a collective 'pop-up inventory' - a material display at the conference - to provoke debates about the contemporary STS researcher. Pre-registration via here: https://goo.gl/forms/lPdpWIPlA0dwFQW23

Long Abstract:

Recent evocations of a 'collaborative turn' (Farías 2016) describe a growing community of STS researchers who choose 'impure entanglement' over 'enlightened distance' (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), and experiment with different forms of 'figuring together' (Suchman 2012) producing mutual learning and caring relations. Is this a repetition of old issues concerning nomothetic x idiosyncratic, objective x subjective, descriptive x emancipatory methods and agenda in social sciences? What can present engagements of STS with design, arts, etc., bring to STS and vice versa? Do we need to consider issues of reciprocity? And is this a typical inter/cross/trans/multi disciplinarity debate? No! STS took a long time to emancipate itself from philosophy of science, history of science, and even sociology to become this hybrid mess.

This workshop takes current developments as occasion to discuss potential ways of re-configuring and re-inventing the roles and responsibilities of STS researchers, reflecting on the practices, the reasons and methods why people choose a particular role (e.g. the consultant) or play with a specific figure (such as the idiot or the partisan).

This workshop consists of two parts. At the beginning of the conference, participants meet to share their experience and knowledge of the topic. Afterwards, workshop participants will use the conference as an empirical site to explore and collect prominent, persistent, hidden, forbidden, and desired forms of being an STS researcher and initiate a collective 'pop-up inventory' at the conference venue.

Pre-registration via here: https://goo.gl/forms/lPdpWIPlA0dwFQW23