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- Convenor:
-
Paula Schiefer
(Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Bringing together practical experiences and conceptual insights, this panel explores how STS can move from symbolic inclusion to genuine collaboration in environmental research, advancing debates on co-production, interdisciplinarity, and resilient futures.
Description
This panel explores how STS can move beyond token inclusion toward genuine, sustained collaboration in environmental research. Building resilient socio-technical futures requires reimagining and renegotiating how applied research operates across disciplinary boundaries. We invite scholars working at the intersections of STS, environmental science, and applied research to reflect on what meaningful collaboration looks like, and how it can be envisioned, practiced, and maintained over time.
In environmental and natural resource sectors, large impact-oriented research and funding programs increasingly call for interdisciplinarity. Yet, STS engagement within these initiatives often remains superficial or symbolic. How can we move from late-stage add-ons to early, substantive involvement? What forms of co-production allow STS researchers to contribute to and learn from projects in fields like sustainability, climate adaptation, and resource management while keeping a critical reflexivity and methodological integrity?
We especially welcome reflections from researchers navigating collaborations with natural scientists, engineers, policymakers, or industry partners in their day-to-day work. How can STS insights be communicated without dilution? Are epistemological compromises necessary, or can diverse research traditions co-exist and enrich one another?
Possible contributions may address:
• Empirical cases of collaboration between STS and environmental or technical disciplines
• Methods and practices for interdisciplinary co-production
• Negotiating values, politics, and power in sustainability and innovation projects
• The role of STS in shaping responsible and resilient futures within current research and funding landscapes
By integrating practical experiences with conceptual reflections, this panel contributes to ongoing STS debates on practical engagement in environmental domains, boundary-work and knowledge co-production across science, policy, and practice, and the collaborative imagining and construction of resilient socio-technical futures.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Amid rising European floods, flood risk research seeks collaboration, yet STS is often included late. Drawing on an Italian project on risk communication, combining a national survey and public consultation, the paper reflects on practising STS as genuine collaboration.
Paper long abstract
As extreme flood events intensify across Europe, flood risk management has become a key arena for applied, interdisciplinary and impact-oriented environmental research. Yet, despite growing calls for co-production and collaboration, STS expertise is often included late or instrumentally, limiting its capacity to shape methods and outcomes. This paper reflects on the possibilities and tensions of practising STS as genuine collaboration within applied flood risk research.
The contribution draws on the project Risk Communication and Engagement for Societal Resilience, funded through Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) programme, which brought together historians, social scientists, risk experts, public institutions and civic stakeholders to investigate flood risk communication and citizen preparedness. Empirically, the study combines a nationally representative survey (n = 2,500) with a deliberative public consultation involving 100 citizens, developed through sustained interaction with policy-oriented partners.
Using this case, the paper examines how STS perspectives on risk, trust and communication were negotiated within a research setting shaped by friction, translation and alignment between science communication experts, social scientists and applied research demands. Our paper argues that resilience-oriented environmental projects offer a concrete space for reimagining multi-stakeholder co-production, reflexive governance, and genuinely collaborative socio-technical futures.
Paper short abstract
Current research ethics and integrity frameworks often neglect environmental and climate ethics implications. The RE4GREEN project fills this gap by engaging 170+ stakeholders in eight Social Labs to explore these issues in R&I and support the transition to a more sustainable research ecosystem.
Paper long abstract
Research and innovation practices themselves have important environmental and climate ethics implications, which current research ethics and integrity frameworks often neglect. The RE4GREEN project aims to respond to this gap through a bottom-up, participatory engagement process.
Between May 2024 and December 2025, eight Social Labs (SLs) engaged over 170 stakeholders across Europe and beyond, representing diverse disciplines and regional perspectives, including contributions from Japan and South Africa. Each SL combined an initial round of interviews with three online and one in-person workshop.
The activities uncovered a wide range of environmental and climate ethics concerns connected to R&I. Ecological impacts, as well as justice and equity issues emerged as the most significant concerns. Resource intensity, technoeconomic constraints, and competing needs and priorities were also considered highly relevant. Issues such as gender dimension, resource use within research practices, and the impact of technologies on animals were seen as less pressing, yet still important especially within specific disciplines or regions.
The SLs examined the EU’s Do No Significant Harm principle, a key supporting instrument integrating sustainability into research funding mechanism. Participants highlighted difficulties to define “significant”, the broad definition of environmental objectives, the unclarity of individual project boundaries, and the principle’s limitations in capturing cumulative, indirect, or long-term harms.
Finally, through a world building exercise, the need for a major societal shift was articulated where sustainability becomes a guiding value for governance, research priorities, and evaluation systems, supported by stronger coordination across actors and more involvement of impacted communities and society at large.
Paper short abstract
The early engagement of STS in research on toxics helps make environmental and health knowledge actionable. Through interviews and transdisciplinary meetings, we traced how expertise, institutions, and local actors shape risk governance.
Paper long abstract
In many applied environmental research projects, STS scholars are involved only after questions and priorities have been defined, yet earlier and more substantive engagement is required to shape how knowledge becomes actionable in specific contexts.
The argument draws on collaborative research conducted within the Italian national project SINTESI, aimed at implementing Environment and Health Surveillance Systems in contaminated sites. We developed a model for collaborative knowledge production to analyse how environmental and health evidence, institutional practices, and local expertise interact in contaminated territories.
The model was applied to two sites: Casale Monferrato, affected by asbestos-related diseases, and the industrial area of Massa Carrara, characterised by long-term chemical contamination.
Materials include semi-structured interviews and transectorial meetings involving public health institutions, environmental agencies, civil society organisations, and local administrations. The research integrated epidemiological and environmental evidence with qualitative analysis of vulnerability, risk perception, and local knowledge.
In Casale, epidemiological research, environmental monitoring, legal action, and civic mobilization developed in relation to one another over time, fostering a locally grounded scientific culture supporting shared understandings of risk and responsibility.
In Massa and Carrara, limited convergence among local expertise and difficulties in sharing data and establishing research-policy connections produced more fragmented outcomes.
STS engagement traced these relations, contributing to environmental health while maintaining critical reflexivity. Attention to historical trajectories and institutional arrangements was central to this approach.
Paper short abstract
This paper uses the Infiniwing gear technology as a case study from the Horizon Europe project Infinifish to show how STS contributes to fisheries research, demonstrating how social feasibility and trajectories of technologies shape research agendas and innovation pathways.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws on experiences from the Horizon Europe project Infinifish to critically examine the conditions under which the integration of STS within applied fisheries research can become more meaningful. Infinifish (2025-2029) brings together scientists, the fishing sector, technology developers, and policymakers to address sustainability challenges in European fisheries through new technologies and innovations. Against this backdrop, the paper foregrounds the “Infiniwing” gear technology as an example through which to explore how STS can contribute to collaborative, impact-oriented research.
Using a technology as an empirical anchor, the paper shows how social and technical innovations in fisheries are shaped not only by technical performance, but by social feasibility and technological trajectories. While Horizon Europe strongly promotes interdisciplinarity, STS contributions within large fisheries projects often remain marginal. The paper reflects on our aims within Infinifish to translating STS insights into forms that are actionable for policymakers, science, and technology developers without losing (too much) critical depth. By situating Infiniwing within its broader social, historical, and regulatory context, the paper argues that STS offers distinctive value in applied fisheries research.
Paper short abstract
I reflect on my role as an STS PhD in a project developing a digital sustainability platform for Swiss farmers. Tracing shifting meanings of “project success”, I show how translation work and productive epistemic tensions enabled STS to move from unexpected inclusion toward actual collaboration.
Paper long abstract
In this contribution, I reflect on my engagement as an STS PhD student in the development and assessment of a digital advisory and assessment platform for Swiss organic farmers. Here I trace the evolving meaning of “project success” during 3.5 years of the inter- and transdisciplinary project that brings together backgrounds in Organic Agriculture, Agricultural Economics, Sustainability Assessment & Metrics, Extension Services, Science Communication, User Experience Design, Information Technology, Agricultural Practice and STS.
I show how integrating STS questions and methods into applied projects requires substantial translation and explanatory work by reflecting on how the team’s perception of my contributions evolved: From initial puzzlement, to “nice to have”, to recognition of their practical value and impact. My case study also illustrates that while having an STS perspective on the team fostered reflections on the project’s aims and methods, many of the uncovered tensions could not be fully resolved when the project proposal had not been designed with space to engage with them in mind. In other words, the projectification of (applied) research creates structural challenges that demand critical attention, especially when thinking about the better integration of STS.
Finally, I show how project members were able to hold frictions and unresolved questions in productive tension, enabling collaboration that maintains epistemic diversity while advancing evolving project goals. This capacity to embrace tension and negotiation hints at a concrete pathway for STS engagement to move beyond symbolic inclusion toward genuine collaboration, offering lessons for applied environmental projects.
Paper short abstract
We draw upon our experiences as STS researchers embedded in a large interdisciplinary project on biodiversity renewal to explore why accounts of collaboration continue to tell stories of struggle. We analyse and expand the idea of 'social infrastructures' to show ways forward
Paper long abstract
We draw upon experiences as STS researchers embedded in a large-scale, interdisciplinary research project on biodiversity renewal, to explore why accounts of collaboration continue to tell stories of struggle, distance and peripherality. Given the decades of policies and institutional imperatives for interdisciplinarity, such STS accounts raise important questions around the difficulty of changes to research practice. Strains have manifested in our project between what interdisciplinarity is supposed to 'look like' and the messy, intriguing, frustrating business of doing this work, while any practices directly supporting collaboration remain sidelined and patchily implemented.
In this paper we explore how to make visible some of the critical, but neglected and unvalued, activities and thus we expand on the concept of 'social infrastructures'. This approach gives a way to better understand the challenges of interdisciplinarity while enabling practices that scaffold collaboration to be re-evaluated into ‘what counts’ for effective research.
We make the case for social infrastructures in three ways. First, we show how research ‘support’ staff extend their formal roles as ‘infrastructure’. Second, we examine the balance across hybrid, ‘placed’ and ‘unplaced’ working that enables ‘distributed project work’ while concurrently shifting the places of collaborative knowledge production. Third, we ask who benefits from available materials and infrastructures, in and beyond the project.
We argue that the promise of ‘genuine’ inter-/trans-disciplinary collaboration to respond to multifaceted environmental crises cannot be met unless institutions, funders and researchers recognise the centrality of social infrastructures in co-constituting research collaborations.
Paper short abstract
STS research on remining in the German Ore Mountains often faces expectations to produce “acceptance” for technological projects. The presentation identifies three conflict levels in transdisciplinary settings and argues that reflecting on the limits of acceptance research can improve collaboration.
Paper long abstract
The notion that social science research on remining can constitute a “minefield” is by no means new (Luning 2012). In the German Ore Mountains, STS scientists are frequently expected, for example, to contribute to the societal acceptance of technology development projects in remining contexts rather than to conduct open-ended research. This presentation addresses both the self-perception and external perception of STS work, as well as actual and potential tensions within transdisciplinary research settings.
Drawing on resource-related projects in the German Ore Mountains, three interrelated levels of conflict are identified. First, technical and natural science project partners tend to perceive public debates on remining projects and (latent) ecological distributional conflicts primarily as obstacles rather than as opportunities for sustainability transformations (Scheidel et al. 2018). Second, this perspective often leads to the application of an instrumental and depoliticized notion of “acceptance,” intended to ostensibly prevent conflicts (Owen & Kemp 2012). Third, these dynamics can in turn generate tensions within transdisciplinary project teams and, in the extreme, lead to the de facto exclusion of STS scholars.
Identifying and reflecting on the limits of “acceptance research,” it is argued, may ultimately help make transdisciplinary collaborations more productive for all participants. This is particularly significant in light of current political discourses that frame the implementation of technology-centered projects as “urgent,” while at the same time increasingly linking the eligibility of research funding to transdisciplinary and application-oriented research designs.
Paper short abstract
Carbon negative economies have to cascade resources. We apply and investigate game based approaches to engage and learn with stakeholders. Continued interaction and workshops including games can stimulate reflexive knowledge creation and drive change.
Paper long abstract
Under the conditions of ambitions climate targets, carbon dioxide removal cannot (CDR) be avoided. A society employing CDR will be confronted with cascading its resources. Carbon negative cascades require various actors to work together in sequestering carbon, transporting and storing it. Conventionally, governments regulate with a mix of market mechanisms and bureaucracy.
We are exploring how to build sustainable and reflexive carbon cascades together with stakeholders. Our approaches include workshop formats, card games and video games, where we try to discuss pragmatic climate solutions as well als reflexive thinking. These methods aim at enhance stakeholder networks and build lasting coalitions to drive change.
Our paper builds on several national research projects as well as extra-academic work to build serious games.
Paper short abstract
Citizen science is often framed as democratizing environmental research. This paper examines it as a site of knowledge co-production, asking how STS can move beyond token inclusion to shape collaborative environmental research while maintaining critical reflexivity.
Paper long abstract
Citizen science initiatives have proliferated across environmental research, from biodiversity monitoring and pollution tracking to climate observation and landscape documentation. These projects are frequently framed as mechanisms for public engagement, collecting data at scale, and democratizing science. Yet citizen science also raises deeper questions about how knowledge and expertise is negotiated and produced across institutional boundaries, and how participation reshapes the governance of environmental knowledge.
This paper examines citizen science as a site where STS can move beyond symbolic inclusion toward meaningful collaboration within environmental research programs. Drawing on examples from several environmental monitoring initiatives, I explore how citizen science projects operate as socio-technical infrastructures that bring together scientists, policymakers, and volunteer citizens in the co-production of knowledge. While such collaborations promise more inclusive research practices, they also reveal tensions around data quality, authority, ownership, “citizenship”, and the distribution of epistemic labor.
I argue that STS has a crucial role to play not merely as an observer of citizen science but as an active participant in shaping how these collaborations are designed and sustained. STS approaches can illuminate how participatory research simultaneously expands and constrains forms of knowledge, reproducing hierarchies as it challenges them. By analyzing citizen science through the lens of co-production, boundary-work, and epistemic justice, the paper uses STS approaches to ask whether citizen science can serve as a model for deeper interdisciplinary collaboration—or whether it risks becoming another tokenistic form of participation within contemporary impact-driven research landscapes.