Short Abstract

This roundtable offers a reflexive space for graduate students entering the EASST community to collectively examine their position within European academia through situated experiences of belonging, supervision, mobility, disciplinary translation, and doctoral futures.

Description

Between January and March 2026, Melina Antonakaki and Iñaki Goñi, serving as student representatives on the EASST Council, invited graduate students from across the EASST community to reflect on their experiences of becoming STS scholars. We proposed three starting points for collective reflection: access and belonging in graduate education; the intersections of training, research, and livelihood; and the supervisory cultures through which hierarchy, mentorship, accountability, and care are experienced. The contributions that emerged do not simply illustrate these themes but broaden the conversation through situated accounts of academic formation, disciplinary translation, mobility, mentorship, and doctoral futures.

‣ Vladislava Bobrova, Positioning in Between: Translating "STS" for "Sociology", examines conducting STS within Russia's only sociology programme specializing in the field, where disciplinary expectations require continual translation of STS concepts and methods for non-STS audiences.

‣ Katie Kung, Am I doing STS? From environmental humanities to environmental STS, explores arriving in STS through environmental humanities and professional experience, highlighting interdisciplinary translation, collaborations with conservation practitioners, and belonging across communities.

‣ Iñaki Goñi, STS Gone South: Crossing STS geographies during doctoral research, examines conceptual translation across Northern and Southern STS traditions through doctoral research on public participation in Latin America.

‣ Salimata Diallo, Entering European STS from Elsewhere: A Situated Account of Academic Socialization, Surprise, and Belonging, reflects on movement between Burkina Faso and France to examine hierarchy, academic socialization, and uneven conditions of belonging and recognition.

‣ Melpomeni Antonakaki, How I learned to inhabit STS through Monograph Development: An Inquiry into conditions of possibility for Heterodox Career Advice, revisits mentorship centred on monograph development, asking what forms of intellectual formation become possible under alternative supervisory cultures.

‣ Tanya Lee, Beyond the dissertation: Advocating for Inclusive PhD Trajectories, presents a PhD-led initiative advocating recognition of public engagement, teaching, policy work, and other scholarly contributions, asking how doctoral success might be redefined in interdisciplinary STS.