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- Convenors:
-
Melpomeni Antonakaki
(Technical University of Munich)
Iñaki Goñi (University of Edinburgh)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract
This Roundtable opens a reflexive space for Master's & PhD students to examine how access, mobility, and supervision shape their paths in STS. We seek to foreground student voices, so roundtable speakers must be graduate students at the time of proposing an abstract via the conference cfp
Description
Graduate students across Europe navigate workplace and fieldwork environments that are complex and uneven. Access to STS+ programs varies widely: students from regions where STS is underrepresented or not institutionally established face additional barriers, as do those transitioning from natural sciences or engineering. Entry into programs (sometimes linked to employment; other times not at all!), as well as researcher autonomy and supervision are shaped by institutional hierarchies, financial constraints and informal networks. Amid changing academic infrastructures and post-pandemic mobility regimes, students increasingly rely on peer networks, social media, and mailing lists to track news and opportunities. These practices reflect new forms of student agency, where collective accountability meets individual planning.
"Positioning the Academic Track" offers a reflexive space for graduate students joining EASST to collectively examine their position within European academia:
1. Accessing the Academic Track
Access to MA and doctoral programs across Europe is configured through linguistic, financial, cultural, and disciplinary parameters. Entry points often depend on informal networks and local academic traditions. We invite reflections that trace the challenges and creative strategies that shape access and belonging in graduate STS education.
2. Mobility and Exchange – or, how training, research and livelihood intersect!
Mobility is often celebrated as a hallmark of the European project, yet it also exposes the uneven conditions under which students live, work, and learn. We welcome contributions that examine how infrastructures of movement and exchange shape belonging, identity, and visibility within networks, and how students navigate or reimagine said conditions through everyday practice, collaboration or activism.
3. Supervision Assemblages
Supervision formally structures qualification and credit, but in practice emerges through assemblages of people, institutions, and affects that shape scholarly development and well-being. We invite contributions that explore how diverse supervision models across Europe cultivate (or challenge) hierarchy, mentorship, accountability or care, and how communities of scholarly support can strengthen both academic and personal flourishing.
Accepted contributions
Short abstract
Years ago, a mentor challenged me to discern among STS theoretical problems and consider which would shape my PhD book. In times when STS is grappling with its publishing culture, I reflect on this formative moment and discuss it in relation to prevalent academic incentives & conventional advice.
Long abstract
One year into my PhD and upon return from fieldwork, I received the gift of instruction into STS monograph development. My mentor outlined the rough contour of a guiding principle for identifying the theoretical and analytical priorities I would ultimately pursue, and suggested ways to embed them within a coherent structure supported by compelling narrative development. This came in response to my excitement over stories from the field and material collection as candidate topics for different publications. In turn, he asked: how are these different from one another? How do you know that they are not speaking to the same theoretical problem, and therefore belong in the same chapter, or that an either/or choice must be made between them? I did not know. This moment set me on a path of learning to discern among theoretical problems in STS, something that shaped my intellectual development since.
The dominant orientation facing researchers today is one in which the expectation is to publish articles early and often. The instruction I received instead assumed the monograph as a central intellectual form and treated the PhD as a period for learning to identify, differentiate, and innovate STS theoretical problems. In this contribution, I start from this moment of Heterodox Career Advice and consider what it meant to follow it and what it meant to defend it. Are there conditions under which such forms of guidance, running counter to prevalent academic incentives, and the resulting intellectual formations, become available and viable options within STS training?
Short abstract
This presentation reflects on the challenges of conducting STS doctoral research across Northern and Southern epistemologies. Drawing on my research on public participation in Latin America, I highlight the hard work of translating across the many STSs.
Long abstract
Calls to “go South” in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have emphasised the need to pluralise the field’s conceptual genealogies and empirical sites. Yet the practical experience of conducting doctoral research across Northern and Southern STS traditions remains under-discussed. This presentation reflects on the methodological and intellectual challenges of undertaking research that moves between these different epistemic and geopolitical contexts.
Drawing on my doctoral research on public participation with technoscience in Latin America, I explore how dominant STS framings (historically rooted in European and North American debates) continue to shape how researchers approach cases from the Global South. This creates a tension for doctoral researchers: how to engage with established theoretical repertoires while remaining attentive to alternative intellectual traditions, historical trajectories, and political imaginaries emerging elsewhere? This 'double vision' is particularly important when ‘elsewhere’ is actually ‘home’.
Rather than just blankly stating that we need ‘decolonial’ STS, I examine what happens when different STS traditions encounter one another within the research process itself. In doing so, I reflect on issues of conceptual translation, the material limitations of articles, and the institutional pressures shaping doctoral scholarship. My argument is that conducting research across multiple STS geographies is hard work, especially because our European curricula and our ‘canons’ still have limited awareness of social theories outside ‘the North’.
Short abstract
Drawing on my trajectory between Burkina Faso and France, I reflect on entering European STS through questions of hierarchy, student selection, and belonging, and on how these reveal unequal North/South conditions of academic recognition.
Long abstract
I would like to contribute to this roundtable by reflecting on what it means to enter French and European STS from a trajectory shaped between Burkina Faso and France. This idea came back to me while rereading journals and notebooks I kept during my early studies and in the years following my move to France. They captured my surprise at the differences in academic life: how hierarchy is expressed in relations between peers and supervisors, how student selection often relies on social and economic capital in more subtle ways, and how one learns, over time, to internalize these codes. I would also like to briefly connect this to a previous essay I wrote on why decoloniality seems more visible in STS teaching and discussion in France than in Burkina Faso. Taken together, these reflections offer a situated account of academic socialization and of how belonging, legitimacy, and intellectual agendas are unevenly shaped across North/South academic spaces.