Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Liminal health activism reveals how trans individuals and allies transform institutional exclusion into dispersed practices of knowledge circulation and care, operating across healthcare's edges to enable trans-inclusive primary care beyond formal biomedical channels.

Paper long abstract

This paper develops the concept of liminal health activism to describe how marginalized communities transform exclusion from institutional healthcare into adaptive practices of knowledge making and change. Focusing on trans-inclusive primary care in Israel, the study examines how trans individuals and allies from within the healthcare system navigate asymmetries in medical authority while creating alternative spaces for learning, care, and collaboration. Operating at the edges of formal institutions, liminal health activism captures dispersed and pragmatic forms of engagement that circulate experiential knowledge across bureaucratic, educational, and technological boundaries within healthcare infrastructures.

Drawing on semi structured interviews with 39 healthcare professionals, trans community members, and activists, along with textual analysis and ethnographic observations, the paper traces how informal initiatives performed outside medical curricula facilitate new exchanges about trans health and expertise. These small scale interventions expose both the porousness and resilience of biomedical systems, revealing how dominant epistemologies selectively absorb activist knowledge while retaining core hierarchies of credibility.

By situating these practices within broader debates on knowledge infrastructures and institutional transformation, the paper highlights the contingent and non linear ways in which marginalized patient communities carve out spaces of participation from within healthcare's margins.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Sex robots are framed within polarized imaginaries of intimacy and sex work. Drawing on interviews with sex workers, this paper foregrounds marginalised knowledge to show how sociality and affective labour challenge dominant AI imaginaries and re-orient debates on intimate socio-technical futures.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary debates on sex robots unfold within what we describe as “robotic sex wars,” where competing utopian and dystopian imaginaries position these technologies as either emancipatory solutions- often framed as remedies to exploitation perceived as inherent to the sex industry- or as threats to intimacy and sexual labor. These polarized futures are largely shaped by technosolutionist and moral discourses and are typically articulated without the participation of those most directly implicated. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 16 sex workers, this paper centres marginalised knowledge to examine how futures of intimate technologies are contested and re-imagined from the margins.

Moving beyond assessments of technological risk or benefit, the analysis foregrounds sex workers’ accounts of intimacy and affective labour as central to understanding how sex robots are imagined to intersect with sexual economies. Participants challenged replacement narratives by emphasising the social, relational, and emotional dimensions of sexual encounters, which they described as fundamental to both their work and clients’ experiences. From this perspective, sex robots appear not as neutral substitutes or solutions, but as technologies whose imagined capacities clash with sex workers’ lived understandings of intimacy as embodied and relational.

Building on these insights, the paper argues that imagining socio-technical futures of intimate technologies requires attending to the plurality of actors involved in their development, circulation, and use. Excluding sex workers’ situated knowledge narrows the range of futures that can be envisioned and obscures care, relationality, and lived expertise as central to engagements with intimate technologies.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

To what extent can participatory design meaningfully address health inequalities and structural injustice and what additional methods or epistemic practices are required when PD alone reaches its limits? Explored through the co-development of an app for people with COPD living in low SEP.

Paper long abstract

Digital health technologies (DHTs) are widely promoted as promising vehicles for integrating AI into healthcare. Yet, their envisioned benefits often fail to reach those who could benefit the most, particularly people living in low socio economic positions. Within STS, participatory design (PD) has long been positioned as a key method for addressing justice issues, frequently celebrated as the “gold standard” for co-developing inclusive innovation together with patients. Yet PD is frequently applied in a pragmatic manner, with insufficient attention to the deeper structural injustices that shape both health and technology development.

Centring justice not as an ethical add on but as a condition of possibility for technological futures this paper asks: (1) To what extent can PD meaningfully address health inequalities and structural injustice? (2) What additional methods or epistemic practices are required when PD alone reaches its limits? These questions are explored through an empirical case study of the DACIL project, which aims to develop an inclusive wearable device for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) living in low socio economic circumstances in the Netherlands.

Building on participatory co-design activities with patients, clinicians, technologists, and interdisciplinary researchers and supplemented by reflexive monitoring in action, I present data on: (a) how developers and patients envision desirable, situated, and just digital health futures; and (b) which attempts to counter structural injustice succeeded and which fell short. I conclude by outlining implications for the development of AI based DHTs that enable the articulation and realisation of minoritised and just technological futures.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Using a double vision care lens with coproduction, I follow environmental care from the individual, to the collective, towards the wider national and corporate institutions. The conduit of this study is additive manufacturing of concrete, an innovation researched and developed in Germany and Chile.

Paper long abstract

The construction industry is one of the largest contributors to climate change: through the creation of steel and cement, it accounts for 37 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions (UNEP, 2023:1; Churkina et al., 2020). This figure follows the industry, demanding attention; the industry response so far has been, reduce CO2 emissions with innovative technologies. One of those innovations is additive manufacturing (3D printing) of concrete, the focal technology of this research. CO2 reduction as environmental care has become a central ambition of both industry and national academic research agendas, as well as a care-oriented motivation for researchers and workers of this printed innovation; its pluriform adaptation indicates its coproduction within these social contexts. With the double vision of care (Haraway, 1988; Martin et al., 2015; Lindén and Lydahl, 2021), I explore who cares and how, the inclusions and exclusions, and their impact. At this point, I found that environmental care – as it appears in this case – is both personal and political and its application within the webs of power can be explained through the lens of coproduction (Jasanoff, 2004; Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff, 2017). These analytical views allow me to see care practiced and follow how it is then coproduced within the wider scale of both the construction and national scales in Germany and Chile. Join me in exploring whether this care can exist in the harsh conditions that is the construction industry, or whether it is another attempt to plant a tree where it cannot survive.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

An ethnography of Swiss energy modelling shows how inter‑ and transdisciplinary integration becomes a site of political struggle between dominant and reflexive epistemologies. Challenging pragmatism and feasibility discourses is necessary to expand imagined energy futures.

Paper long abstract

Energy research and modelling play a crucial role at the interface of science and policymaking. While modelers remain interested in influencing the course of the energy transition policy, they also remain dependent on the policy agendas set by public administrations and implemented through grant schemes and research funding. In Switzerland, the increasing pressure for delivering solution-oriented energy research goes hand in hand with state support for inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches. These approaches are expected to increase epistemic diversity within energy research by integrating knowledge and methodologies from Social Sciences and Humanities and incorporating stakeholders’ perspectives.

This presentation is based on multi-sited ethnography done across several research teams in Switzerland, aimed at understanding practices and motivations for collaboration among diverse research teams, researchers’ perceptions of integration efforts, and the discourses that shape inter- and transdisciplinary work. Through Gramscian theoretical lenses, I investigate both the dominant, taken-for-granted epistemological assumptions among modelers and researchers that reinforce political consensus, as well as the reflexive, counter-hegemonic ideas that seek to contest and expand the range of energy alternatives.

I show how the discussion about the barriers to integration is connected with the political dimensions of research epistemologies. While certain epistemologies remain dominant and are explicitly encouraged by policymakers, more reflexive and critical ones struggle to gain traction. Discourses of ‘pragmatism’ and ‘feasibility’ marginalize these alternative perspectives and limit the imagination of possible energy futures. I conclude by presenting a set of recommendations for how reflexivity can be more effectively incorporated into energy research projects.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

What norms for collective data stewardship can support community-led transitional justice today? This paper reflects on practical and theoretical insights from an ongoing collaboration with grassroots actors among Syria’s families of the disappeared.

Paper long abstract

Data on forced disappearance is at the core of transitional justice in Syria. In the absence of state action, scholarly and media observers look to UN mechanisms and foreign NGOs to manage technical infrastructures for Syria’s more than 100,000 disappeared people. Practically, these extractivist approaches have authorized the removal of evidence from Syria and weakened public trust. Conceptually, they sever transitional justice from technology. Yet the question of who stores, curates, and accesses testimonial data, and with what infrastructures, is critical to achieving not only legal, but also social and epistemic resolutions to years of war (Fricker 2007).

This paper describes an ongoing collaboration for technical futures with grassroots actors in Syria: Truth Tents, led by families of the disappeared. A decentralized movement that collects data from, and gives voice to, marginalized populations, the Truth Tents are typically read as a memory project (Bassisseh et al. 2025). Our collaboration recognizes them as local knowledge stewards who are advancing a community-led view of transitional justice. The paper presents our development of norms for data commons with actors who, underresourced, store data on chat platforms that expose them to risks of loss and surveillance (Zuboff 2019, Bratton 2016). Our collaboration finds that testimonial data in Syria concerns specific individuals but equally constitutes shared bodies of social knowledge. This view invites collective approaches to stewardship, beyond top-down regulations or data protection models. I conclude that data commons can support marginalized grassroots actors procedurally while enacting demands for transitional justice as an epistemic transformation.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This contribution examines the European Digital Identity Wallet from the perspective of undocumented migrants. It shows how overlooked documentation practices reveal blind spots in emerging system architectures and assumptions about identity and access.

Paper long abstract

The European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) is being developed as a digital identification framework across the European Union. While its architecture is negotiated in regulatory and technical arenas, the everyday lifeworlds of those governed through it remain largely absent from these discussions.

This contribution reflects on the methodological implications of studying such a process from the perspective of groups whose experiences are rarely represented in design arenas. In our research, we focus in particular on undocumented migrant communities. Their documentation practices, legal statuses and digital devise use often do not align with the implicit assumptions embedded in emerging system architectures. Yet these perspectives are seldom known or integrated into development processes.

We argue that this absence is not merely a question of participation but of epistemic orientation. When everyday conditions, documents and constraints of certain populations are insufficiently understood, infrastructures risk stabilising narrow assumptions about identity, access and legitimacy. Attending to such overlooked perspectives therefore becomes a methodological strategy: not to speak on behalf of these groups, but to examine how their situations expose blind spots in infrastructural design.

Our approach combines document analysis, expert interviews, field observation and participatory formats such as make-a-thons. These formats allow us to surface alternative use cases, highlight mismatches between system assumptions and realities, and analyse how some concerns become articulable while others remain difficult to integrate.

By foregrounding perspectives typically peripheral to institutional development arenas, this contribution proposes a way of studying socio-technical innovation that treats epistemic inclusion as central to infrastructural formation.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This talk examines how imaginaries of healthcare robotics are produced, negotiated, and contested across public policy, engineering research, and nursing practice, and how the inclusion of marginalized perspectives can open possibilities for more just and care-centered sociotechnical futures.

Paper long abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are increasingly promoted as solutions to pressing challenges in healthcare, from workforce shortages to demographic change. These narratives often rely on technosolutionist imaginaries that marginalize perspectives from those most affected by imagined technological interventions, particularly healthcare workers expected to integrate new technologies into everyday care practices.

The analysis draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of AI-enabled healthcare robotics in Germany, combining policy document analysis, ethnographic fieldwork within a robotics research initiative, and interviews and focus groups with nursing professionals. While policymakers and engineers largely converge around imaginaries that frame robotics as “assistive” technologies promising efficiency and relief for care workers, nursing professionals articulate more critical and situated perspectives – which, however, currently remain largely excluded from shaping collective imagination and decision-making. When given the opportunity, nursing professionals mobilize robotics as a lens to surface long-standing concerns about workload, professional autonomy, and the relational dimensions of care.

Building on feminist STS scholarship on care, I develop the concept of caring imaginaries – future visions that foreground relationality, situated knowledge, and the ethical commitments embedded in care practices. I discuss how caring imaginaries can be fostered through integrative “embedded ethics and social science” research and through participatory methods such as LEGO® Serious Play®. By centering nursing perspectives as sites of critical imagination, the talk shows how marginalized actors can reframe technological futures and contribute to imagining more just, relational, and context-sensitive forms of innovation.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This contribution shows how participatory design mobilizes marginalized perspectives in order to imagine alternative socio-technical futures against digital gender-based violence. The resulting prototype foregrounds justice, care, and non-extractive infrastructures against dominant Big Tech logics.

Paper long abstract

Digital gender-based violence has expanded across online environments and services, becoming embedded in everyday digital practices and sociotechnical infrastructures (Hall et al. 2022). Drawing on STS and feminist technoscience, this contribution starts from the premise that technologies are being shaped by, and shape, power relations (Benjamin 2023), enabling both harm and possibilities for resistance (Schwartz and Neff 2019).

This contribution presents results from the project Gendering Internet. Violence, Resilience, Empowerment in Digital Spaces (GIVRE), funded by Next Generation EU. We focus on two participatory design workshops with activists and anti-violence practitioners. Through a counterfactual scripting methodology (Huybrechts & Hendriks 2016) and hands-on activities, they created a prototype that challenged the logics and ideologies embedded in Big Tech platforms by questioning: what digital technologies might exist today if they had been developed around principles of gender justice, care, and collective well-being rather than proprietary and profit-driven logics?

Conceptualizing digital violence as part of a broader continuum of gendered and structural harms in sociotechnical systems (Eubanks 2018), the workshops sought to surface situated knowledge, practices of resistance, and alternative technological imaginaries emerging from marginalized perspectives. They revealed a demand for technologies that act as spaces of care, relation, and self-determination. These demands were translated into design choices and micro-interactions in the interactive prototype. The resulting artefact illustrates design suggestions for avoiding profiling or identity requirements, conceiving of community as a relational technology, while creating an infrastructure designed to foster mutual recognition rather than data extraction.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines ongoing debates over race-based data in clinical settings in Canada, with a focus on health equity and the uses of medical AI. It demonstrates how justice-focused legislation can play a role in addressing health inequities, making anti-racist policy, and enacting data justice.

Paper long abstract

Working to address racial bias in algorithms used in clinical settings – including diagnostic tools that may reproduce forms of systemic racism – advocates of health equity in Canada are calling for the use of datasets that are representative of the Canadian population in the training of algorithms used in an increasingly AI-integrated health care system. The collection of data on race and ethnicity in clinical settings began to take place in Canada in 2020, prompted by the deepening of existing race-based health inequities during the COVID-19 pandemic. At this time, calls for the collection of race-based data were made by health care practitioners and leaders of racialized communities, stating that “we cannot address what we cannot measure.” Without disaggregated data, it was argued, it is impossible to provide evidence of inequities that can prompt anti-racist policy and equitable clinical care. Since 2020, provinces and territories across Canada have begun to collect race-based data, along with data on languages spoken. However, these data practices remain contested, in flux, and regionally-distinct from one another, leading to significant gaps and inconsistencies in the “processing” and analysis of race-based data to make statistics at the level of the federal government to inform policymaking and clinical care. My paper discusses how race-based data collection practices in Canada are altered by Ontario’s Anti-Racism Act and British Columbia’s Anti-Racism Data Act, examining how these Acts’ placement of justice as a guidepost can play a role in addressing health inequities and enacting a form of data justice.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Developing justice-centred futures requires the inclusion of vulnerable minoritised voices. Grounded on three case studies on collaborative innovation in contexts of migration, violence, and socioeconomic deprivation, this paper explores the multi-level challenges for their meaningful inclusion.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines justice-centred approaches to re-make sociotechnical futures through the lens of Creary’s ‘bounded justice’ framework (2021): justice-oriented public health policies and interventions are “bounded” by socio-historical constraints compromising the meaningful inclusion of the minoritised populations they are aimed to benefit. We build on the concept of ‘technical democracy’ (Callon et al. 2009) and on the literature of democracy as a tool for equity to argue that the direct (rather than representative) involvement of underserved groups to co-design and co-lead sociotechnical futures is essential to the equitable care of their needs and to the pursuit of justice. We specifically focus on the inclusion of vulnerable minoritised voices for justice-oriented sociotechnical innovation and policies: we explore potential strategies to give them voice, and we analyse the multi-level barriers that compromise their meaningful inclusion. We discuss the post-traumatic, psychosocial and socio-historical barriers that prevents them to seek, or even accept invitations for, collaborative innovation; as well as the upstream barriers to even access and invite them in the first place, such as gatekeepers’ permission and collaboration and institutional ethical and insurance approval. In particular, we build on the barriers we have encountered to include vulnerable, minoritised voices across three research case studies aimed to promote justice-centred health futures: homeless people in Ireland, socioeconomically deprived migrant people in Italy, and conflict-related internally displaced women exposed to gender-based violence in Ethiopia. We conclude by discussing the limits of current approaches to achieve the challenging goal to protect vulnerable populations without silencing them.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines a case study on cruise ship pollution in northern Marseille. It shows that while citizen sensing helps document environmental pollution, alliances with social movements are crucial to bring it onto the public agenda and to question adopted techno-solutions.

Paper long abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the cruise industry suddenly suspended its operations worldwide, making the port of Marseille one of the key Mediterranean harbours for repatriating cruise passengers. While most ships made only a quick stop at the cruise terminals located in the northern districts of Marseille, some stayed for extended periods. At one point, fourteen cruise ships were moored there, adding to the pre-existing social and environmental violence in this area. Once moored, the ships’ engines are connected to heavy fuel oil generators that operate 24 hours a day to supply the ships with power and maintain onboard operations.

As the number of cruise ships docked in the port increased, concerns over air pollution grew among residents and environmental activists from Extinction Rebellion and Alternatiba. They quickly began monitoring air quality in their neighbourhoods using PurpleAir sensors. Based on thirty-three semi-structured interviews and observational fieldwork, this paper examines how citizen sensing (Gabrys, 2022) and social movements (Ottinger, 2016) function as complementary mechanisms that document pollution problems and make them visible in the public arena. It argues that alliances between residents and the “Stop Cruises” social movement were crucial in bringing the environmental violence (Bécot and Le Naour, 2023) onto the public agenda and in questioning the techno-solutions implemented within environmental transition politics, such as shore-power connections for ships or scrubbers (ship exhaust gas cleaning devices). This paper suggests that these solutions only partially address pollution problems and tend to displace and transform environmental health outcomes without challenging industrial capitalism.