Short Abstract

This roundtable explores how historical research can act as an intervention—co-producing knowledge, re-narrating crises, and shaping plural futures across STS and sustainability studies.

Description

In their recent article Plural Pasts, Plural Futures (2025), Evelien de Hoop and Erik van der Vleuten issue a call for a more transnational, transformative, and transdisciplinary historiography—one that not only analyses but also intervenes in socio-material-ecological crises it studies. This call resonates with current debates at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and fields of history (environmental history, history of technology, etc.), where scholars are increasingly exploring how historical inquiry can contribute to making sustainable and just futures. Yet, despite growing enthusiasm for such interventionist approaches, few concrete models or sustainable formats have been developed for how they might be practised, taught, or institutionalised.

This roundtable takes up that challenge. Drawing on insights from curating the first (!) Making & Doing History of Technology section for the upcoming Tensions of Europe conference in Eindhoven (July 2026), and contributions to the EASST Making & Doing programme at this very conference, we would like to explore what it means to “make and do” history within Science and Technology Studies. Our premise is that historical knowledge production and travel can function as a situated intervention (Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015; van de Voort et al. forthcoming; de Hoop et al. forthcoming): a performative practice that co-produces knowledge, normativity, and imagination in collaboration with diverse publics.

Through short provocations and collective discussion, participants will consider:

• What does Making & Doing mean for scholars working in and with pasts, and how does it transform research, collaboration, and impact?

• Which temporalities—of past, present, and future—are enacted through these practices, and with what ethical and political effects?

• How can we design sustainable infrastructures for interventionist historiography across academic and public spaces?

The session bridges EASST’s “Making & Doing” program and current historiographical debates, inviting historians, artists, and STS scholars to collaboratively articulate practical repertoires for plural and transformative historical practice.