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- Convenors:
-
Sjamme van de Voort
(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Evelien de Hoop (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Location:
- D-17, 3.27b
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 9 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
Short Abstract
This participatory roundtable explores how historical research can intervene by co-producing knowledge, re-narrating crises and shaping plural futures. All attendees participate in small-group discussions to map and contrast initiatives in this space.
Description
In Plural Pasts, Plural Futures (2025), Evelien de Hoop and Erik van der Vleuten call for a transnational, transformative and transdisciplinary historiography that not only analyses but also intervenes in socio-material-ecological crises. Yet few models exist for how such approaches might be practised or institutionalised.
This roundtable takes up that challenge. Drawing on the first Making & Doing History of Technology section at Tensions of Europe in Eindhoven (July 2026) and contributions to EASST’s Making & Doing programme, it explores what it means to “make and do” history within STS. Its premise is that historical knowledge production and travel can function as situated interventions (Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015; van de Voort et al. forthcoming; de Hoop et al. forthcoming), co-producing knowledge, normativity and imagination with diverse publics.
The roundtable brings together Piotr Maron, Luis Toledo Machado, Rebecca Carlson, Huiying Ng, Mason Heberling, Yulim Song and Sung-Hoon Hong, alongside convenors Sjamme van de Voort and Evelien de Hoop. Rather than delivering presentations, contributors will briefly introduce concrete episodes from historical, scientific, artistic, curatorial and methodological practices. These will anchor three small-group rounds in which all attendees participate through contributions or attentive listening.
The discussion asks:
* What does working in and with pasts mean for Making & Doing scholars – or vice versa?
* Which temporalities – past, present and future – are enacted, and with what ethical and political effects?
* How can we design sustainable infrastructures for interventionist historiography across academic and public spaces?
Together, the groups will map and contrast initiatives and possibilities in this research space. The session thus connects and enriches EASST’s Making & Doing programme with historiographical debates and repertoires for plural, transformative historical practice.
Accepted contributions
Session 1 Wednesday 9 September, 2026, -Short abstract
This contribution presents the “Utopian Envisioning Lab”, a participatory methodology leveraging the history of utopias to co-create alternative futures. Drawing on a March 2026 pilot implementation, we explore empirical results and graphic recording generated through collective anticipation.
Long abstract
How can the history of utopias serve as a practical tool for co-creating futures? Answering the call for interventionist historiographies, this contribution presents the methodological framework and outcomes of the “Utopian Envisioning Labs”. This participatory device leverages the historical study of utopian experiences not merely as an object of specialised inquiry, but as an active resource for co-producing plural futures.
The lab structures this historical intervention in three distinct phases: revisiting past utopian practices, valuing present community-led resilience, and collaboratively imagining future scenarios. By translating utopian historical research into a hands-on methodology, we challenge default futures and democratize the imagination of alternatives.
Specifically, this intervention will share the execution and results of a pilot implementation conducted in Leeds in March 2026. We will detail the participatory dynamics employed and critically reflect on the empirical outcomes generated by the attendees (students, grassroots activists and scholars). A central focus will be the role of visual translation in this process, showcasing the graphic recording produced in real-time during the session. The visual map demonstrates how making and doing history can tangibly articulate desirable futures.
Ultimately, by bringing these results to the roundtable, this contribution seeks to discuss how integrating historical narratives with anticipatory practices offers a scalable infrastructure for researchers to engage with, and intervene in, present socio-ecological crises.
Short abstract
By tracing the print assemblages of European gay porn magazines published between 1970 and 2000, the paper demonstrates how making and doing across time could benefit from attending to the erotic as sites where HIV epidemic, public health, and queer politics are co-produced.
Long abstract
This paper engages with the panel's provocation to explore how transdisciplinary STS can "make and do" across time by attending to the past through a curated selection of gay erotic and pornographic magazines published in Poland and the United Kingdom between 1970 and 2000. I argue that these publications functioned not merely as sites of sexual fantasy but as active public health artifacts, particularly in relation to the AIDS crisis and sexual health. In doing so, I respond to the call for 'Queering STS' (Ledin, 2024), deploying queer studies and STS traditions to offer perspective to how we might attend to the past as negotiated through porn and erotic press.
Specifically, I engage with the 'Queering STS' proposition that brings forward desire, passion, pleasure, and affection as analytical categories, situating them within the contexts of the HIV epidemic, risk, public health, and state response. I approach the data generated by these publications not solely as textual but also as material—attending to how paper, ink, photographs, and circulation networks participated in the making of queer worlds across time. I am therefore particularly interested in the material dimensions that these texts enact: how they translate transnational biomedical knowledge into local contexts, and how they enact forms of sexual citizenship that operate across and against the East/West divide.