Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Sjamme van de Voort
(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Evelien de Hoop (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Roundtable
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.
Accepted contributions
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.