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Paper short abstract

The 2019 European Green Deal aimed to phase out fossil fuels. Yet instead new incentives soon expanded financial support for natural gas, thus making its role more resilient. The EU justified this support through a techno-market fix, based on sociotechnical-spatial imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

The term ‘resilience’ has connoted more environmentally sustainable futures, as in the phrase ‘socio-ecological resilience’, yet it can mean the opposite. For several years, renewable energy has been promoted as a resilient means to transition beyond fossil fuels. The 2019 European Green Deal aimed ‘to create a cleaner, healthier and climate-neutral Europe’, especially by phasing out fossil fuels. European countries were anyway producing only 10% of their natural gas usage, while importing the rest as Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). Within a few years, however, EU policy was subsidising new infrastructure to perpetuate natural gas production and LNG imports. To justify this support, the EU rebranded natural gas as a ‘transition fuel’: Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) would decarbonise it, while also creating new value chains for CCS technology. ‘clean hydrogen’ and even CO2. This techno-market fix initially focused on industrial sectors that were ‘hard-to-abate’. but expanded more generally to natural gas. EU policy financed new incentives for ‘hydrogen-ready’ gas pipelines, called valleys or connectors; such metaphors imply linking energy, knowledge and people for their mutual benefit. As an even better future, this infrastructure would facilitate an eventual shift towards hydrolysing water to produce zero-carbon hydrogen from renewable energy, imagined as abundantly available. Moreover, Germany’s investments have sought to site ‘clean hydrogen’ production in North Africa, drawing on its solar energy production, as an economic development model. In all those ways, sociotechnical-spatial imaginaries have helped to make natural gas a more resilient energy supply for Europe, thus perpetuationg carbon emissions.

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We present a media-led fabricated scandal over the Kufiya to expose the "Palestine Exception." Contrasting transactional "partnerships" with the dehumanization of research partners during an ongoing genocide, we ask: what is academic freedom when institutions prioritize reputation over humanity?

Paper long abstract

This case-based presentation examines the "Palestine exception" through the experiences of two researchers who faced institutional and media backlash for wearing a kufiya at a university event. We move beyond "objective" distance to examine how a gesture of solidarity was transformed by media framing into a manufactured "scandal," activating repressive institutional mechanisms.

A central tension is the university’s decade-long collaboration with Palestinian institutions. We argue that this reveals "extractive commodification." Palestinian partners are valued only for "ranking points" and funding. However, when researchers demonstrate visible solidarity in times of a genocide, the institution retracts its collaborative stance, opting instead for interrogation and selective "neutrality," which dehumanizes the very partners it claims to value. The university’s simultaneous, explicit support for Ukraine highlights this double standard.

We emphasize the profound irony that, while our current high-impact research focuses on censorship and content moderation regarding Palestine/Israel, we experienced these mechanisms firsthand offline. This raises urgent questions: What does "academic freedom" entail? Where are its boundaries drawn, and by whom? The human cost of these "drawn lines" is documented through our account of a lawsuit and the professional burnout that led to a researcher’s resignation.

We conclude with this failure (or revelation?) against the backdrop of a scholasticide in Gaza. While our Palestinian consortium partners are being physically destroyed, the institution’s primary concern remains the "content moderation" of its staff’s. We ask: is academia truly a space for critical discourse, or is "freedom" merely a placeholder retracted the moment the status quo is challenged?

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Energy communities are local initiatives to produce, consume, and manage renewable energy. Popularly discussed in Sweden, but rarely implemented, they reveal a paradox through how stakeholders mobilise the concept of resilience both to support and oppose them.

Paper long abstract

Energy communities (EC) are new actors in the Swedish centralised energy system. Defined as local initiatives to produce, share, and manage renewable energy, ECs have been met with enthusiasm from the public, and resistance from large actors. This situation has been described in academic and public debates as surprising, given that the democratic ideals and renewable transition upon which ECs are built upon, align with core Swedish societal values.

In this work we examine how ECs are framed in Swedish media, with a focus towards the socio-technical futures their potential establishing enact. As Swedish ECs remain in their infancy, media coverage plays an important role in shaping public understandings. We draw on framing analysis (Goffman, 1986), showing that the national coverage of ECs reveals a paradox centred on the concept of resilience. Media narratives often portray ECs as desirable actors which can strengthen the energy system’s resilience through decentralisation, flexibility, and local participation. However, resilience is also mobilised in opposing narratives in which decentralised energy production undermines the system’s stability.

Resilience becomes a frame through which competing visions of the future energy system are articulated, the illustrated debates indicating a struggle for a hegemonic meaning of resilience in the specific context of the renewable energy transition. Therefore, there is an embedded temporal aspect in the way ECs are presented as an unreached potential of initiatives that never come to fruition. This work highlights how imagined socio-technical futures of resilience can simultaneously promote and constrain the emergence of new energy actors.

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Paper short abstract

How is the Palestine Exception encoded in platform infrastructures? Drawing on discourse analysis and research on automated moderation, I introduce 'infrastructural realization' to show how algorithmic systems instantiate geopolitical imaginaries, foreclosing pro-Palestinian speech.

Paper long abstract

The systematic suppression of pro-Palestinian speech on major social media platforms represents a technologically mediated extension of the Palestine Exception into algorithmic governance — the same logic that blocks legal and decolonial recourse now encoded in the infrastructures that govern global speech. This paper draws on two empirical bodies of work: collaborative research on public discourse surrounding the moderation of Palestine-related speech (El Mimouni et al., 2024; Abokhodair et al., 2024), and research on automated moderation infrastructures, including institutional documentation and interview material with platform governance actors.

Conceptually, I argue that the STS notion of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) does not sufficiently account for infrastructural asymmetry - the uneven capacity of actors to materialize imaginaries within operational systems. I introduce infrastructural realization to distinguish imaginaries embedded in code, taxonomies, and automated decision architectures from those that remain discursive. Publics generate counter-imaginaries contesting moderation regimes, but lack the material capacity to instantiate alternative epistemic orders.

From a decolonial perspective, this asymmetry is not incidental. It reflects hierarchies of technological sovereignty in which US platform infrastructure operationalizes particular geopolitical imaginaries as technical fact. The Palestine Exception is thereby not only imposed through liberal discourses of neutrality or overt repression, but encoded in the automated architectures governing global speech. Foregrounding infrastructural realization contributes to STS debates on epistemic authority, showing that the legitimacy of competing claims depends on differential access to the material means of world-making.

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Paper short abstract

This presentation develops digital resilience as a sensitizing concept for STS analyses of contemporary digitalisation. The aim is to suggest an approach for critical studies of how societies can shape digital futures in ways that are more socially and ecologically viable.

Paper long abstract

While digital resilience is used in policy debates and scholarship on generative AI—typically to denote the public’s capacity to withstand disinformation—arguably, it has broader potential. By comparing digital resilience to related concepts such as democratic resilience and digital sovereignty, I want to introduce digital resilience as sensitizing concept for a research agenda on 'democratically sustainable' digitalisation. While STS scholarship on digitalisation has thoroughly documented dependencies and problems, less is known about how to get more independent and how resistance can succeed. Such investigations could foreground not only political and epistemic dynamics but also ecological conditions and constraints.

I propose to distinguish between two strands of digital resilience: resistance and endurance. First, digital resilience as resistance can zero in on every day and collective practices aimed at withdrawing from digital infrastructures. Examples include digital disconnection in daily life, as well as organized mobilizations such as parental activism against school digitalisation. Examining how such actions catch on, opens analytical space for understanding how citizens negotiate and shape the trajectories of digitalisation.

Second, digital resilience as endurance concerns the capacity of democratic institutions to maintain despite structural pressures linked to tech monopolies. Here, resilience becomes a matter of politics; topics can encompass the distribution of power in data center politics or the dominance of techno-optimistic sociotechnical imaginaries in policymaking. This perspective invites inquiry into what forms of knowledge, critique, and institutional design are required to maintain democratic technology development and use amid digital dependencies, and how to achieve greater independence.

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Paper short abstract

Sector coupling is considered a crucial component for building resilient energy systems. Our analysis examines the hidden work that enables systems to couple at organizational boundaries as well as the emerging questions in terms of knowledge, power relations and ethical doings.

Paper long abstract

Energy transition is on the top of the political and research agenda to meet the climate objectives and today it has become a crucial geopolitical factor to secure energy capacity in an unstable world. Electrification based on renewable energies is at the core of the transformations towards a fossil free society. In this framework the integration and interoperability of adaptable systems – for instance energy-transports or energy-logistics - are considered a key factor for resilient electrified systems. However, the flexibility and capacity of systems to be integrated cannot be taken for granted. This raises critical questions related to knowledge creation at organizational boundaries, cross-sectorial collaborations and working practices, working through different organizational cultures, reconfiguring power relations and ethical doings. These dimensions are still underexplored (Silvast et al., 2021), while priority is still given to the “technical feasibility” of system integration.

Building on STS literature and practice-based theorizing, we explore sector coupling as sociomaterial knowledge and practices emerge from within a project aiming at building resilient energy systems. The project gathers scientists – from engineering as well as from the social sciences – and different public (municipalities) and private organizations (mainly in the area of logistics, public transportations, energy providers). We focus on the hidden work at organizational boundaries required systems to couple, but also on the extent to which this understanding of resilience casts a shadow over other critical questions and practices involved in energy transformations.

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Paper short abstract

Drawing on a South London public health data programme, this practitioner-researcher paper asks: resilient for whom? It examines how health data systems encode unequal urban futures, reproducing the inequalities they claim to address, and asks what transformative resilience might look like.

Paper long abstract

Integrated data systems have become central infrastructure for urban public health, promising evidence-based, equitable, and resilient cities. Yet the concept of resilience embedded within these systems is rarely interrogated. Drawing on practice-based insights from a local authority data integration programme in Southwark, a London borough where over a third of residents live in England's most deprived areas, Southwark JSNA, 2022), this paper examines what resilience means in practice, and for whom it is being built.

Health data infrastructures are not neutral conduits of evidence but sociotechnical assemblages that encode particular visions of urban life, normative health outcomes, and acceptable risk. Through the selective inclusion of datasets and the design of indicators, these systems function as legibility projects (Scott, 1998): quietly adjudicating which communities are visible to the state, and which disruptions count as problems worth solving. In doing so, they risk reproducing the very inequalities they claim to address- enacting an undesirable resilience that restores hegemonic structures rather than transforming them.

Engaging with data justice scholarship (Taylor, 2017; Eubanks, 2018) and critical public health STS (Hoeyer et al., 2019), this paper asks whether integrated data systems can be redesigned to bounce forward rather than back (Jones et al., 2021): surfacing lived vulnerability, redistributing definitional power, and enabling communities to contest what counts as a resilient future.

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Paper short abstract

Money’s assumed resilience shapes how ecological processes become commensurable. This paper shows how the US dollar, sustained by global oil trade, enables unequal ecological and economic exchange by stabilizing extractive flows through monetary valuation.

Paper long abstract

Markets and market‑based policy instruments are often assumed to be resilient, capable of “fixing” the ecological problems that markets themselves have produced. While STS and political ecology scholars have examined how such instruments operate, the expertise they mobilize, and the environmental representations they rely on, comparatively little attention has been paid to the most ubiquitous artifact underpinning market exchange: money. Social theory has long debated what money is and how it reshapes social relations, yet its role in making ecological processes commensurable remains underexplored.

This paper conceptually examines the relationship between commensuration and ecological processes by analyzing how money is predicated on a specific notion of resilience. Monetary exchange presupposes the circulation of labor‑time, the extraction of raw materials, and the embodied energy in manufactured goods. I argue that the money‑artifact renders ecological degradation legible, exchangeable, and governable by appearing both neutral and resilient.

I illustrate this through the US dollar, widely regarded as the world’s most resilient currency. As the global reserve currency, the dollar holds a unique position in international trade, particularly in relation to oil. Continued global dependence on oil sustains demand for dollars, enabling the United States to export its currency in exchange for raw materials and manufactured goods, which is also reflected in its trade deficit. This supports both ecological and economic unequal exchange on a global scale. And this shows that the resilience at stake is not ecological but institutional, since it stabilizes extractive flows by translating heterogeneous ecological processes into commensurable monetary values.

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Paper short abstract

We propose “societal guardrails” for plant synthetic genomics based on public focus groups. While research frames resilience at the level of plants, publics emphasise societal resilience and question agri-food systems and narrow plant-centred solutions.

Paper long abstract

New interest in developing ‘synthetic plants’ by the public UK funder ARIA is justified by narratives of growing uncertainty regarding food security and crop resilience in the wake of climate change. Research focuses on enabling plants to respond through traits such as drought resistance.

Through focus groups with UK publics, we develop a framework of societal guardrails for synthetic plants. Guardrails is a concept in AI development that provides rules to keep AI ‘safe’ and ‘on track’. First, we borrow this concept to explore how publics might keep synthetic plants ‘on track’ for society. Societal guardrails may help leverage technological benefits while mitigating potential harms, by shaping the key decisions that determine particular technology trajectories upstream in the development process. Second, we examine what requires resilience. While ARIA focuses on plant resilience as a response to climate change, focus group participants focus on societal resilience, critically questioning global agri-food systems and the sole focus on plants without consideration of broader ecology.

Societal guardrails may help guard societal needs while not expecting continued publics’ resilience in the wake of damaging and unjust global agriculture. We explore the possibility of “bouncing forward” (Manyena et al., 2011) with plant synthetic genomics to challenge hegemonic ideas of resilience. We argue for the need to keep synthetic plants research to be guided by societal knowledge, values, and interest, demanding resilience from science and the agricultural economy, instead of stabilising harmful agricultural systems by focusing solely on the deficiency of plants.