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- Convenor:
-
Spencer Adams
(LMU-Munich)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Working class struggles, in the workplace, the home, and the streets, are generative sites of knowledge production. This panel explores worker inquiries, worker-scientist collaboration and other working class knowledge formations, asking what they offer to an STS committed to worldly transformation.
Description
Standpoint theorists in early feminist science studies drew on Marx and Marxist theories of proletarian consciousness to argue that subjugated groups held a more complete understanding of the world than those in a dominant position (Harding, 1986). A more recent body of work in sociology and political theory has returned to Marx’s understudied proposal for a “worker inquiry” (Marx, 1880), highlighting it as a tool of systematic knowledge production capable of leveraging workers’ inherent knowledge of industrial systems and worker organization to combat the aims of management and the forces of capital (Ovetz, 2021; Bernes, 2025). At the same time, a surge of industrial actions and organizing campaigns have seen apprentice and casualized natural scientists increasingly articulate themselves as workers in struggle (Notes from Below, 2022), while the revival of “radical science” organizations like Science for the People have served to bring technoscientific and STS knowledge work in direct conversation with working class struggles against slum housing conditions (Science for the People, 2024) and ecologically-disruptive crypto-mining centers (Marshall, 2022). Across these examples, we can take note of something familiar to anyone who’s taken part in worker struggles: they’re immensely generative sites of knowledge production and transmission, where novel analyses, concepts, and data for making sense of capitalist exploitation and its social and ecological effects are forged. This panel aims to explore these working class knowledge formations, asking: how do they draw upon but also unsettle conventional scientific knowledge and practice? What do they tell us about the social relations of science and technology, both in the present and in possible futures in which knowledge production is oriented to the fulfillment of social needs and collective well-being? And what do they offer to an STS concerned with the more-than-now, both in the sense of collective transmissions of historical injustice and resistance and that of future-oriented worldly transformation?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
What kinds of knowledge have unions produced as patrons? This paper examines union collaborations with prominent computer scientists in 1970s Norway. I argue that this work sutured information designs to social democratic means of mobilization, demonstrating a radically democratizing potential.
Paper long abstract
At the turn of the 1970s, the Norwegian computer scientist Kristen Nygaard embarked on a long-term collaboration with the labor unions on worker-centered informational design. Nygaard drew on his insider’s perspectives from the security establishment and management consulting to warn the labor movement about the emergence of new digital planning tools, budgeting, strategy, and automation practices. The goal was to develop a knowledge strategy and research program under union patronage, closely coordinated with the labor party, This work laid the foundations of the Scandinavian School of System Development’s participatory information design, a long-standing alternative to the corporate, top-down tradition of User Experience (UX) that came to dominate in the Silicon Valley.
Union patronage of knowledge production is an underexamined topic in the history of science. In this paper, I will focus on how Nygaard’s affiliation with unions and the worker perspective shaped his approach to the “user” in information design. The “user”, I argue, is a central figure in digitalized societies, a form of subjectivation of comparable importance to the “citizen”, the “voter” or the “worker”. Defining the “user”, however, was simultaneously a matter of politics and expertise; Nygaard recruited anthropologists to aid the mediation between factory workers (and in his second project, hospital nurses) and computer scientists. By insisting on the specificity of working-class users, the Scandinavian School beckons us to question the generality of the “users” coproduced by more commercially oriented information science.
Paper short abstract
The socio-cultural and technological changes over the last few decades have transformed the environment in which romantic couples operate. Based on qualitative interviews, I will attempt to explain the way in which partners manage the household budget and how it is shaped by modern reality.
Paper long abstract
The socio-cultural changes that have taken place in Poland over the last few decades have significantly transformed the environment in which working-class romantic couples operate. The increase in women's participation in the labour market, technological and cultural changes have led to a significant extension of the repertoire of possible and acceptable family life practices. In line with these dynamics, there have been significant changes in the financial sphere of cohabiting couples—the way in which partners share money and manage the household budget. In recent years, traditional systems of managing money in the family have become less common, while systems based on financial independence have gained popularity. The aim of the study is to understand the financial practices of dual-earner couples running a joint household. Based on qualitative interviews conducted with 32 individuals in the second quarter of 2026, I will attempt to describe and explain how the economic and technological changes of recent years have shaped the everyday financial practices and knowledge of couples. The interviews will include following aspects: practices in household financial management; the motivations behind the selection of the way of managing finances; circumstances and conditions (e.g. marriage, engagement, joint property) of major (e.g. joint account) and minor (e.g. everyday purchases) financial decisions; technological conditions and their impact on everyday financial practices (e.g. banking apps, expense tracking apps); the course of financial negotiations and role of financial knowledge. The results will provide deeper understanding of the changes in romantic relationship models and their technological and economical foundations.
Paper short abstract
The proposal highlights the value of embedded, situated knowledge held by actors, examining how it is represented in synthetic data and how it can shape the intelligence of AI systems.
Paper long abstract
Does synthetic data capture the embodied knowledge of the actors it represents?
With this question, we intend to open a discussion around how the inclusion or exclusion of embodied, situated knowledge in synthetic data not only alters the intelligence of AI systems but also redistributes power over how their results are interpreted, trusted, and acted upon.
Suchman explains knowledge is "situated, embodied, and accountable to the specific positions from which it is enacted" Suchman 2002). Such knowledge holds diverse forms of human understanding that often remain undocumented and unarticulated, yet are tacitly used, shared, and developed over time through experience, conversation, and collaboration. It is crucial for forming agreements, building diverse opinions, and shaping dissent. In this sense, it is a defining characteristic of the individual who holds it.
Hybrid factory floors are rich sites of embedded knowledge, where workers continuously draw on tacit, embodied expertise to complete tasks. Now, this workspace has been disrupted by robots enabled by physical AI, often trained using synthetic data. It creates an important tension between simulated knowledge and the lived realities of workers' practices.
What remains unclear is whether the AI-generated synthetic data also incorporates workers' embodied knowledge. If not, then can synthetic representation be considered complete or accurate? How is such an outcome getting consumed as intelligent? Moreover, if synthetic data succeeds in capturing embodied, lived, situated knowledge, does it become more than "copies" of missing actors? In light of these provocations, we warrant a careful epistemic examination of synthetically generated knowledge.
Paper short abstract
We share results from interviews and surveys of the LSST Rubin Observatory community (astrophysicists/computer scientists/social scientists) focused on structured mentoring and multi-disciplinarity of postdocs. We assess mentoring effectiveness and the sense of belonging of these diverse workers.
Paper long abstract
This multi-method study of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Rubin Observatory community highlights mentoring and mentoring relationships. LSST is the 10-year ‘movie’ of the night sky that will begin later in 2026 at Rubin Observatory. Of interest is the new LSST-Discovery Alliance Catalyst Postdoctoral Fellowship – created to build a cohort of early-career researchers prepared to use the data when released in 2026. The Fellow applicants had to present a community project alongside their scientific proposals, which resulted in attracting a cohort of postdocs embodying diversity along many axes.
We use 35 qualitative interviews and structured surveys (44 in round 1, round 2 underway) to assess the effectiveness of what we consider two of the main strengths of the fellowship program – structured mentoring and multi-disciplinarity. Each postdoc built a committee of five mentors, with a supervisor at the same institution. The other mentors are interdisciplinary and distributed worldwide. Postdocs mainly come from astrophysics/astronomy and the social sciences.
We share our analyses of the responses about having a mentoring committee, sense of belonging, and professional identity overlap. Our analyses should enable us to identify patterns grouped by (the intersection of) socio-demographic features. This mixed-methods exploration provides insights into the effectiveness and challenges of the LSST-DA Catalyst Fellowship for advancing inclusivity and diversity. The intersection of these frameworks helps to understand that knowledge is situated and to intentionally allow communities that elevate marginalized perspectives to create more equitable and effective practice.