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?

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