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Paper short abstract

This untold story addresses the ethnographer’s difficulty in recognising octopuses as interlocutors during fieldwork in oceanographic labs, while navigating ethical dilemmas of studying the controversial case of octopus farming and imagining how to share these dilemmas with non-human actors in STS.

Paper long abstract

This presentation stems from ongoing PhD research focusing on the ethical controversies surrounding octopus welfare that have emerged from recent techno-scientific innovations enabling octopus farming.

Adopting the form of a confessional tale, it reflects on a dimension of fieldwork—based on ethnographic research in oceanographic laboratories in Galicia and Catalonia (Spain)—that revisits a persistent concern in STS (Latour, 2004; Haraway, 2006): the challenge of recognising non-human actors, in this case the octopus, as interlocutors.

This tale narrates how such difficulty restricts the possibility of establishing reciprocal relations with octopuses, even though they remain the ethical centre of this research. Thus, while relationships with human actors, such as bioscientists, open spaces for exchange where the ethnographer’s ethical dilemmas—concerning how to embody a research that speaks of an ethical controversy—can be shared, the absence of genuine encounters with octopuses generates a specific form of methodological vulnerability. This vulnerability, which has not been made explicit in previous academic disseminations of this work, points to the difficulty of situating the ethnographer’s ethical positioning alongside the non-human beings encountered in the field.

By bringing this untold story to the foreground and making explicit the researcher’s ethical dilemmas during fieldwork, the presentation also invites a reimagining of methodological practices, emphasising the need to attend to the absences and silences between octopuses and the ethnographer as a way of recognising shared vulnerabilities, transforming them into matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2014) and into strategies of resilience in STS ethnography alongside the non-humans.

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Paper short abstract

This study examines our scientists’ role as epistemic actors in a national consortium. Our consortium mirrored the dynamics under study, which hindered its activities. As a mirror, these experiences could have provided valuable insights, yet they were not recognised as data, leaving them untold.

Paper long abstract

With the rise of practice-oriented, transdisciplinary research and increasing expectations for researchers to engage in public–private partnerships, the role of the researcher as an epistemic actor has become less clearly defined (Nowotny, 2003). STS scholarship has long emphasized that science and its objects of inquiry are entangled (Knorr Cetina, 1999; Jasanoff, 2004). Yet, reflexive accounts by researchers how they experience and deal with this epistemological politics still remain scarce. (Schuurmans et al., 2025). Drawing on qualitative research (observations, formal, and informal interviews), this paper explores our own experiences as an epistemic actor within a national consortium that aimed to guide and monitor regional cross-sectoral networks organized around a complex societal issue in the Netherlands.

We observed that our consortium reproduced the dynamics we aimed to study within the networks, particularly in navigating diverse knowledge and interests and in positioning itself in the broader field. Addressing these dynamics required collaborative and reflexive work, which was challenging under top-down financing and accountability structures. This work was essential for the consortium to function and generate data, but it reduced the time available for data collection, increasing our vulnerability as actors. Although these experiences mirrored the processes under study and could have been highly valuable, they were not recognised as legitimate data, leaving an important story untold. Reflexive accounts of researchers as epistemic actors thus not only support learning from personal vulnerabilities but can also serve as a productive method for revealing the dynamics of the systems under study.

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Combining literature review with ethnographic vignettes, this paper explores the affective labour of interdisciplinarity among early-career life scientists. It conceptualises “the middle” as a reflexive and methodological space for examining ambiguity, belonging, and everyday research practice.

Paper long abstract

Interdisciplinarity is routinely invoked as a solution to contemporary scientific and societal challenges, and increasingly framed as a prerequisite for building resilient futures. Within the life sciences, early-career researchers are frequently positioned as key agents of this work: expected to collaborate across epistemic boundaries, translate values and methods, and sustain productive research cultures under conditions of uncertainty, acceleration, and institutional pressure. Yet the affective and ethical labour required to inhabit these interdisciplinary spaces remains under-theorised in science and technology studies.

Drawing on an ongoing ethnographic study embedded within interdisciplinary cardiometabolic research environments in Denmark, this paper combines a critical review of STS and medical-humanities literatures on interdisciplinarity, research culture, and affect with a series of reflexive ethnographic vignettes. These vignettes emerge from what I conceptualise as the middle: the lived, often uncomfortable space of occupying an in-between position characteristic both of early-career researchers navigating interdisciplinary environments and of the researcher studying them. Working within this hyphenated position foregrounds experiences of “fuzziness”: frustration, ambivalence, partial belonging, and identity negotiation not as methodological obstacles but as analytically productive sites.

This paper suggests that interdisciplinarity is less a stable attribute than an ongoing, affectively charged process sustained through informal practices of care, narrative work, and value articulation often invisible within institutional accounts of collaboration. It proposes the ‘middle’ as both an empirical object and methodological stance for examining how resilient futures are imagined and sustained from within the systems they analyse.

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Paper short abstract

Combining autoethnography and practitioner insights, this paper offers a confessional reflection from within bibliometric practice, examining how simplifications and omissions shape decision-making and reproduce inequalities in science.

Paper long abstract

Bibliometric indicators have become central to research evaluation, shaping funding decisions, academic careers, and institutional priorities. While they promise seemingly neutral methods, their limitations are well documented, including biases and the reinforcement of disciplinary, linguistic, gender, and regional inequalities (Gingras, 2016; Beigel et al, 2019; Abramo et al, 2026; Sooryamoorthy, 2020). They may also incentivise gaming practices and breaches of research integrity (Biagioli & Lippman, 2020).

This paper offers a set of “confessional tales” (Van Maanen, 2011) reflecting on the tensions of working within bibliometrics while critically engaging with its effects. Drawing on my experience as both a bibliometrician and an academic, and on roles across universities, journals, and the Colombian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, I explore how indicators are produced and enacted in practice. Positioned across these sites, I examine moments where technical rigor coexists with simplification, and where known limitations are negotiated or silenced in decision-making contexts.

These reflections are complemented by a set of exploratory conversations with fellow bibliometricians. Together, these accounts ask: What is lost when indicators become authoritative tools beyond their limits? What is edited out when bibliometrics is translated for policy? And how do practitioners navigate, justify, or resist these tensions?

By mobilizing these confessions, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on responsible metrics (DORA, 2012; Hicks et al, 2015; European University Association et al, 2022), while inviting a more reflexive engagement with the role of bibliometrics in shaping not only research systems, but also human lives and science as a whole.

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Based on two collaborative film projects, this paper frames Commons-Film as a reflexive visual method for making shareable what interdisciplinary research often leaves untold: hesitation, disagreement, withheld voices, and judgments negotiated through iterative co-editing and consent.

Paper long abstract

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research is often presented through polished outputs such as articles, conference papers, models, or policy recommendations. In this process, much is edited out: hesitation, awkward negotiations, unresolved disagreements, shifting judgments, and voices that cannot be fully made public. These are often treated as noise outside the result, yet they are central to how collaborative knowledge is actually produced.

Drawing on two projects carried out through my own research and filmmaking practice, this paper proposes Commons-Film as a reflexive visual method for making such untold margins shareable. Extending participatory and collaborative visual methods, Commons-Film is based on shared footage, repeated access by multiple participants, iterative co-editing, negotiated consent, and the possibility of retaining multiple unresolved versions rather than forcing one authorized account. In this process, moving images function as boundary objects through which different actors negotiate meaning, visibility, and responsibility.

The paper examines two cases. In “In the Margins of Kathmandu,” researchers from different disciplines collaboratively re-edited footage around an international conference, bringing into view peripheral exchanges and hesitations usually excluded from formal presentation. In “Young Muslim’s Eyes: Crosswork between Arts and Studies,” participants joined the filmmaking process itself, destabilizing the distinction between researcher and researched and leaving questions of authorship, permission, and public visibility productively unresolved. Commons-Film is thus framed as a reflexive and ethical method for examining what collaborative research leaves untold, including experiences not easily recognized as data within formal accounts of interdisciplinarity.

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Paper short abstract

Using a case of conflict in an interdisciplinary science communication project, the contribution examines how disagreements over “scientific consensus” reveal divergent disciplinary assumptions and how such frictions produce confessional tales and expose the vulnerabilities of collaboration.

Paper long abstract

Conceptions of “scientific consensus” vary across research fields and publics. Moreover, explicit references to consensus serve different functions in contexts such as academia, politics, or popular media. Many scientists and communicators assume that communicating consensus is crucial for aligning science, politics, and other stakeholders in addressing real world problems. At the same time, in politicized public issues such as climate change or global health, communicating consensus poses significant challenges.

This paper offers a “confessional tale” from an interdisciplinary science communication research project involving scholars from STS, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and science communication. In this project, a conflict arose over what is at stake when publicly problematizing the concept of scientific consensus in a handbook article. Disagreements over how to frame and communicate the project’s findings prevented the group from co-publishing their perspectives and presenting a shared position.

At first glance, this case appears to illustrate failed interdisciplinary cooperation. However, we argue that the disagreement proved analytically productive for knowledge-making and sense-making. The conflict exposed divergent assumptions about the meaning, function, and politics of “scientific consensus” across disciplinary and professional perspectives. It also stimulated new lines of empirical research on how the concept of scientific consensus is used across different societal contexts.

By analyzing this “dissensus about consensus,” the paper shows how interdisciplinary frictions can give rise to confessional tales, as team members are compelled to integrate experiences of conflict and disagreement into their professional identities. This also implies a reflection of the vulnerabilities of interdisciplinary collaboration.

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Paper short abstract

The untold story of this talk is how power structures and personal ethical beliefs — including those of STS researchers — build up the basis of, and frame the interactive processes that lead to the implementation — or at least dominance — of “shared” success definitions in complex projects.

Paper long abstract

In an interdisciplinary project success is often defined differently by different actors. This makes sense, because different disciplines and practice communities go hand in hand with different definitions of that what constitutes a valuable result in their own community. Nevertheless, there is one phenomenon around which everyone gathers. The untold story of this talk is how power structures and personal ethical beliefs — including those of STS researchers — build up the basis of, and frame the interactive processes that lead to the implementation — or at least dominance — of “shared” success definitions. That is, in the interactive interplay of interdisciplinary project groups, STS researchers themselves must be considered individuals acting politically with their own agenda, looking for ways to implement their own definitions of success, either in collaboration with or in opposition to the others.

Drawing on my own experiences in a small-scale transdisciplinary visualisation project involving neurosurgeons, computer graphics specialists, and STS researchers, I will critically examine my own power-base for my political actions. Ironically, among other things the results of qualitative, STS-influenced approaches to the field gave me the opportunity to influence the other actors in favour of my own definition of success. I only openly acknowledged this at a late stage of the process. And, of course, I told the story in other ways, too: for example, I used narratives such as 'dis/empowerment for participation”, or “qualitative research as tool for understanding”. But perhaps even fundamentally, the project interactions are politically driven acts, too.

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Paper short abstract

What is it like being left-behinds? What are our own untold stories of waste and wasting (time, desire, opportunities), and how could these act as a disruptor and reassemble imaginaries of academic innovation in future societies?

Paper long abstract

Funded under Research Ireland’s Science Policy Research stand, this project explores the research talent pipeline and research culture(s) in Ireland, Denmark and Singapore as examples of small, advanced economies. Our project uses qualitative interviews to map the lived experiences of postdoctoral staff (n=60) within the talent pipeline to understand the opportunities and barriers innovation workers face, including the ‘left-behinds’ residues. We seek, in an anarchist form, to mis-use value stream mapping, a core lean management tool (used in industries such as manufacturing to document all steps within a production process), to trace often invisible elements which form the production process of postdocs within the higher education ecosystem. Stepping beyond discussions of precariousness and gender equality, our aim is to visualise material resources, information flow, value and waste. In this paper, we direct our attention to being left-over and left-behind, practices of waste and wasting (time, desire, opportunities) and how these might act as a disruptor and reassemble imaginaries of academic innovation in future societies.