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- Convenors:
-
Markus Rudolfi
(Goethe University Frankfurt)
Timo Roßmann (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Gili Yaron (Windesheim University of Applied Sciences)
Violet Petit-Steeghs (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel invites “STS confessions”—untold stories of vulnerability in STS-fieldwork. Sharing what is silenced will serve to collectively imagine, enact and negotiate greater resilience within STS communities, while fostering meaningful engagements with field interlocutors.
Description
The sometimes overwhelming realities of STS-fieldwork may linger in our memories as compelling reminders of what “could have been otherwise”. Sharing stories about these experiences, however, is often constrained by formal directives (e.g. journal guidelines, project goals), methodological frames (e.g. “thin” data, “bad” interviews) or ethical dilemmas (e.g. fear of misconduct allegations, reputational risks). Despite the silence that surrounds them, such untold stories may contain valuable insights regarding our work. Moreover: they allow us to handle and endure our vulnerabilities as researchers. “STS confessions” may thus help us imagine, enact and negotiate greater resilience within STS communities while fostering meaningful engagements with field interlocutors.
The format of “confessional tales” (Van Maanen 2011) can open up a space to collectively make our untold stories matter. This “STS confessions” panel therefore invites contributions exploring vulnerabilities in field encounters. Mobilizing these confessions, we will collectively reimagine a politics of resilience for future STS inquiries. Questions we welcome (non-exhaustive):
- Which field stories do you edit out to produce a tighter, publishable, less vulnerable narrative? What is lost in these omissions?
- What is lost when you translate STS-informed findings when engaging with interlocutors?
- How do you account for, resist, or rework the vulnerabilities entailed by the uncontrolled uptake of such translations beyond STS?
- What silences did you encounter in dealing with external demands by funders, collaborators, interlocutors and publics? What produced these silences, how did they address vulnerabilities and how did you handle them?
Panel format (traditional): Presenters will have 10–15 minutes followed by a 10-minute discussion. We seek papers from scholars in all career stages spanning diverse methodological framings and empirical settings. Invited discussants will explore the implications of confessional tales for resilient STS practice and public engagement. Contributors should be willing to revise for peer review, as we envision developing selected panel papers into a Special Issue.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
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.
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.