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Short abstract

We explore the institutional, temporal and geographical edges of the German digital welfare state, as they become apparent in projects that support digital education for older adults along the German-Polish border.

Long abstract

The proposed contribution explores current efforts at ageing well with digital technology in Görlitz, a district along the German-Polish border, with an ethnographic focus on two projects that provide digital education and support to senior citizens. Since the 1990s, the local government has strategically positioned Görlitz as an attractive retirement destination within Germany, building infrastructures of care while playing the district’s borderland history and the architectural charm of its trading towns. At the same time, many citizens perceive delays in the implementation of digital infrastructures that could support active ageing, among other things. On this background, we explore how actors from within civil society, local government and welfare institutions are forging new coalitions and experimenting with new practices for supporting one another and themselves in ageing well with digital technology. Combining ethnographic and archival research, we shed light on the institutional, temporal and geographical edges of the German digital welfare state that they are working across, and the layered political and scientific infrastructures of ageing and technology that they mobilize in the process. The contribution is based on ongoing work at “Praxisforschungsstelle Görlitz”, a local research laboratory that is a part of the T!-Raum “AlterPerimentale”, funded through the German Ministry of Research (BMFTR).

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Short abstract

Energy precarity in North Bohemia shows how Europe’s green transition layers new climate promises onto long-standing sacrifice zones. At the edge of repeated failed transitions, decarbonisation is lived as infrastructural strain, testing democratic trust in everyday life.

Long abstract

Central and Eastern Europe has repeatedly been addressed through promises of transition—industrial modernity, socialist progress, post-1989 liberalisation, European integration, and now green transformation—producing a persistent sense of never-completed change. In North Bohemia, a Czech post-industrial region shaped by coal extraction and heavy industry and formerly part of the heavily polluted “Black Triangle,” these successive projects have sedimented as layered infrastructures of expectation and disappointment. The region functions as an internal sacrifice zone, bearing disproportionate social and ecological costs of national development.

Rather than appearing as rupture, decarbonisation is encountered as another transition layered onto unresolved transformations of the past. Rising energy costs and carbon governance are interpreted through memories of industrial decline, precarious labour, and uneven Europeanisation. Climate policy thus enters everyday life not simply as environmental reform but as a renewed claim to institutional trust. It is in mundane calibrations—heating decisions, utility bills, subsidy applications—that political promise becomes measurable, translated into degrees of warmth, hours of labour, and the felt durability of democratic commitment.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with households at risk of energy poverty and local intermediaries, this paper conceptualises energy precarity as a material and affective site where the credibility of political commitment is tested. Engaging STS debates on democracy and sociotechnical imaginaries (Ezrahi; Jasanoff) and connecting sacrifice zones with Nixon’s notion of slow violence, I argue that the fragility of contemporary climate governance in CEE cannot be understood without accounting for the temporal accumulation of broken promises that shape how new ones are received.

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Short abstract

How do regions respond to failed promises? Magdeburg's €9B Intel factory (announced 2022, cancelled 2025) lingers in liminal suspension. This post-industrial GDR city's (failed) transformation to semiconductor hub reveals how peripheral regions navigate between memory and futuremaking.

Long abstract

How does a regional innovation culture respond to failed promises? How is innovation policy politicized when missions do not deliver? Magdeburg's anticipated, but failed, but not completely abandoned, transformation from post-industrial periphery to high-tech semiconductor hub provides the case for testing these questions. The capital of Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, once a center of heavy machinery production in the GDR, has struggled with deindustrialization and population decline since the fall of the wall. A megaproject was supposed to provide a new vision for the city. Intel's flagship chip factory was announced in 2022 as a cornerstone of European digital sovereignty. Supported by subsidies amounting to over 9 billion Euros the factory was supposed to be build in the infrastructured midst of a field of potatoes at the cities edge. After multiple announcements of delays, it became apparent in 2025 that the project will never start.

On the one hand the promise never died. Politicians, investors and the university continue with the idea. On the other hand many citizens did never really expect anything from the distant, high-tech imaginary presented to them. This liminal state, articulated between memory and futuremaking, portrays the edge, I propose to scrutinize. Thereby, my contribution is modest and mainly seeks for support to develop my burgeoning research interest.

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Short abstract

The paper examines how social science researchers from Central and Eastern Europe make sense of and navigate European academia. Drawing on interviews and mapping exercises, it explores liminality, precarity, and the re-enactments of “East” and “West” in European research spaces.

Long abstract

Europe is often described as a centre of epistemic privilege. But how is it experienced and perceived by researchers moving from and on its "edge"?

A growing body of literature has pointed out the underrepresentation of Central and Eastern European voices in European research. While this imbalance has been documented in a number of fields and theorized at a conceptual level, a practice-oriented, STS approach seems to be missing. Combining postcolonial and postsocialist frameworks with the concept of epistemic living spaces, this paper seeks to address that gap by examining how CEE researchers make sense of, navigate and negotiate the research spaces they move through, and how they position themselves – and their region – within European research landscapes.

Drawing on interviews and mapping exercises with social science researchers from Czechia, Croatia, Hungary, and Russia, it analyzes the dividing lines, power hierarchies and symbolic regimes that shape researchers' mobility, shedding light on liminality, precarity, and othering across different research spaces. In doing so, it seeks to uncover the meanings of 'East' and 'West' that are re-enacted there, and contribute to broader debates on global asymmetries in knowledge production. Ultimately, by tracing the (semi)peripheries of European research, it aims to problematize Europe and 'the West' as unequivocal centres of epistemic privilege and shed light on its inner differences and varities.

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Short abstract

The paper explores the evolution of biological expertise during and after the Soviet era within one of the Eastern Bloc’s primary hubs of military biological research and challenges thus some of common misconceptions about military biological research in the Eastern Bloc

Long abstract

This paper explores the evolution of biological expertise during and after the Soviet era within one of the Eastern Bloc’s primary hubs of military biological research: the Biological Defense Department (BDD) Těchonín in the Czech Republic. Drawing on insights of former BDD scientists, their personal archives and a review of secondary literature, the study traces the evolution of biodefence expertise cultivated at the BDD Těchonín with a focus on the changing purpose, technologies, and scientific networks of the facility from 1970s till 2000s. The paper shows how changing political priorities and scenarios of biological threats shaped the work of the BDD Těchonín, while the core technologies and methodologies of biodefence research have remained. It also describes the transformation of scientific networks and modes of knowledge production from secrecy and isolation to open international collaborations after 1990. Through this case study, the article challenges three common misconceptions about military biological research in the Eastern Bloc: that it was mainly offensive, fully directed from Moscow, and largely imitative of Western science. Instead, the Těchonín case reveals a more complex and autonomous trajectory of nationally grounded, defense-oriented research that generated a durable foundation of biodefence expertise in the post-Soviet era.

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Short abstract

This paper explores how silence is viewed as a moral failure in wartime publicity during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It highlights how digital platforms make both speech and silence visible, allowing public actors to evaluate and contest political stances.

Long abstract

This paper examines how silence becomes publicly interpreted as moral failure in platformed wartime publicity. Drawing on the case of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it asks under what conditions the absence, delay, or perceived insufficiency of speech is transformed into moral accusation in digital publics. Wartime communication intensifies struggles over political belonging, turning speech and silence into markers through which democratic alignment is evaluated. In the context of wartime mobilisation and digitally mediated publics in Central and Eastern Europe, expectations that public actors must publicly position themselves become particularly visible and contested.

The paper explores silence as a relational category within digital visibility infrastructures, rather than merely the absence of speech. By treating digital platforms as sociotechnical infrastructures, it presents a three-level model for understanding silence in mediated environments. The first level addresses infrastructural visibility, making speech and its absence observable and comparable. The second level examines the moralisation of silence, in which public expectations transform ambiguity or neutrality into morally significant actions. The third level examines contestation, highlighting how accusations of silence and judgments about speech become subjects of public debate.

Empirically, the study draws on qualitative content analysis of media discourse between 2022 and 2025, including YouTube programmes, journalistic commentary, and online resources that monitor public figures’ statements about the war. The findings suggest that conflicts in wartime digital publicity revolve not simply around silence versus speech, but around the sufficiency, timing, and recognisability of political positioning.

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Short abstract

This paper examines how steel infrastructure shapes industrial decarbonization in Poland. Conceptualized as a sociotechnical megaproject, the sector reflects infrastructural lock-in, multinational ownership, and competing transition imaginaries, highlighting constraints facing CEE countries.

Long abstract

This paper examines how industrial infrastructures shape the politics of decarbonization in Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on the steel industry in Poland as particularly revealing in this aspect. Primary steelmaking relies on highly capital-intensive facilities (infrastructures), such as blast furnaces, coke plants, transmission grids, and transport networks — all of which operate within tightly coupled industrial ecosystems. In this regard, steel infrastructure can also be understood as a sociotechnical megaproject: complex configurations of industrial production, energy systems, and supply chains characterized by long-term planning, multi-actor governance challenges, and significant risks of technological lock-in (Sovacool & Geels, 2021).

Drawing on scholarship in Science and Technology Studies, this paper conceptualizes infrastructure as both a material system and a cultural form (Larkin, 2013) and as co-produced with political institutions and imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015). In Poland, these dynamics intersect with the political economy of the post-socialist industrial transition. Following the privatizations in the 1990s and early 2000s, steelmaking assets became integrated into multinational enterprises. In consequence, decisions about the future of primary steel production are increasingly co-shaped by transnational corporate strategies rather than national or EU-level industrial policy alone. At the same time, emerging, and for some promising, decarbonization pathways — particularly hydrogen-based direct reduced iron —require new infrastructures that are currently underdeveloped in Poland. Empirically informed by expert interviews with industry and civil-society actors, this paper argues that industrial decarbonization in Poland unfolds at the intersection of infrastructural lock-in, ownership structures, and competing imaginaries of decarbonization.