Short Abstract

This panel examines limitation as a generative force in re-imagining technoscience within socio-ecological boundaries. We welcome contributions on self-limitation, collective constraint, and regulation, highlighting the roles STS researchers play in shaping and inhabiting these limits.

Description

Large parts of the technosciences remain entangled with extractive infrastructures and growth-driven imaginaries. Yet across disciplines, proposals are emerging to actively constrain and re-condition research and innovation systems. For example, in chemistry, calls to reimagine the discipline from the perspective of planetary boundaries treat ecological limits as generative conditions, opening new possibilities for responsibility, creativity, and sociotechnical integration. Similar moves appear elsewhere, such as banning cobalt in battery research or refusing to use PFAS membranes in hydrogen research.

This panel invites STS scholars to examine how limitation can enable rather than foreclose innovation. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and historical contributions that analyse practices of self-limitation, collective constraint, and regulatory restriction in scientific and engineering contexts. Rather than remaining in a purely diagnostic mode that elucidates power relations and captured imaginaries, we aim to explore how limits can be inhabited as conditions of possibility for re-imagining technoscience within planetary boundaries.

We invite contributions that explore:

• Who sets limits (funders, regulators, researchers, industry, citizen collectives, journalists,…) and how do their effects differ?

• Which limitation strategies have proven effective, and how do approaches like counter-scripting or design framings operate?

• How are concepts like planetary boundaries, post-growth, sufficiency, circularity or toxicity mobilized as productive constraints for experimentation and design?

• What roles can STS play? Introduce external values or adopt a restrained approach? Engage with policy and regulation, or focus on individual actors and epistemic cultures? How should STS limit itself?

• Who has the capacity to enact limitations into imagination and long-lasting change? And how are responsibilities negotiated across science, engineering, governance and publics

• What do engaged STS researchers expect from scientists and engineers in this quest? And what do and may the latter expect from STS?

Ultimately, this panel wants to bring together researchers committed to re-imagining technoscience through, rather than despite, socio-ecological boundaries.

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