Short Abstract

This panel invites papers examining how STS can illuminate the production of contested diseases, where uncertainty and embodied suffering challenge biomedical authority, and contribute to epistemic resilience through more responsive knowledge and care infrastructures.

Description

STS has examined how diseases become knowable, tracing the epistemic, material, and sociotechnical conditions through which visibility, legitimacy, and authority are co-produced. Contested diseases—such as endometriosis, ME/CFS, or post-infection syndromes like long COVID—illustrate how symptoms like fatigue, cognitive fog, and chronic pain resist quantification, blurring the somatic and psychosocial and challenging biomedical norms of objectivity and technological verification. These struggles extend beyond the clinic, intersecting with stigma, medical gaslighting, and the politics of recognition as contested diseases are addressed through activism, R&D, product development, interventions, policy, and care. This offers analytical scope for STS to trace how ambiguous symptoms acquire—or fail to acquire—credibility, reveal how illness is continually remade at the intersection of bodies, technologies, and institutions, explore epistemic resilience in contested diseases, and envision STS-inspired actions that make knowledge infrastructures more responsive to uncertainty, ambiguity, and diverse ways of knowing and caring.

Papers could focus on (but are not limited to):

• The epistemic and technological politics of making contested illnesses visible, examining how knowledge, symptoms, and care are co-produced through diagnostic infrastructures, patient activism, and clinical practice

• How biomedical visibility is negotiated, deferred, and unevenly distributed across bodies and institutions extending beyond the clinic, entwining medical uncertainty with stigma, medical gaslighting, and the politics of recognition and care

• The making of credibility of ambiguous symptoms through material-semiotic practices, diagnostic infrastructures, and patient narratives

• The potential and limits of epistemic resilience when much is still unknown

• The politics of experiential knowledge and institutional legitimacy

• New forms of STS inspired medical action that can hold ambiguity, value difference, and sustain alternative modes of knowing, caring, and believing, and what the role of an engaged STS researcher might be in such collaborations.

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