Short Abstract

Join a community conversation among fellow inter-science workers on knowledge-sharing, epistemic and institutional challenges and opportunities for STS and social science engagement with science, engineering, and techno-solutionist problem approaches in climate, environment, and sustainability.

Description

The work of attending to socio-technical complexity in the crafting of resilient human futures is commonly understood to necessitate interdisciplinary collaboration. Yet experts seeking to cross disciplinary boundaries and institutional silos face stubborn tensions. Interdisciplinarity in itself is neither a virtuous mode of knowledge production nor inherently value-neutral, although it is often treated as such in techno-solutionist framings that instrumentalize contributions from the social sciences and humanities.

In this participatory workshop, we build a conversation about inter-paradigmatic, and interdisciplinary collaborations in climate, energy, and sustainability drawn from our institutional tech-focused research contexts. We invite fellow inter-science workers to share experiences in collaborative spaces on engaged, meaningful interdisciplinary humanities and social science research for sustainability.

Building on an initial convening at 4S Seattle 2025, we invite participants to (re)-join space for knowledge-sharing around STS and social science engagements with science, engineering, and techno-solutionist problem approaches. The conveners will foster an interactive, connected space to explore questions together in a participatory format, strengthening connectivity between inter-science STS researchers and empowering each other in the remaking of interdisciplinary sustainability work. We will consider questions such as: How can STS tools and sensibilities productively structure interdisciplinary collaborations? How can “value ecosystems” meaningfully reshape problem definitions and collaborative work spaces?

Participants are invited to interact with and co-create frameworks of interdisciplinarity and engagement with science to articulate and strengthen a central role of non-technologist perspectives in these collaborations. We aim at systematizing conditions for interdisciplinary collaborations and their potential to delineate future institutional constellations in technological institutions.