Arriving in Lausanne in 2016 felt like touching down in a place I already knew, only to realize Swiss STS is less a clearcut community than a relay of languages, legacies, and lively streams of scholarship.
I arrived in Lausanne as a postdoc in 2016 with a map drawn elsewhere: my supervisor’s connections to Harvard STS, a recent visit of Franco Panese to Cambridge MA, and a conversation on the opportunity to build a project together. It felt like home (many shared references, similar approach and reflexivity) until it didn’t, in the best possible way. Even in Lausanne alone, multiple sensibilities coexisted: different conceptual accents, different alliances, different ways to make an argument travel. Very quickly I discovered that “Swiss STS” was in no way a fixed address in Lausanne, Zurich, Geneva or Basel, but rather a messy and vibrant crossroad. Language, of course, did a lot of the work. The same STS notion – say, boundary object – tilted differently as objet frontière (Dominique Vinck and colleagues docent); “governance” mutates from and into gouvernance…And the examples could be numerous. Each translation was and is still a miniature literature review: a reminder that concepts and ideas pick up baggage as they move, and that thinking in Switzerland felt like thinking across.
My point is that this heterogeneity isn’t a hurdle; it is an empowering condition. And a small gift crystallized it for me. Years later, Marc Audétat handed me the printed program of the Lausanne Summer School (2001). Its title – Knowledge in Plural Context – read like a retroactive diagnosis of my first months. That event, a milestone in the early STS-CH story, gathered big names (already made, and in the making), multiple analytical sensibilities and distinctive inclinations into a single, multilingual, or – perhaps – clumsily anglophone room. At its onset, STS-CH meant stitching together languages and approaches to weave new ties across – and beyond – an emerging national network.
From reading that program, a pattern – corroborated by experience – came into focus. Perhaps, Swiss STS does not cohere by ironing differences out; but rather by routing them collectively. People import frameworks, then tinker with them locally, collaboratively, often playfully. The result is an ecosystem where “outside” or “inside” are relative terms, and where outward bridges and translations are not exceptions but infrastructure. So: what if the distinctiveness of Swiss STS lies precisely in the plural contexts it inhabits – the languages it lets concepts traverse, the institutional traditions it braids, the inter-national routes it keeps open? If you come from elsewhere, you may recognize a familiar landmark, but do not mistake it for the whole landscape. If you stay, you’ll experience a multilingual, cheerfully non-monolithic and syncretistic STS community. Either way, bring a dictionary, curiosity, and get a half-fare card for all the bridges you’re going to have to cross.