Read the Book of Abstracts.
The conference will take place online. Registration by February 10 is required to receive the session links via e-mail. For more information, please visit the STS-CH 2021 page.
Please note that the program is subject to last minute changes.
STS-CH 2021 Program
Monday 15 February
| 09.15-10.00 | Opening words Tanja Schneider (STS-CH) Marc Audétat, Tatiana Smirnova, Philippe Sormani (STS Lab, UNIL) Dominique Vinck (ISS, UNIL) Room A |
| 10.00-12.00 | Panel Session A |
| Room A | PANEL: Medicine and Environmental Health I Chair: Francesco Panese Bridging Immunology and Genomics: Fragile Knowledge and Agile Platforms in the Making of Precision Immuno-oncology Nils Graber Being Allowed to Feel Vulnerable and Confident. When Adults and Young People Exchange Experiences of Living with Type 1 Diabetes Mélody Pralong Objectifying Participants? Data Production in the Clinical Research Center Nolwenn Bühler |
| Room B | PANEL: Technoscientific Promises from the Vantage Point of Fragile Futures I Chair: Tanja Schneider The Human Error: AI, Algorithmic Fallacy and The Failed Promise of Digital Profiling Veronica Barassi Fragile Intimacy Futures: Challenging the Promises of AI-Based Physiognomy Nicolas Baya-Laffite “Half of all Jobs will be Automated in 20 Years”. The Promises of AI: Credibility, Popularity, and Scenarization Marc Audétat |
| Room C | PANEL: Doing Urban Futures: Anticipation and the city I Chair: Hendrikje Alpermann Introduction by the Organizers Contextualizing Anticipation: Planning for Futures and the Present in Bordeaux Jenny Lindblad Making the Future in a Building Project Brett Mommersteeg |
| Room D | PANEL: Futures of Ageing Chair: Giada Danesi Aging at Home: Materialities of Ageing and Materialities of Care Cornelia Hummel Worlds in the Making in Nephrology Health Care Practices: Insights from two Quality of Life-Initiatives Anna Mann |
| Room E | PANEL: Innovation’s Futures Chair: Olivier Glassey Opening Tools For Opening Science: Lessons From Global Open Science Hardware Initiatives In Africa And Latin America Julieta Arancio Design and Testing of Robotics Innovation: Crowd dynamics, Co-creation, and Values Gianluigi Viscusi |
| 12.00-13.00 | Lunch Break |
| 13.00-15.00 | Panel Session B |
| Room A | PANEL: Medicine and environmental health II Chair: Laetitia Della Bianca Bio-Psycho-Social Complexity and Epigenetics: Fragilities and Agilities of Biosocial Representations and Interventions Luca Chiapperino Vulnerabilities in the Making: Exploring Experiences of the Pandemic and Reconfigurations of Living Conditions Nolwenn Bühler Postmortem Imaging, Ontology of Dead Bodies and the Future of Forensic Investigation Céline Schnegg, Séverine Rey, Alejandro Dominguez |
| Room B | PANEL: Technoscientific promises from the vantage point of fragile futures II Chair: Marc Audétat Smart farming futures: Sociotechnical imaginaries of agricultural technology providers Laura Innocenti The Argentinean ECOSeedsystem: The Promise of Seed Customization as a Strategy of Climate Change Adaptation in Industrial Agriculture Diego Silva Promising future health through dietary tracking apps: An ethnography of digital data-human assemblages Giada Danesi, Tanja Schneider Fragile food futures on stage: TED talks and technoscientific promises Tanja Schneider |
| Room C | PANEL: Doing Urban Futures: Anticipation and the city II Chair: Moritz Fürst Urban Wild Futures: Ecology’s Exploration of the City Maud Chalmandrier (Un)doing Urban Soil Futures: The Trajectory of Soil Ecological Engineering in France Germain Meulemans The Presence of Future: Investigating the Anticipatory Power of the City as Promissory Assemblage Alexa Färber |
| Room D | PANEL: ICT, Cultural Diversity and Change Chair: Basile Zimmermann, Amalia Sabiescu, Yan Zhang Does Personalized Medicine Endanger Culturally Diverse Approaches Towards Health? Dana Mahr Fake News, Social Media and the Destruction of Knowledge Fayez Alrafeea, Basile Zimmermann Social Inclusion or Exclusion: Implementing Community Based ICT Yan Zhang Leave no Digital Traces: Elderly Volunteers’ Use of Outdated Technologies in Humanitarian Work with Irregular Migrants in the United States Sara Vannini |
| Room E | PANEL: Taking care of energy infrastructures I Chair: Tristan Loloum Discussant: Chris Henke Tongue, Tape, and Time: Men’s Care (Re)Produces Energy Infrastructure in the Sundarbans, India Silvia Pergetti Current Demands in the Nepali Electricity Sector: For an Infrastructural Theory of Social Reproduction Mikkel Vindegg What “Order” to Maintain and Repair?. The Ethnographic Case Study of a Civil Resistance Movement from Mexico Umberto Cao Wilder Microgrid Maintenance Software for Alaska Native Power Plant Operators Piper Foster |
| 15.00-16.00 | Break |
| 16.00-18.00 | Unfortunatly, the keynote by Natasha Myers had to be cancelled on short notice. The organizers therefore opted to dedicate the time slot to: Research updates and announcements by the STS community Chair: Loïc Riom Room A |
Tuesday 16 February
| 9.00-11.00 | Panel Session C |
| Room A | PANEL: Science Policies Chair: Gianluigi Viscusi Science Policy, the Very Notion Alexandra Hofmänner Interdisciplinary Research and Problem Solving: Analysing European Policy Discourses Isabel Fletcher Shaping the Scientific and Policy Discourses through Problematization: A Heuristic Tool to Disentangle Inter- and Transdisciplinarity Bianca Vienni Baptista |
| Room B | WORKSHOP: Rethinking Music from and through Materiality and Fragility I Chair: Guillaume Heuguet François Ribac, Alain Müller, Loïc Riom |
| Room C | PANEL: Climate Change and Environmental Sciences Chair: Nicolas Baya-Laffite Reoperating Reservoirs in Response to Changing and Competing Societal Water Demands: Insights from Colorado Laura Turley, Christian Bréthaut and Géraldine Pflieger What Autonomy? The Case of Forest Hydrology Field Astrid Oppliger and Christian Kul E-Biking as Social Practice: The Emergence of a New Travel Routine? Karin Edberg |
| Room D | PANEL: Digital cities, open government and platform urbanism Chair: Julio Paulos Digital platforms and public space: from involuntary externalities to controlled interdependence Mathilde Abel Balancing Uneasy Relations of Innovation, Participation and Transition in Urban Living Labs through Choreographies Andrea Schikowitz, Kevin Weller |
| 11.00-11.30 | Break |
| 11.30-13.00 | Session D: Roundtable + Workshops |
| Room A | ROUNDTABLE: Doing Online Ethical Ethnographic Research: Challenges and Opportunities Chairs: Sylvain Besençon, Nina Khamsy Participants: David Bozzini, Laurence Tessier, Mackenzie Klema |
| Room B | WORKSHOP: Rethinking Music from and through Materiality and Fragility I Chair: Maria Eriksson François Debruyne, Sophie Maisonneuve, Guillaume Heuguet |
| Room C | Dis/connection Matters: Natural, Synthetic, Digital Chair: Mathieu Bolay Filipe Calvão, Matthieu Bolay, Johannes Brude, Lindsay Bell, Tina Sikka, Dominique Vinck |
| 13.00-14.00 | Lunch |
| 14.00-15.30 | STS-CH General assembly Chair: Tanja Schneider, Loïc Riom Room A |
| 15.30-16.00 | Break |
| 16.00-18.00 | ROUNDTABLE: When crisis matter: Reflecting on STS methods, concepts, and interventions Chair: Nolwenn Bühler Ola Söderström, Nicolas Nova, Michael Guggenheim, Sophie Mützel, Priska Gisler Room A |
Wednesday 17 February
| 10.00-12.00 | Panel Session E | |
| Room A | PANEL: Medicine and environmental health III Chair: Nolwenn Bühler Epistemic Tensions around Vaccination: From Public Controversies to Private Experiences Jérôme Gaillaguet Matters of Discrimination: DNA Ancestry Tests and DNA Phenotyping as Technologies of Racialization Isabelle Bartram, Tino Plümecke Careful Equivocations of Value(s) in a Translational Space: Making Sense of the Circulation and Valuation of Stem Cells in Belgium Pierre Delvenne Kim Hendrickx and Céline Parotte | |
| Room B | PANEL: Reconfigured Time-Spaces: Techno-Digital Mediations, and Their Multiple Rhythms I Chair: Alain Müller Capturing Multiplicity: The Rhythms of Wayfaring as Method Marion Schulze, Alain Müller Infrastructures of Sociality: Bodies, Spaces, Practices in Times of Confinement and Contagion Aylin Yildrim Tschoepe The Algorithms of Mindfulness Johannes Bruder The Rhythms of Urban Water Ina Dietsch | |
| Room C | PANEL: Digital Transformation of/in Research and Higher Education II Chair: Philippe Saner Introduction Luca Tratschin, Christian Leder Digital Transformation: Constructing the Future in Higher Education Barbara Getto, Michael Kerres Digital Transformation and Reconfigurations in Scientific Work: The COVID19 Pandemic and its Effects on Knowledge Production in German Sociology Maria Keil, Tim Savert Digitization Strategies and Digitization Policies at Universities Justus Henke Digital Strategies in Swiss Higher Education Policies and Institutions Philippe Saner, Christian Leder, Luca Tratschin | |
| Room D | PANEL: Maintenance and Repair Studies Chair: Anna Jobin “It’s not a Bug, it’s a Feature”: The Blurry Line between Maintenance and Transformation in Videogame Development Maxime Besenval Stepwells, Tanks, and Cisterns: Regularising Water Supply in Ahmedabad, Gujarat Justin Pickard Caring for the Fragile Future of an Aging Cryptographic Standard Sylvain Besençon | |
| 12.00-13.00 | Lunch | |
| 13.00-15.00 | Panel Session F | |
| Room A | PANEL: Gender Studies and Sexuality Chair: Cynthia Kraus Coproduction, Multiplied: The Case of Sex as a Biological Variable Madeleine Pape How to Produce Bodies at Risk? Marlyse Debergh | |
| Room B | Cancelled and combined with the morning session (I) of the same title. | |
| Room C | PANEL: Digital Transformation of/in Research and Higher Education III Chair: Luca Tratschin Big Data as a Transformative Force Maren Lübcke, Klaus Wannemacher Learning to Program? A Reflexive Ethnography of Digital Education Philippe Sormani On the digital transformation of scientific knowledge production. A look at different epistemic cultures Martina Franzen Digital Transformation of Qualitative Research in Educational and Social Sciences. Processes, Policies and Practices Maria Kondratjuk Universities in Transformation. Digital Management of an Institutional Organization Günther R. Burkert, David F. J. Campbell | |
| Room D | PANEL: Digital technologies, communication and organizations Chair: Loïc Riom Assessing biases, relaxing moralism: On ground-truthing practices in machine learning design and application FIorian Jaton Entangling Reporting Templates in the Development Sector Alexandrine Dupras Bioethics in the Making: Some Thoughts on the Agility of Commissions’ Decisions Solène, Gouilhers, Loïc Riom | |
| Room E | PANEL: Taking care of energy infrastructures II Chair: Moritz Fürst Discussant: Chris Henke The Immutability of Home Heating Faye Wade Taking Care of Energy Infrastructure at a Distance: The Proxemics of HVAC Maintenance Tristan Loloum, Alain Bovet, Moritz Fürst Building a “Smart” Campus with Care Madison Snider Reverse Salients in Infrastructural Innovation. The Case of a Neglected Building on a Zero Emission Campus Thomas Berker, Ruth Woods | |
| 15.00-15.30 | Break | |
| 15.30-16.00 | Closing words Chair: Tanja Schneider, Loïc Riom Room A | |
| 16.00-17.00 | Break | |
| 17.00-19.00 | Keynote: Nicholas Shapiro Some Ways of Struggling Against Home Sickness: Apprehending, Enduring, and Subverting Toxic Housing Chair: Alain Kaufmann Room A |
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