Conference program 2021

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

09.15-10.00Opening words

Tanja Schneider (STS-CH)
Marc Audétat, Tatiana Smirnova, Philippe Sormani (STS Lab, UNIL)
Dominique Vinck (ISS, UNIL)

Room A
10.00-12.00Panel Session A
Room APANEL: 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 BPANEL: 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 CPANEL: 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 DPANEL: 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 EPANEL: 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
12.00-13.00Lunch Break
13.00-15.00Panel Session B
Room APANEL: 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 BPANEL: 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 CPANEL: 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 DPANEL: 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 EPANEL: 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
15.00-16.00Break
16.00-18.00Keynote: Natasha MyersSeeding Planthroposcenes
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

9.00-11.00Panel Session C
Room APANEL: 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 BWORKSHOP: Rethinking Music from and through Materiality and Fragility I
Chair: Guillaume Heuguet

François Ribac, Alain Müller, Loïc Riom
Room CPANEL: 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 DPANEL: 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
11.00-11.30Break
11.30-13.00Session D: Roundtable + Workshops
Room AROUNDTABLE: Doing Online Ethical Ethnographic Research: Challenges and Opportunities

Chairs: Sylvain Besençon, Nina Khamsy

Participants: David Bozzini, Laurence Tessier, Mackenzie Klema
Room BWORKSHOP: Rethinking Music from and through Materiality and Fragility I

Chair: Maria Eriksson

François Debruyne, Sophie Maisonneuve, Guillaume Heuguet
Room CDis/connection Matters: Natural, Synthetic, Digital

Chair: Mathieu Bolay

Filipe Calvão, Matthieu Bolay, Johannes Brude, Lindsay Bell, Tina Sikka, Dominique Vinck
13.00-14.00Lunch
14.00-15.30STS-CH General assembly

Chair: Tanja Schneider, Loïc Riom

Room A
15.30-16.00Break
16.00-18.00ROUNDTABLE: 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

10.00-12.00Panel Session E
Room APANEL: 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 BPANEL: 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 CPANEL: 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 DPANEL: 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
12.00-13.00Lunch
13.00-15.00Panel Session F
Room APANEL: 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 BPANEL: Reconfigured Time-Spaces: Techno-Digital Mediations, and Their Multiple Rhythms II
Cancelled and combined with the morning session (I) of the same title.
Room CPANEL: 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 DPANEL: 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 EPANEL: 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
15.00-15.30Break
15.30-16.00Closing words

Chair: Tanja Schneider, Loïc Riom

Room A
16.00-17.00Break
17.00-19.00Keynote: Nicholas Shapiro

Some Ways of Struggling Against Home Sickness: Apprehending, Enduring, and Subverting Toxic Housing

Chair: Alain Kaufmann

Room A

Register for the conference:

More information on the STS-CH 2021 conference: