Swedish STS Conference 2024

Photographer: Josefin Landhagen

Welcome to the Swedish STS Conference 2024 that will be held at the Museum of Work in Norrköping, 3-4 October 2024, and is hosted by Technology and Social Change (TEMA T) and Gender Studies (TEMA G) at Linköping University.

The Swedish STS Conference is an open, widely advertised, biennial conference, organised since 2006. It is an interdisciplinary meeting place for researchers interested in issues related to technology and science in society as approached from social science and humanities perspectives, and while it gathers researchers at all levels of their careers, it is planned and coordinated to particularly appeal to doctoral students and early career researchers, with special sessions and events catering to the concerns of junior colleagues.

2024 theme: Transmissions, Mediations, Interferences

The theme of the Swedish STS Conference 2024 is Transmissions, Mediations, Interferences. With this theme, we seek to provoke dynamic and reflective engagement with (un)orthodox modes of doing and transmitting scholarly research. Transmissions – of knowledge, messages, questions, materials, artefacts, and research objects – occur at all stages of research, in different forms, forums, and with the involvement of diverse entities. Transmissions make the matter of research vibrant and lively, evolving dynamically across multiple trajectories. At their most generative, transmissions are not an "outcome" at the end of the research process, but a dynamic and transformative encounter from the very beginning (Jungnickel 2020) that press upon norms, boundaries, sensibilities and affects as they mediate and create interferences between multiple social worlds, spaces and temporalities that academic research inhabits.

Inertia, established conventions, and standardised evaluation metrics can encourage scholars to pursue familiar paths in their choices of research media (paper, screen, keyboards), audiences (peers), methods and form (texts). We are keen to discuss transmissions that break with these norms and push scholars into uncertain ground; which bring challenges but also possibilities for imaginative renewal, reinvention and political engagement of, with and through scholarly practice. This conference invites scholars to explore critically the dynamism and social life of both conventional and norm-breaking transmission of research in the broad sense of the term and at all stages of the research process.

We also want to ask what frictions transmissions - as mediations, as interferences, and as transgressions - bring about? What is their generative potential in different contexts, and for different researchers? Which boundaries are affirmed, and which are unsettled through (un)orthodox modes of transmission, (un)conventional media upon which everyday research relies (e.g. paper/a Word program), or the (un)expected and dispersed - dandelion like - afterlives of our research when it is out "in the wild"?

 

 

Keynotes

Two Time Travellers and the Hope they Wear: Transmitting Research Methods across the Centuries

a joint keynote by Kat Jungnickel & Laura Watts

We live in hope. We work in hope. We make the world in hope through our research practice, as two feminist STS scholars. Our hope is not vanity but hard scholarly work and a commitment to the possibility that, through our research practice being otherwise, we can make worlds that are otherwise. This joint keynote is an exploration of our STS methods for world-weaving hope in the midst of anthropogenic climate change and academic institutional transformation. We will sew together our research across the centuries: from the eighteenth century, through the present, into the twenty-second century.

Our journey through time begins in the early 1800s, in the patent archives. Here, Kat Jungnickel studies the attempts by clothing inventors to change the world, stitch by stitch. We then move through the present moment and its crises, to the early 2100s, where Laura Watts collaborates with energy and tech organisations to change the world through speculative fabulation (‘SF’) created through her ethnographic archive. Both patents and SF are instruments of power and erasure, but it is in their gaps and silences, in what is not quite written, that we find hope and possibility: the organisations and individuals we work with reframe, negotiate, and sometimes even remake their socio-political worlds in acts of quiet resistance. They pressed against binaries and conventional boundaries. We can do no less.

Inspired by our collaborators’ persistent acts of hope across the centuries, we two time travelling scholars will weave together alternative research methods to show how we transmit research inside and outside the academy–and how we can wear hope on our scholarly sleeve.

Speakers

Portrait of Kat Jungnickel
Kat Jungnickel

Kat Jungnickel, Goldsmiths, University of London

Professor Kat Jungnickel is a Director of Methods Lab and PI on the European Research Council–funded project Politics of Patents (POP): Reimagining Citizenship via Clothing Inventions 1820-2020 (www.PoliticsofPatents.org) at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research draws on STS and Feminist Technoscience to explore how people radically re-invent and re-imagine socio-political worlds with mundane and ordinary things. She currently leads a team of sewing social scientists in the POPLab using ethnographic research, interviews and speculative sewing – making and wearing historic data – to develop insights into the history of invention, wearable tech and citizenship. Recent publications include: (ed) How to Do Social Research With… (with Coleman and Puwar, Goldsmiths Press 2023), (ed) Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating research (MIT Press 2020), Creative Practice Ethnographies (with Hjorth, Harris and Coombs, Rowman & Littlefield 2020) and Bikes and Bloomers: Victorian Women Inventors and their Extraordinary Cycle Wear (Goldsmiths Press 2018).

Portrait of Laura Watts
Laura Watts

Laura Watts, Linköping University /Copenhagen University

Laura Watts is an author, poet, ethnographer of sustainable futures, and Visiting Professor at both University of Copenhagen and Linköping University. As a Science & Technology Studies scholar her research and writing explores how energy and data futures are imagined and made in places at the edge. Her last book, Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga (MIT Press), won the 4S Rachel Carson Prize and was Shortlisted for Saltire Research Book of the Year. You can read her most recent short stories in the open access Climate Action Almanac and award-winning Shoreline of Infinity magazine.

Important dates and fee

Important dates

  • Submissions open February 2024
  • Abstract and session proposals must be submitted no later than 17 May 2024
  • Notice of acceptance is given no later than 7 June 2024
  • Registration closes on 26 August 2024
  • Conference: 3-4 October 2024

Conference Fee

975 SEK (includes lunches, coffee breaks and the conference dinner).

Programme

3 October – Day 1

09:00-12:00 Morning pre-conference
A writing workshop for PhD students and early-career scholars with Laura Watts

12:00-13:00 Lunch (the Museum of Work)

13:00-13:15 Welcome Address:
Julia Velkova, Ericka Johnson, Jelmer Brüggemann

13:15-14:30 Keynote session: Two Time Travellers and the Hope they Wear: Transmitting Research Methods across the Centuries – a joint keynote by Kat Jungnickel & Laura Watts

Keynote Abstract (pdf, 120 kB)

14:30-15:00 Coffee

15:00-16:30 Sessions A

16:30-16:45 Short break

16:45-18:00 Sessions B

18:00-19:30 Mingle with drinks

19:30 or 20:00 Dinner

4 October – Day 2

9:00-10:30 Morning workshop with Kat Jungnickel

10:30-10:45 Quick coffee and break

10:45-12:00 Sessions C

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:30-15:00 Sessions D

15:00-16:30 Closing and future plans for the Swedish STS community & conferences

Detailed programme

Title page for conference program
 

 Download programme (pdf)

Venue

Previous Swedish STS Days

2006 Stockholm
2007 Umeå
2008 Göteborg
2009 Uppsala
2011 Linköping
2012 Stockholm
2016 Lund
2018 Uppsala
2020 Umeå
2022 Göteborg

Scientific Committee Chairs

Julia Velkova

Julia Velkova

Julia Velkova is associate professor at TEMA – Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, founder and co-chair of the DATALAB at TEMA, and a Profutura Scientia Fellow with the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. Velkova’s research lies at the intersection of media and communication studies and STS.

Contact

Ericka Johnsson

Ericka Johnson

Ericka Johnson is professor of Gender and Society, Linköping University and director of the WASP-HS national graduate school. Her work is at the intersection of STS and Feminist Technoscience studies, with an empirical focus on medical technologies.

Contact

Jelmer Brüggemann

Jelmer Brüggemann is associate professor at TEMA – Technology and Social Change, Linköping University and docent in sociology. His work lies mainly within medical sociology and is inspired by science and technology studies.

Contact

Scientific Committee members

Supporters

The conference is financially supported by

  • The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Linköping University
  • The Department for Thematic Studies, Linköping University
  • Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien

Organisation

Linköping University