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"?
