ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on the higher education practice of building students’ interdisciplinary expertise within the large-tent discipline that is Digital Humanities from the vantage point of an STS researcher-educator. I argue that providing an STS perspective within such an interdisciplinary and – at times – instrumentally-oriented setting leads to being positioned either as an interloper or, in a more positive light, as a boundary worker (Sauer & Hagedoorn, 2022). From the vantage point of the boundary worker, developing a pedagogical approach based in cultivating interdisciplinary expertise in students can feel like being Sisyphus: pushing the notion of interdisciplinary expertise and skills in a field wherein students struggle to define “where they stand to begin with” while they simultaneously recognize the value of interdisciplinary expertise in their present and future professions. How does one move forward as an STS researcher-educator on the periphery of a discipline that is inherently interdisciplinary? I present three strategies that have helped realise more agency for interdisciplinary expertise within the University of Groningen’s Digital Humanities curricula: (1) Including thematically-focused interdisciplinary exercises within theoretically, methodologically, and making-oriented courses, (2) Fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between educational practitioners by means of co-taught courses, (3) Application of interdisciplinary expertise as part of knowledge infrastructure building work beyond the walls of the classroom (projects, grant applications) that culminates in the development of new educational activities (Sauer, Hagedoorn & Aasman, 2024). This is not to say that these strategies have been immune to tensions and notable challenges. I want to discuss, with the peers present at this panel, how we may actively exchange best practices and challenges, so as to create a sense of community within the Dutch STS field, and to foster collaborations.

Sauer, S., & Hagedoorn, B. (2022). Linking Data and Disciplines: Interdisciplinary brokering in digital humanities research. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 16(3). Sauer, S., Hagedoorn, B., & Aasman, S. (2024). 'De-Google-ing'our Students: A User Approach to Understanding Archival Media Discovery in the Classroom. VIEW, Journal of European Television History and Culture, 13(26), 47-61.

ABSTRACT. Leibniz Association connects around 100 independent research institutes across Germany which are active in varying fields. These Leibniz institutes collaborate with local universities in multiple ways, including the form of an innovative Leibniz Science Campus (LSC). With the aim of forging new paths in research, such regional partnerships create networks and encourage interdisciplinarity.

“Digital Transformation of Research” (DiTraRe) is a LSC which started in September 2023. Within this consortium, FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure collaborates with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Creating a very diverse and interdisciplinary team, DiTraRe is divided into various working groups. We base our work on four use cases, originating from different KIT faculties: sensitive data in sports science, Chemotion electronic lab notebook, AI in biomedical engineering, publishing large datasets (climate research). On top of that, four dimensions study different aspects of each use case. The dimensions are: exploration and knowledge organisation, legal and ethical challenges, tools and processes, reflection and resonance.

In DiTraRe we are aiming at establishing a new research branch which is digitalisation of research. Making such a growth core successful requires implementing multiple different tasks with the aim of building a community. DiTraRe team organises regular interdisciplinary colloquia, workshops and sessions at conferences, manages newsletter and social media accounts. We also concentrate on conducting research which connects the main topics of our working groups and applying for third-party funding.

In my talk we will introduce the idea of a LSC with a special focus on DiTraRe and its structure and activities. We will present our main challenges which originate from the interdisciplinary nature of the consortium as well as our solutions and ideas on solving them. We will also bring unanswered questions which we would like to discuss with the audience and create possibilities to connect and collaborate.

ABSTRACT. Much has been written about interdisciplinarity, about its logics, its translation problems, its (epistemological) frictions. Anyone who has worked or tried to work interdisciplinarily knows about the many challenges involved. Nevertheless, one of today’s commonplaces is that existing problems and crises do not care about disciplinary boundaries; inter- and even transdisciplinarity is called for. Research and research institutions are often valued, justified and funded (or not) according to how publics and policy perceives their “impact”. With this in mind, it is not surprising that the number of formats aimed at facilitating interdisciplinary work is growing.

This paper looks at formats that aim to facilitate interdisciplinary work, and explores practices and proposed practices to enable interdisciplinarity. Interests lie in how disciplines and interdisciplinarity are enacted and problematised in these formats. How is knowledge integration supposed to be enabled? What roles do different kinds of frictions play (or not)? And how are power dynamics dealt with and addressed (or not)?

To answer these questions qualitative content analysis has been employed towards different facilitation formats including tool boxes, peer-reviewed articles, blog posts, guidance documents and card sets. The thematic focus is on sustainability research, but the observations travel more broadly.

ABSTRACT. In developing plans for the energy transition, policy makers increasingly rely on computational models. These models play a crucial role in (de)legitimizing actors’ perspectives and steer which questions will be asked, addressed or left out. Participatory modelling – the construction and assessment of models with stakeholders – is a promising way to include more diverse perspectives and create a greater perception of justice in the decision-making process.

We took a four step approach to an inter- and transdisciplinary participatory modelling project for the heat transition in the Dutch city of Utrecht. This was a collaborative process among Leiden University (public administration, economics), TU Delft (energy system modelling), the local municipality and an energy cooperative. First, we defined the central problem to be modelled. For this, we conducted 12 stakeholder interviews, used as input for a workshop where stakeholders decided upon the model scope and central modelling question. The second step consisted of a Participatory Value Evaluation among local inhabitants, to gather their values and perspectives. In the third step we constructed the model based on the input gathered in the previous steps. Finally, the fourth step consisted of a sense-making workshop, in which stakeholders worked with and reflected upon the model to come to a representation of the local heat transition that would, ideally, respect the diversity of perspectives among stakeholders.

In this paper, we assess the transformative potential of our participatory modelling approach. We reflect upon its effects on both the research and decision-making processes. We pay special attention to stakeholders’ experience of the process, the perspectives embedded in the model, the change in stakeholders’ perspectives resulting from the modelling process and the effects of the process on the interaction among stakeholders. In so doing, we wish to contribute to democratization of energy modelling and energy policy making.

ABSTRACT. In the centre of Beijing, a city with a population exceeding 20 million, which embodies Chinese statehood and economic “miracle”, lie historic neighborhoods of traditional courtyard residences known as “hutongs”. Having witnessed the eras of imperial urban design, socialist city planning, and post-industrial transformation, hutongs exemplify persistence and adaptation of the social worlds against the background of technologization, gentrification and museification. Surrounded by the large-scale contemporary infrastructures and modern architecture, hutongs maintain both material and imaginary borders, preserving a microenvironment and communities with tense connections and shared lifestyles. At the same time, they are fully integrated in the city space, permeable to various mobilities and flows. The symbolic meanings, social organization, and embodied space-objects relationships of hutongs simultaneously stand in opposition to the rest of Beijing and preserve its memory and identity. The flexibility of hutongs are challenging for the formal categorizations and the modern distinctions between urban and rural; village, town and city; pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial; center and periphery; authenticity and commodification. In this report, we will explore the sociomaterial organization of hutong from a hermeneutical perspective. The research question is: what are the meanings and interpretations of the hutongs arising in the context of Beijing city? Drawing on the methods of visual sociology and ethnography, micro-observations and artistic representations, we examine the internal tensions and reconciliations between the private and the public spheres, and between tradition and modernity.

ABSTRACT. Land is a finite resource, yet demands for housing, industry, agriculture, energy, nature, recreation, and climate adaptation continue to rise. Many of these functions compete, requiring difficult trade-offs. The Netherlands exemplifies these tensions. Rising spatial pressures led to the development of the RuimteScanner, a tool designed to translate future spatial claims into integrated spatial visions. Initially used to support national spatial planning, it is now being repurposed by the Directorate-General for Water and Soil (DGWB) as a conversational tool to facilitate regional dialogues under the Water and Soil–based planning policy. This transition places the tool in a fundamentally new operating context. This poses a problem.

Climate service research shows that such contextual factors strongly shape usability. Viewing the RuimteScanner as a climate service underscores the need to understand how it functions within broader decision-making processes. Traditional human-centric approaches to usability, although valuable, focus mainly on direct interactions between users and tools. As a result, they often overlook wider contextual influences and the position a tool occupies within complex networks of actors, institutions, and decisions.

To address this limitation, we adopted an Actor Network Theory perspective, which considers both human and non-human actors—such as tools, policy documents, and organizational structures—as interconnected network components. From this perspective, usability depends not only on user interaction but also on how effectively a tool can enter, adapt to, and integrate within these networks.

Our research aims to include this “contextual sensitivity” into the RuimteScanner’s redevelopment. By observing project meetings, conducting interviews with original users, developers, and future users, and organizing workshops/focus groups, we identify the RuimteScanner’s evolving objectives, translate these insights into design criteria, analyze the developers’ decision context, and test the redeveloped tool with potential users. Through this approach, we assess whether greater contextual sensitivity leads to higher usability.

ABSTRACT. Research culture reforms in Dutch universities have foregrounded social safety as a national priority and institutional responsibility, resulting in an expanding infrastructure of policies, reporting mechanisms and accountability frameworks aimed at preventing intimidation, discrimination and power abuse. While these reforms promise to delimit exposure of academic minorities to inappropriate behaviors, a series of public controversies suggests that they also reshape the conditions under which critique, dissent and feminist knowledge-making can be articulated within academia. I here examine social safety as a contested site, where governance ambitions, epistemic authority and lived experiences of harm intersect. Based on an STS controversy study-design and analysis of the court proceedings and their public documentation, my contribution centers on the dismissal of Professor Täuber from the University of Groningen, treating the case not as an isolated personnel conflict, but as a strategic site for analyzing how universities govern dissent under conditions of reform and public exposure. Täuber’s 2019 paper on DEI policies, which aimed at exposing how inclusion schemes still reproduce exclusion, was reframed as overly personal and institutionally damaging, despite being formally cleared of research integrity violations. What followed (years of mediation and formal dismissal) reveal a mechanism through which power-critical scholarship becomes epistemically downgraded and morally reclassified. The case shows how governance-oriented safety frameworks can discipline feminist dissent while remaining nominally aligned with reform ideals. And at this breakdown point two partially incompatible epistemologies of safety are in tension: one approaches it as a matter of governance and procedural control; the other understands safety as shaped by power asymmetries and unequal risks attached to competing along the academic track. I conclude by arguing that research culture reforms in the Netherlands must confront this tension if universities are to remain spaces where critical, reflexive and power-sensitive knowledges can flourish, without becoming career-ending endeavors.

ABSTRACT. Debates on research culture often foreground transparency, integrity, and reform, yet much of academic life is structured through what remains informal, opaque, and unofficial. This paper introduces the concept of “secret academia” to describe the hidden cultural layer of academic culture through which power is exercised, careers are shaped, and misconduct is normalized or concealed. The Secret Academia conceptualizes academic culture not only as formal governance, evaluation metrics, or ethical frameworks, but as a system of informal rules, tacit expectations, and unspoken dependencies that operate alongside official institutions. Secret academia manifests in practices such as selective silence around abuse, informal patronage networks, reputational shielding, and the normalization of self-exploitation under conditions of precarity and competition. These practices are not anomalies but integral to contemporary academic culture, particularly within neoliberal research regimes that reward productivity, loyalty, and strategic conformity. By making these hidden structures visible, the paper challenges individualizing accounts of misconduct and instead frames harm as systemically produced and culturally sustained. The contribution engages ongoing discussions on uncertainty and reform in academic research by arguing that meaningful cultural change requires confronting not only policies and incentives, but also the informal power structures that shape everyday academic life and limit accountability.

ABSTRACT. Transformative change is widely recognised as essential to address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and broader interconnected global crises. It is defined as ‘fundamental, system-wide shifts in views, structures, and practices’ (O’Brien et al. 2024 p. 5). Yet, translating this ambition into lasting societal change remains highly challenging. A key barrier lies in entrenched structures and power dynamics that constrain not only the implementation of new ideas and innovations, but also the dismantling of old systems and the ability to sustain these changes over time. Despite this, power dynamics remain underexplored in research on transformative change.

This paper examines how transformative power is exercised and where it remains constrained within 14 EU-funded research projects in the Transformative Change cluster. We conducted a reflective power-mapping exercise with project coordinators, using an integrated framework of power dimensions (power to, over, with, and within) and power types (prefigurative, reinforcive, and countervailing). To provide broader context, the study also draws on five semi-structured interviews with EU policymakers and officials.

The analysis shows that the Horizon Europe projects most strongly mobilise prefigurative forms of power, particularly through experimentation with new concepts, practices, narratives (power to), and collaborative arrangements (power with). Power within - shaping understandings, agency, and ownership - is also frequently fostered. In contrast, countervailing and reinforcive forms of power, especially those involving power over (e.g., challenging entrenched structures or institutionalising new governance arrangements), are consistently weaker. These patterns point to deeper, systemic challenges rather than project-level shortcomings.

Moreover, the interviews with EU policy officials highlight complementary tensions at the science-policy interface, including institutional silos, limited transition capacity, unclear mandates, and difficulties sustaining momentum. Together, the findings reveal a systemic mismatch between transformative expectations placed on research and the authority, capacities, and leadership required to enact and sustain transformative change.

ABSTRACT. Sustainability transitions are inherently future-oriented, motivating transition scholars to explore future orientation and representations, which are recognized as critical arenas for agency and transformative action. Recent research, however, highlights significant constraints to future orientation, stemming from incumbent actors, techniques of futuring, affective states, and future cultures. Concurrently, attention is increasingly directed toward the role of imagination and imaginaries as powerful forces shaping temporal and spatial representations. However, despite growing interest, the study of imaginaries in transitions suffers from theoretical uprootedness, unclear conceptualization, conceptual overlaps, and predominant limiting attachment to the future. This theoretical paper addresses this gap by conducting a conceptual review of the literature on imagination, future, and temporal orientation across Sustainability Transition Studies, Futures Studies, and Science and Technology Studies, drawing on literature underlying imaginaries research and classic social theory to align approaches. This approach differs from previous systematic reviews of literature as the core aim is to present a framework that sharpens boundaries and clarifies relationships among concepts related to imagination, future orientation, and broader temporal horizons. Our primary focus is to provide an ontologically and theoretically sound reconceptualization of imaginaries as a critical link between how societies intelligibly connect future orientation with the past and present, and the material world. We also inquire into narrative forms of discursive representation, such as visions, narratives, expectations, and utopias. By doing so, we aim to provide a transparent framework for understanding the connections between imaginaries and other core concepts in the research of future and temporal orientation, one that addresses both structure-changing and structure-preserving perspectives. Our work paves the way for moving the field beyond fragmented, descriptive research on future orientation across different domains, towards interaction across different concepts, levels of structuration, and temporalities, thereby enhancing the analytical rigor of transition research and related disciplines.

ABSTRACT. Nuclear fusion is an experimental potential source of energy whose research has been ongoing for almost 80 years. Such a resource- and time-consuming process of research has been facilitated by extensive recourse to expectations and promises. Nuclear fusion is commonly depicted as a sustainable, safe, and practically infinite source of energy. On one hand, fusion represents an innovative technological solution that can meet all the energy needs of a modern society. On the other, it envisages an old-fashioned system for energy production akin to the one represented by nuclear fission reactors currently in operation. Indeed, although the ways in which nuclear fusion and fission produce energy differ from each other, their production facilities share similarities, and both fusion and fission assume a centralised energy system. Relying on STS scholarship, this paper investigates an underresearched topic, namely the representation of the promise of nuclear fusion in the traditional and social media (i.e. leading newspapers and Facebook), which participate in constructing collective expectations of technoscience. This paper asks 1) how do the traditional and social media frame and define fusion promises, and 2) which is the future that these fusion representations envisage, such as a means of mitigating climate change and/or as an obstacle to the necessary transformations of the energy systems. Applying a mixed-methods approach, the paper places the analysis within the broader discourses on nuclear power. A long-term and cross-country analysis will enable the comparison of the fusion and fission promises in countries with and without nuclear power plants (i.e. UK and Italy). By examining the role of fusion promises in the capture of futures by the existing nuclear-fission-centred imaginaries, interests, and materialities, this research helps to explore the omnipresent dilemmas and tensions of technoscientific promising between novelty and continuity – between radical innovation and ability to deliver.

ABSTRACT. Future imaginaries—whether technological, ecological, or political—do not merely emerge; they circulate, proliferate, and endure through deliberate and often invisible infrastructures. Whether from policy, media, business, and public engagement, future visions spread communicatively (via policy papers, sci-fi, concept videos) and materially (through prototypes, exhibitions, demonstrations). We argue that actors—governments, corporations, activists, engineers—deploy diverse strategies to ensure "their" futures remain mobile and resilient, resisting stagnation. Yet, futures do get stuck— not simply due to failures of their advocates or loss of credibility, but (1) in moments of transition from communicative formats towards materalization or (2) when they encounter other, contradictory future narratives and imaginaries. With our contribution we explore how actors try to manage transitions and dissolve contradictories by linking future imaginaries together in order to make them actionable again.    We draw on the notion of re-combination (Besio/Meyer 2015) as a critical process involving negotiation, alignment, or hybridization of plural futures to specify and stabilize them in practice. Comparing cases from industrial platformization and sustainable AI, we discuss three kinds of re-combination processes: with (1) decoupling future visions are rhetorically embraced but structurally disengaged from implementation; whereas (2) translation adapts futures when crossing institutional, cultural, or epistemic boundaries; (3) interfaces are points of engagement that can be used by different actors according to their needs.  We conclude that “stuck” futures reveal the friction inherent in pluralistic, heterogenous, co-constituted futures. Our contribution lies in reframing future-making as a relational and contested practice. By showing that futures are not “stuck” but rather “stalled” and can get going again, we offer analytical tools to better understand—and intervene in—the dissemination of future imaginaries, particularly in contexts demanding sustainability, equity, and resilience.

ABSTRACT. Climate change and other sustainability pressures are challenging urban areas and require fundamental and multiple adjustments to urban practices, infrastructures, competences, business models and policy incentives. While urban transformations can occur – and have occurred – spontaneously, inducing and steering urban transformations is a significant challenge.

Studies on sustainability transitions have called for experiments as a source of learning, because learning processes have the potential to influence, accelerate or reorient transitions. However, research on learning in sustainability transitions is still poor in conceptual clarity and empirical evidence. This leads to questions about the actual impact of experiments in practice, both concerning their transformative effect and their level of inclusivity.

This paper develops a transdisciplinary and cyclical approach for transformative interventions based on four elements: - A System of practices: a social-practices-based way of scoping and analyzing the challenge and current policy mix - Defining a portfolio of Living Lab experiments - A Reflection, Learning & Adaptation Cycle

Accordingly, it combines policy mix analysis with (urban) experimental approaches, addressing intervention through SPT elements like meanings, competences, and materialities. As an illustrative case study, we elaborate urban mobility transformations in Maastricht (The Netherlands, 2010 - 2030), including its entanglements with other relevant domains and practices like housing, shopping and urban planning. Our case study combines a retrospective analysis of car constraining policies with promoting car alternatives, with a prospective discussion on how to make policies more transitional.

The merit of this approach is that it goes beyond the mainstream transition (governance) concept of a simple regime shift from A to B through ‘upscaling niches’. Instead, it is a more context-sensitive concept of ‘distributed upscaling’ of multiple adapted elements within reconfiguring practices. This can help to develop more locally-tailored interventions to accelerate sustainability transitions for specific locations.

ABSTRACT. Topic

This study examines University Campus Living Labs (UCLLs) as emerging mechanisms through which universities experiment with and demonstrate sustainability transitions. The research focuses on how the UCLL concept functions as both a collective vision and institutional practice, addressing the ambiguity and heterogeneity observed in campus living lab initiatives globally.

Research Question

The main research question investigates how campuses narrate and institutionalize the UCLL imaginary, from visions and narratives to governance structures and project pipelines. The study aims to understand how universities actively construct and stabilize the "campus as a living lab" imaginary through socio-technical embedding, addressing the gap in systematic analysis of how sustainability agendas become anchored in the socio-material and procedural fabric of universities.

Methods

The study adopts a comparative literature-study based design analyzing 12 detailed case studies of Campus Living Labs and Smart Campus initiatives. Cases were purposefully selected to capture variation across geography, governance models, and degrees of institutionalization using maximum-variation sampling logic. The analysis applies reflexive thematic analysis within cases followed by cross-case synthesis to identify convergences, divergences, and meta-themes. The conceptual framework combines science and technology studies concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries and boundary objects to understand how UCLLs coordinate diverse actors while maintaining interpretive flexibility.

ABSTRACT. In times of intertwined socio-environmental, geopolitical, and technological crises, universities, particularly technical universities, are increasingly called upon to reconfigure how knowledge and technology are produced. Living Labs have emerged as prominent infrastructures within this shift, intended to institutionalise open and participatory experimentation that brings together researchers, citizens, policymakers, and industry actors. As such, Living Labs are often presented as key instruments for societal transformation, promising to connect scientific knowledge production with democratic participation, social inclusion, and sustainability goals. At the same time, their expanding role raises important questions about responsibility, legitimacy, and the governance of innovation under conditions of uncertainty. Drawing on STS scholarship and literature on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), this contribution examines Living Labs as reflexive innovation settings. While they open up research processes to new actors and forms of expertise, they also introduce new constraints and expectations for academic work. Empirically, the paper is based on a case study of several Living Lab initiatives at a large technical university in Germany. We analyse how transdisciplinary, real-world experimentation reshapes relations between science and society in everyday research practice. The analysis highlights recurring tensions: between academic autonomy and societal relevance; between disciplinary standards and transdisciplinary collaboration; between fast-paced innovation and ethically reflexive research; and between broad participation and control over experimental design and validity. Methodologically, we adopt a multi-level approach that connects local research practices to organisational structures, (inter)national policy frameworks, and global agendas such as the Sustainable Development Goals. Rather than proposing fixed normative solutions, we argue for a practice-based and reflexive understanding of Living Labs, in which responsibility is negotiated, relational, and often contested. In short, the presentation contributes to rethinking (and thus shaping) Living Labs as critical infrastructures for knowledge and technology production in times of global shifts.

ABSTRACT. In the context of a practical turn in the philosophy of technology (Eggink & Dorrestijn, 2026) and in line with ethics of technology as accompaniment to technology development (Verbeek 2011) we introduced the concept of an “ethical parallel track for innovations” (Dorrestijn & Eggink, 2021; Dorrestijn et.al. 2024). Ethics can be made practical in technology development by applying a series of ethical tools for specific phases or aspects in design. Together these interventions build up to a parallel track for ethics all along a design process. The better the ethical interventions connect to the design process, the better this ethical parallel track works. Therefore, a foundational question is: parallel to what, and parallel how? What are relevant models for innovation processes, and how can ethical deliberation become connected in a parallel track? As a contribution to answering this question, we will discuss some of models for theoretical understanding and practical governance of design and innovation processes. We will identify what are fundamental elements where ethical intervention can be connected. One innovation process model are the Technological Readiness Levels. For connecting ethics it seems useful if a notion of ethical readiness (levels) becomes elaborated. In design methods there are often successive phases (such as problem statement, concepts, pilot), which prompts the question if there are specific ethical aspects in different phases. Other elements in design methods we will discuss are diverging and converging phases (Roozenburg & Eekels, 1991), the mutual development of problem and solution as the core of design thinking as described by Dorst (2011), and the iterative nature of development processes (Buijs, 2012). This theoretical exercise is in support of a practical ethics, which will be made accessible by visual representations of the design models and ethical track.

ABSTRACT. There exists a wide range of practical workforms that can be applied around the design process to support ethical reflection. This research has resulted in a simple framework in which such workforms can be positioned. The aims of this framework are (1) to help designers choose from the large number of available workforms, (2) to make explicit the purposes for which these workforms can be used, and (3) to help identify where there is room for the development of new worksforms.

This research was initiated with the following research question:

What is an appropriate classification of different workforms addressing the impact and ethics of technology, such that it becomes clear at what moment and for what purpose they can be applied?

A large number of workforms were examined looking at the stage of the design process at which they can be applied and the possible outcomes they may generate. A complex overview was subsequently strongly simplified into a concise framework. This framework shows that workforms can broadly be divided into two areas of application. First, considering societal impact helps determine adjustments in design and implementation. Second, design choices also have a personal impact, and methods can support reflection on how these choices affect designers on a personal level or influence their professional role as designers.

Design processes take many forms but consist of one or more successive divergent steps as well as steps in which decisions are made. In parallel, for both societal and personal impact, methods can be deliberately deployed in alignment with these phases. In divergent phases, workforms introduce “slow” reflective questions that broaden perspectives and expand the range of possible options. In convergent phase of the design process, by contrast, it is essential to arrive at ethical decision-making.

ABSTRACT. This workshop presents a toolkit for working with divergence and convergence toward common ground on what values are important, how they work together and what they mean in a particular context of technology development. The toolkit itself comprises of the shapes that values will take for the purpose of the workshop, and these physical, handheld objects offer participants an unique abstract language with which to discuss things that are important to them in the role they are playing, within their research team, as a developer or user, or in representing a stakeholder. This particular workshop will start with a question or context from the audience, relevant to the ‘practical turn’ engaged by the track. Having a secondary function, the performance of the workshop will not only generate discussion around the topic of the practical turn itself, but will provide insights into how normativity generates relationships, between objects, and with as well as between people. The workshop will end with observations from the workshop leader as well as participants on spatial aspects of the workshop’s performance, noting how these both embody and enable or constrain relationships between the shapes and the participants, between the shapes as values, between the model of the question or context built through the shapes during the workshop and the ideals originally held by participants about the values they initially chose. In sum, the workshop enacts and illustrates the values of the practical turn, by examining the question itself more deeply through exercises in divergence and convergence, abstraction and embodiment. Further, it demonstrates how to use an effective tool for working through plurality, highlighting the importance of (expert?) mediation in enabling the interaction between abstraction and the concrete that underlies values talk in general.

ABSTRACT. Tracing knowledge ownership offers us a method that can investigate extant inequalities of knowledge and technological progress. We locate this investigation in an experiment of decentralized production that connects different artisanal actors engaged in the production and use of handwoven Indian cotton textiles. To unweave colonial ruptures, we will present attempts of an Indian handloom research collective to facilitate knowledge exchanges between local farmers, spinners, weavers and customers in the hope of building a ‘handloom knowledge commons’, where knowledge ownership is both individual and collective. Furthermore, this presentation will set up yarn, textile and film installations to teach participants how to read textiles, an exercise that is designed to make textile literacy part of common knowledge. This interactive exercise will upturn knowledge hierarchies created between those who name their knowledge (producing texts) versus those who perform their embodied knowledge (producing textiles). The installations will exhibit material and technological interventions carried out by the artisanal collective that resulted in successfully repurposing colonial machines that were originally designed to cater to American cotton monocultures grown in large scale plantations, to produce yarn of various counts and twists from short and medium staple hybrid varieties of organically grown indigenous cottons grown by smallholder cooperative farms.

ABSTRACT. Amidst protracted patent battles over foundational CRISPR–Cas9 technologies and the growing concentration of proprietary seed-sector patent portfolios, knowledge ownership of gene editing (and their derivatives) are often performed through legal mechanisms. Yet, in contexts historically excluded from crop biotechnology research and innovation, we argue that knowledge ownership extends beyond legal mechanisms to include the ways in which the African-ness of research and innovation practices and infrastructure is foregrounded in efforts to build scientific autonomy.

This paper examines how knowledge ownership in crop genome editing is understood and performed by scientists in Ghana and Kenya working to institutionalize gene editing within national agricultural research systems. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and 30 interviews with molecular biologists, plant breeders, and research administrators, we investigate how boundaries around crop genome editing are enacted in practice through efforts to make these technologies “African.”

Our findings show that knowledge ownership, as articulated by our interlocutors, extends beyond questions of patenting or access to CRISPR technologies. Instead, ownership is interwoven with efforts to build scientific autonomy, retain control over research agendas, and align innovation with national development visions. We find that “African-ness” is performed and recognized through situated practices, including who initiates research projects, where genetic engineering physically takes place, how research infrastructures are assembled, and which development trajectories knowledge production is made to serve. Yet our interlocutors do not problematize the historical and geo-political context from which CRISPR-Cas9 has emerged nor the expertise, material, and services provided by foreign companies and researchers.

By foregrounding how scientists in historically marginalized research contexts enact knowledge ownership that go beyond the legal sphere, this paper contributes to rethinking dominant Science and Law knowledge regimes and highlights crop genome editing as a site where alternative forms of knowledge ownership are being contested

ABSTRACT. The global transition toward knowledge capitalism has reconfigured geopolitical power, economic relations, and policy agendas in the contemporary world-system. Within this transformation, three interconnected dynamics structure the United States' current engagement with Latin America. First, the transition has intensified the peripheralization of Latin American economies, as the region becomes increasingly marginalized from knowledge production and capitalization and integrated into innovation-driven global value chains primarily as a supplier of strategic resources, data, and low-value segments rather than as a site of technological creation. This marginalization is geopolitically consequential, as economic and technological asymmetries have historically underpinned asymmetric political relations between the United States and Latin America. Second, the relative decline of U.S. power and the emergence of China as a global actor have reshaped U.S. geopolitical priorities, reinforcing Latin America’s position as an arena of strategic competition. This shift cannot be fully understood without accounting for U.S.–China rivalry in knowledge production and capitalization, which underlies the recent reinforcement of U.S. hemispheric power across the Western Hemisphere. Third, the U.S. agenda of hegemonic projection toward the region has been reshaped by the imperatives of knowledge capitalism, encompassing priorities such as semiconductor supply-chain “de-risking” and securing access to rare and strategic minerals. Together, these dynamics highlight how science and technology have become central instruments of geopolitical strategy, redefining U.S. influence in Latin America and the region’s position within an evolving global order shaped by technological rivalry.

ABSTRACT. ‘Complexity science’ has existed as a scientific label for roughly four decades, never quite managing to become fully institutionalized. Indeed, scholars agree that this field cannot be parsed as an established discipline or described as simply interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. Rather, it has been defined as a ‘quasi-discipline’ or a ‘scientific platform’. Epistemologically, complexity science combines an antireductionist impetus and the formal acknowledgement of uncertainty with a purely quantitative methodological toolbox. Yet, the semantic openness of the term ‘complexity’ allows it to encompass a broad array of research foci. Since its early days, the field explicitly embodied a challenge to academic tradition and, increasingly, it is associated with the production of societally relevant knowledge. An idiosyncratic example of contemporary disciplinary rearrangement, complexity science shows that efforts to improve science are the messy and unstable result of contrasting forces. From an STS perspective, it is crucial to attend to how scientists navigate these forces, both collectively and individually.

To this end, I carried out empirical research at the CSH, a research center in Vienna. I relied on document analysis, interviews and participant observation, and specified my research interests to identity work and interdisciplinary practice. First, the institutional flexibility of complexity science emerged as both a challenge and an opportunity. Indeed, while researchers struggle to feel a sense of belonging or security in complexity science, they value the possibility to cultivate research interests more freely than in their ‘home disciplines’. Second, my research shows that the integration of different knowledges in complexity science is fraught with asymmetries. This is mainly predicated on the epistemic authority of quantitative approaches, which biases the complexity science landscape towards a few dominant disciplines, and on publication pressure, which is experienced even by the most well-intentioned scientists as an insurmountable bottleneck for the careful practice of interdisciplinarity.

ABSTRACT. Despite a long standing history of anthropology as an interdisciplinary discipline, existing literature on interdisciplinarity—within and beyond anthropology—emphasizes collaboration and negotiation among scholars from disparate fields. However, less work addresses researchers who, educated across scientific domains, integrate multiple disciplinary methods during solo ethnographic research, shifting interdisciplinarity from a collective enterprise to a lived, individual practice. Drawing on reflections from investigating everyday knowledge of drinking water—an inherently, albeit not uniquely, interdisciplinary topic—this presentation examines what unfolds when ethnography navigates multiple epistemologies without the buffer of a team. It explores the risks and advantages of one researcher moving between multiple knowledge frameworks, proposing "ethnographic interdisciplinary experience" as a concept emerging from such embodied, situated crossings. Engaging John Dewey’s concept of experience, the talk conceptualizes interdisciplinary work as a series of situated “undergoing and doing” episodes that transform both researcher and inquiry over time. This perspective foregrounds how learning other sciences is not mere acquisition of methods but reconstruction of habits of perception, inference, and judgment in concrete research encounters. The talk highlights solo navigation's unique contributions to knowledge production, urging recognition of such approaches in interdisciplinary scholarship.

ABSTRACT. Integration is often considered a defining characteristic of interdisciplinarity, distinguishing it from other forms of discipline-crossing, such as multidisciplinarity. But this definition is debated. To better understand the relationship between the terms “interdisciplinarity” and “integration”, we set out to explore how the discourses of these terms became connected, which understandings they carried prior to their linkage, and how their understandings evolved since.

We took a sample of recent (2020-2024) interdisciplinary education literature to understand how authors defined interdisciplinarity and its relationship to integration when using the term to characterize educational initiatives. We related this to how interdisciplinarity and integration were understood – in relation to one another and separately – in 20th century literature.

We found that recent authors often did not provide definitions of interdisciplinarity, which confirms and updates the decades-old concern that interdisciplinarity is often used while left un(der)conceptualized. Those who took integration as a defining characteristic of interdisciplinarity often substantiated their definition with direct or indirect reference to texts that made this link in the 1950s to 1970s. Particularly, the collaborative understanding of interdisciplinarity and integration that sprang from the social sciences movement towards interdisciplinarity was prominent in the recent literature, including the use of integration as an evaluative criterion of ‘genuine’ or true interdisciplinarity. Moreover, the ‘integrated curriculum’ discourse from Northern American general and liberal education literature was reflected in recent publications. In contrast, unity of science logics that were prominent in older literature, was not apparent in our sample of recent interdisciplinary education literature.

Taken together, we demonstrate that current understandings of interdisciplinarity, and particularly its reliance on integration, are founded on conceptualizations coined between the 1930s and 1970s. This relationship and its underlying reasoning are, however, often left implicit and the concept integration often remains insufficiently precise to serve as an evaluative or analytical category.

ABSTRACT. As academic research cultures undergo intensified pressures toward productivity, disciplinarity, and performative impact, early-career researchers engaged in transformative, inter- and transdisciplinary research often find themselves navigating profound uncertainty, tension, and vulnerability. These experiences - emotional, embodied, relational, and political - remain largely invisible within dominant academic knowledge practices. This paper explores how such ‘in-between’ spaces can become sites of collective sense-making, care, and transformation.

One year after participating in a course on transformative research, a group of 21 early-career researchers re-convened to reflect on what it means to be and become transformative researchers within and beyond academia. Drawing on the Circle of Letters method, we engaged in a dialogical, circular exchange of personal letters followed by collective reflection and collaborative analysis, combining poetic inquiry and participatory narrative inquiry. This two-step approach intentionally separates phases of opening up - attending to emotions, resonances, and tensions - from phases of closing down, where shared themes and narratives are carefully synthesised.

Rather than aiming for fixed conclusions, our process foregrounds becoming-with: a relational mode of inquiry that treats subjectivity, vulnerability, and care not as methodological risks, but as epistemic resources. Empirically, the project surfaces how early-career researchers navigate tensions between personal values and academic norms, practice relational forms of scholarship, and sustain commitment to transformative research under conditions of uncertainty. Methodologically, it demonstrates how dialogical letter writing and poetic-narrative analysis can function as low-threshold, collective infrastructures for reflexivity across time zones and institutional contexts.

By making visible the lived realities of transformative research work, this paper contributes to debates on research culture(s) in transition, offering both a critique of prevailing academic norms and a generative example of alternative, care-centred research practices.

ABSTRACT. Growing scientific research talent requires technical training, material resources, and nurturing researchers’ social well-being, especially as progression is impacted by factors such as gender and ethnicity, producing a widely acknowledged leaky pipeline. Funded under Research Ireland’s Science Policy Research stand, this project explores the research talent pipeline and research culture(s) in Ireland, Denmark and Singapore as examples of small, advanced economies. Our project uses qualitative interviews to map the lived experiences of postdoctoral staff (n=50) within the talent pipeline to understand the cultural practices, traditions, and mores that constitute the qualitative and quantitative elements, as well as the constraints and blockages. We seek, in an anarchist form, to mis-use value stream mapping, a core lean management tool (used in industries such as manufacturing to document all steps within a production process), to trace often invisible elements which form the production process of postdocs within the higher education ecosystem. Stepping beyond discussions of precariousness and gender equality, our aim is to visualise material resources, information flow, value and waste. In this paper, we direct our attention to the interaction(s) between Neo-Fordism and social mores (cultural habits and folkways). For example, the advice ‘ask for forgiveness rather than permission’ often echoes in the hallways of Irish universities, a system born during British Colonialism, a strikingly different history than the Scandinavian Janteloven, a set of cultural mores first noted in Aksel Sandemose's novel "A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks" and summarised as “You are not to think you're anyone special, or that you're better than us”. Our intention here is to question how postdocs in these rich sociohistorical settings experience the push towards a notional transnational research culture.

ABSTRACT. All academics navigate the competitive research culture, which creates an uneven playing field and makes it difficult to sustain research positions especially for those who are discriminated in multiple ways. The concept of intersectionality has taught us that categories of discrimination such as race, class, gender and age intersect with disability. This contribution examines the following questions through an intersectional lens: How do researchers with disabilities and impairments experience research culture in Germany? What barriers and opportunities can be identified? We aim to go beyond the focus on barriers and additionally investigate opportunities for marginalized researchers in academia to broaden the view on academic inclusion.

Our data was generated through 12 interviews (within a mixed method design for a survey) on career paths of marginalized researchers at four universities in Germany. Implementing intersectionality in research methods requires intentional integration of its principles at every stage, with a focus on power, complexity, and context. The analysis of lived experiences does not narrow its focus exclusively to disability but centers discriminating experiences more broadly. This allows for a heightened analytical sensitivity to intersectionality, as the individuals in question are not addressed or categorized primarily through identity labels.

The presentation addresses the tension between productivity, equity and wellbeing. The results show that pressure to perform and the precarity of German academia affect researchers differently, depending on their social position. We call intersecting obstacles researchers face multiple barriers, to highlight the specific situation facing multiple discrimination. Experiences in our interview material can be systematically categorized into the multiple barriers: structural and knowledge-related conditions, invisible normativity and internalized stigma. At the same time, academia offers opportunities that have positive effects on self-actualization and increase inner capacities for marginalized and in particular disabled researchers.

ABSTRACT. Research culture transitions can be shaped by shifts in policy and infrastructure, but they can also be spurred on by changing discourses within scientific communities. In the case of climate science, debates around the appropriate roles and activities of researchers have become increasingly polarized, prompting individual researchers to demarcate and defend their positions as climate scientists in the public sphere. In doing so, these scientists are renegotiating long-standing academic norms and legitimate scientific roles in the face of current climatic and socio-political transformations. In this study, we interviewed thirty-five climate scientists across diverse disciplines and career stages working in the Netherlands about their perceptions of their roles and activities in the public sphere. We identify two empirically salient dimensions along which climate scientists delineate their roles and activities, which we term politicization and participation. Taking these dimensions as structuring axes, we have constructed an analytic framework on which we map the statements of our interviewees. Furthermore, we highlight four boundary registers centered on scientific credibility, political efficacy, normative responsibility, and individual capacity that scientists mobilize to demarcate their roles and activities in the public sphere. Our research provides empirical grounding for theoretical conceptualizations of scientists' public roles and reveals how climate scientists are actively reshaping norms around public engagement in response to the evolving Dutch climate research context.

ABSTRACT. Energy transitions rely heavily on visions, scenarios and expectations about the future. These images of the future are not passive descriptions, they are performative: they actively shape which pathways are pursued, which technologies are supported, and which social values are incorporated or sidelined through investment decisions, policy directions, infrastructure design and public debates. This performativity is grounded in power-laden knowledge practices such as modelling, policy expertise, economic valuation, participatory inputs, etc. Futures do not become real simply because actors agree on them, but because certain forms of knowledge are seen as legitimate and have the power to define what futures are feasible, necessary, or desirable, whereas other forms of knowledge get sidelined/marginalized.

Futures can become stuck when particular visions harden, epistemic authority narrows and alternative perspectives are marginalized. This paper examines how such captivity of collective futuring emerges, persists, and is occasionally disrupted in the Dutch energy transition. We investigate how epistemic diversity expands or contracts over time, and how this contributes to particular futures becoming stuck. Through a comparative study of three energy technologies – hydrogen, onshore wind, and nuclear energy – we trace episodes of epistemic closure, opening and reopening in the Netherlands. Hydrogen illustrates a shift from political enthusiasm encouraging epistemic diversity to institutional and industrial stagnation and dominance (epistemic closure), onshore wind shows how social conflict can destabilize expert-led planning to make way for alternative knowledges (epistemic opening), and nuclear energy demonstrates how previously closed down futures can be rapidly reopened as a climate and security solution (epistemic reopening).

Through document analysis and semi-structured expert interviews, we map how different epistemic bases can gain or lose performative force. We identify mechanisms through which collective futuring becomes captured, as well as conditions that enable its release, through the lens of epistemic diversity.

ABSTRACT. The EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy painted an ambitious vision for the future of food systems in Europe, integrating sustainability, nutrition and food security. In 2025 the Vision for Food and Agriculture has has shifted the attention from sustainability, nutrition and the protein transition towards agricultural competitiveness and supporting rural communities. Still, the promotion of circularity as a solution for food systems sustainability remains as a priority across these policies, as reflected also in the Bioeconomy Strategy and the Circular Economy Action Plan. This paper examines what future vision of an EU circular food system is assembled across EU policies, how a transition towards it is enabled or limited, and asks: what does this vision mean for environmental sustainability, nutritional quality and food safety? While in the policy discourse circularity is uncritically equated with environmental sustainability, this is not always the case. Moreover, scientific research has emphasised the food safety risks of waste and by-product valorisation, and while revalorised food products can provide nutritional benefits, processed foods are at odds with understandings about healthy food. Through a document analysis of European policies and legislation relevant to circular food systems, my study adresses how policy goals and instruments mobilised to achieve circular food systems in the EU interact with the three goals of environmental sustainability, nutrition and food safety. My preliminary findings suggest that EU circularity visions mobilise a transition pathway based on large scale biorefineries to process agricultural biomass, where animal production remains stable and food safety requirements are simplified to promote innovation. This can be interpreted as a ‘capturing’ of food system futures by competitiveness ambitions, global trade conditions and techno-optimism which might have detrimental consequences to environmental sustainability, nutrition and food safety, while foreclosing alternative pathways.

ABSTRACT. Climate neutrality has emerged as a central political objective shaping national and supranational climate strategies. In this context, Industrial Carbon Management Technologies (ICMTs), including carbon capture (CC), carbon capture and storage (CCS), and carbon capture and utilisation (CCU), have gained increasing prominence in debates on net-zero pathways (European Commission 2024). While these technologies were initially discussed primarily as technical mitigation options, early public controversies indicate that ICMTs cannot be understood solely in technical terms but are deeply embedded in social, political, and institutional contexts (Wesche et al. 2023; Sitinjak et al. 2023). This development highlights the need for social-scientific perspectives that move beyond assessments of technical feasibility and cost-effectiveness. This paper analyses ICMTs through the lens of sociotechnical imaginaries (STIs). Following Jasanoff and Kim (2009; 2015), STIs are understood as collectively held and institutionally stabilised visions of desirable futures in which science, technology, and society are co-produced. The concept is particularly relevant for emerging technologies such as ICMTs, whose development and implementation are shaped by future-oriented narratives, expectations, and socio-technical contexts. While STIs have been widely applied to other energy technologies, such as nuclear or wind energy, their systematic use in the field of ICMTs remains limited (e.g. Lefstad et al. 2024; Hougaard und Christiansen 2025). Especially analyses addressing multiple ICMTs across different actor groups in Germany remain scarce. Empirically, the study utilizes discourse analysis to examine documents from different actors that are actively involved in stabilising or contesting dominant imaginaries of ICMTs in Germany. The paper addresses three research questions: (1) which sociotechnical imaginaries of ICMTs can be identified in the German context; (2) how do these imaginaries differ across actor groups and between different ICMTs; and (3) how power asymmetries manifest within the discourse, particularly with regard to the institutionalisation of specific imaginaries.

Sources European Commission. 2024. „Towards an ambitious Industrial Carbon Management for the EU“. Februar 6. Hougaard, Inge-Merete, und Kirstine Lund Christiansen. 2025. „Domesticating Technology: Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Carbon Capture and Storage in Denmark“. Energy Research & Social Science 125 (Juli): 104087. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2025.104087. Jasanoff, Sheila, und Sang-Hyun Kim. 2009. „Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea“. Minerva 47 (2): 119–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4. Jasanoff, Sheila, und Sang-Hyun Kim. 2015. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001. Lefstad, L., J. Allesson, H. Busch, und W. Carton. 2024. „Burying Problems? Imaginaries of Carbon Capture and Storage in Scandinavia“. Energy Research & Social Science 113 (Juli): 103564. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2024.103564. Sitinjak, Charli, Sitinjak Ebennezer, und Józef Ober. 2023. „Exploring Public Attitudes and Acceptance of CCUS Technologies in JABODETABEK: A Cross-Sectional Study“. Energies 16 (10): 4026. https://doi.org/10.3390/en16104026. Wesche, Julius, Silvia Germán, Lila Gonçalves, u. a. 2023. „CCUS or No CCUS? Societal Support for Policy Frameworks and Stakeholder Perceptions in France, Spain, and Poland“. Greenhouse Gases: Science and Technology 13 (1): 48–66. https://doi.org/10.1002/ghg.2195.

ABSTRACT. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving and highly present in different forms of public discourse, such as the media, the workplace and informal conversations. Yet, the term “AI” is rather muddled. It encompasses different applications, diverse interpretations, imaginaries and narratives that shape how organisations perceive and approach this technology. These perceptions matter: they influence strategic decisions, ethical considerations, and implementation practices. Especially in the public sector, these imaginaries can shape the development, implementation and use of AI and therefore its impact on society.

In this prototype presentation, I explore which stories and imaginaries of AI circulate within public organisations and how they frame organisational responses. I present several interventions that visualise existing AI perceptions, based on exploratory interviews with five Dutch public organisations. The interventions can serve as ethical conversation starters and guide decision-making on an organisational level. By making the different perceptions and expectations around AI more visible in a creative way, the interventions aim to enable more productive and context-sensitive ethical reflection on AI.

Using the interventions, I argue that understanding the underlying perceptions of AI is a crucial first step towards value-driven AI governance. Future research will build on this idea by integrating AI imaginaries into structured ethical reflection processes, supporting responsible and transparent decision-making about AI in the public sector.

ABSTRACT. Along with contemporary scientific and technological advances, we face a context of "perverse globalization" (Santos, 2000), since development is not committed, for instance, to liberating people from hunger, forced labor, poverty, or the consequences of the environmental crisis. Pinto (2005) conceptualizes the epistemology of technique as praxis, i.e. a mediating theory and practice through labor that relies on prior culture. Praxis can be alienating insofar as it distances people from perceiving reality as a concrete totality in which humanity could recognize itself as the agent of intentional and ethical transformation of reality mediated by technique (Freire, 2019; Kosik, 2007). We are challenged to identify and mobilize either techniques and scientific, popular, and ancestral knowledge based on ethical-critical rationality (Dussel, 2012; Silva 2004), struggling with communities of victims to build a world that promotes life. We aim at answering the question: What is the potential of participatory forms of scientific knowledge production to integrate local and practical knowledge when addressing global crises? Prosa (Center for Studies and Research in Ethical-Critical Education and Technology) is a group affiliated with the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, that seeks to develop actions engaged with communities of victims (Dussel, 2012). In 2024, a project was developed in the Rural Education Degree program, educating rural teachers in Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Relying on Thematic Investigation (Freire, 2019; Silva, 2004), the project aimed at interdisciplinary planning and implementation of educational practices committed to the realities of three different communities, starting from the contradictions identified in these contexts. The themes addressed included transportation, public management, urban planning, and social inequality. The content (scientific and popular knowledge) of the educational practices was selected based on these themes. Furthermore, the project sought to develop collective strategies for overcoming these problems, using science and technology to benefit the communities.

ABSTRACT. There is a growing awareness in both corporate and governmental contexts that ethics should be part of operational practices. As ethicists, we welcome this development. While academic ethical research is valuable in its own right, its societal relevance increases when ethical theory is practiced in the real world. However for ethics to be adapted in corporate and municipal decision-making and practices, it must be perceived as applicable, accessible, and practically useful to those facing concrete dilemmas. Without this adaptation, awareness alone achieves little.

Moving from awareness to adaption requires, to some extent, that ethics is “sold” to practice. In this presentation, we reflect on a range of tools and approaches that we have introduced in corporate and municipal settings to bridge the gap between ethical theory and everyday decision-making. These approaches were designed to address challenges of applied ethics, such as the limited perceived relevance of ethical reflection and the misconception that substantial background knowledge is required to engage with ethical theories.

To “sell” ethics, theory is often translated into simplified questions, an agile diagram, or interactive formats, for example by offering feedback in the form of ethical scores, like doel-middel.nl. While such approaches can lower thresholds for engagement and stimulate reflection, they also generate new ethical dilemmas of their own. Simplification may obscure normative complexity, and scoring mechanisms may steer behavior in unintended or problematic ways.

During the presentation, we will discuss concrete examples of these methods and critically reflect on their ethical permissibility. Drawing on insights from ethics of technology, we bring to light ethical dilemmas that arise when selling ethics. Insights from psychology are used to better understand implications on ethical reflection when engaging with such tools. Ultimately, we address the question: what is the ethically responsible way forward for an “ethics salesman”?

ABSTRACT. Data sharing is expected to boost economic growth, and the glittering promise of digitalization has motivated companies to generate, accumulate and store different data from various industrial and business processes (Gizelis et al., 2024). To live up to these promises, data sharing requires infrastructure to mediate collaboration between different actors. The Horizon Europe project DATAMITE develops such an infrastructure to simplify data exchange for organizations.

To fully exploit its potential, the project included responsible innovation practices, such as exploring the non-monetary impacts of data sharing for organizations like SMEs as well as the general public (Gizelis et al., 2024). Our respective analysis showed that the technical interventions shape (and are shaped by) business visions and practices of our pilot partners, with non-monetary benefits playing a significant role in changing their business practices. Based on our analysis, we co-developed a reflection tool on non-monetary impacts of data sharing for businesses (and other organizations) together with our pilot partners of the DATAMITE project.

While feedback has been promising, the development of the tool remained challenging, bridging between comprehensibility and usability in practice, especially as it is intended to be used beyond the project (and in different sectors accordingly). Therefore, we are interested in discussing and learning from experiences how to best foster considerations of responsible innovation in future data sharing practices from the outset.

Literature Gizelis, T. I., Maglogiannis, I., Iliadis, L., Macintyre, J., & Jayne, C. (2024). Data monetization opportunities and challenges: The European landscape by DATAMITE. In I. Maglogiannis, L. Iliadis, J. Macintyre, & C. Jayne (Eds.), Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations. AIAI 2024 IFIP WG 12.5 International Workshops (pp. 62-79). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63227-3_5

ABSTRACT. It is well established that when digital health technologies (DHTs) are implemented through a lens of equity, they have the potential to reduce existing health inequalities. Unfortunately, current practices routinely ignore health equity and justice as both the means and ends of DHT implementation. Instead, system actors tend to focus on the other perceived gains of DHTs, such as efficiency, or on their risks, such as privacy. As a result, health inequities may (at best) stagnate or (at worst) be exacerbated. Whilst we do see a growing concern for the impact of DHTs on health inequities, this concern does not always translate into action. Using María Puig de la Bellacasa’s framing of Matters of Care, which encourages us to move from simply recognising an issue as complex towards committing to transforming it, our research explores the moments in which the practices of system actors start to resemble Care for digital health inequities rather than remaining at the level of cognitive concern. We explore these moments through multiple field labs, employing diverse participatory, action-oriented and transformative methods. Whilst this is still a work-in-progress, we present some early results that navigate key conundrums such as: why do people express concern about digital inclusion in health until they realise the work such inclusion actually entails? How do health systems actors working on digital inclusion enact inclusive practices in a world that makes it difficult to prioritise inclusion? And how do we get system actors to care about digital health equity when there are so many different issues in health care to care about?

ABSTRACT. Humanitarian Virtual Reality (VR) is often framed as an “empathy machine,” promising to cultivate care for distant others through immersive, technologically mediated encounters. Such narratives tend to stabilize care as a singular moral outcome and assume a universal spectator who feels and responds in predictable ways. Drawing on feminist STS, postcolonial theory, and debates on matters of care, I engage with care as an analytical and methodological lens to plurify what humanitarian VR is and what it does.

Rather than treating care as inherent to VR, I approach humanitarian VR as a socio-material care assemblage through which care is practiced, negotiated, and contested across networks of human and non-human actors. This approach allows for a more complex understanding of how care is enacted, how it becomes knowable, and how power dynamics shape whose concerns are foregrounded or neglected. Empirically, the paper draws on three ethnographic case studies: curating "Phoenix of Gaza" at a humanitarian rights film festival, observing "Shelter" at the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, and facilitating "Under the Same Sky" at DocLab. Tracing practices of making, curating, facilitating, and experiencing VR reveals multiple, coexisting forms of care that often remain unnoticed in dominant debates focused on empathy and impact.

By attending to these multiplicities, the presentation moves beyond assumptions of singular affective responses or care practices. Care becomes a way of following relations, noticing overlooked practices, and understanding how technologically mediated encounters shape engagement with humanitarian issues. In line with the panel’s call for equity and justice in digitalisation, my presentation aims to open up speculative space through care: how might care be practiced differently? What alternative sociotechnical futures become possible when care is treated not as an (assumed) outcome, but as a situated, contested, and world-making practice?

ABSTRACT. Older adults’ ability to travel and maintain social relations within their communities is widely recognized as crucial for well-being. Yet, age-related life changes often complicate the use of conventional transport modes such as public transport, driving, and cycling, constraining access to shops, healthcare, and social networks. Community bus services (also known as special transport services or paratransit) offer alternatives through demand-responsive, door-to-door travel that meets some older adults’ needs and preferences. Drawing on full participant observations as a driver on a community bus once a week for eight months in The Hague, the Netherlands, 12 semi-structured interviews with travelers, co-drivers, planning staff, and board members, and forthcoming co-creation workshops, this study examines everyday negotiations of equitable transport on a community bus. Adopting a situated intervention perspective, the community bus is approached as a sociotechnical intervention where digital and non-digital arrangements are adjusted, negotiated, and contested in practice. The bus functions as an experimental site where values related to efficiency, care, and equity are enacted through booking procedures, operational zones, and on-board interactions. The analysis shows how perceptions of fair and equitable transport are co-produced through interactions between human actors (travelers, drivers, planners, and board members) and non-human actors (the bus, booking systems, rules, and norms). While many participants argue that digitalizing planning and booking could improve efficiency, travelers and volunteers value the informal, makeshift, and caring character of the service. Older adults prioritize recognition and care over speed or reaching all destinations, and employ coping strategies to navigate rigid procedures, often reducing autonomy and increasing anxiety. We argue that, amid increasing digitalization and emerging self-driving alternatives, transport equity cannot be reduced to efficiency or system-wide optimization, but is negotiated through everyday practices of care, adjustment, and coping, offering insights for STS scholarship and informing policies for inclusive, fairer transport futures.

ABSTRACT. Biometric technology has been widely adopted in border control, identity authentication, and law enforcement, raising growing concerns about “bias.” While much scholarship focuses on algorithmic errors or data quality, fewer studies have examined how different actors construct the meaning of “bias” through discourse. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing the Schengen Information System II (SIS II), a key EU law enforcement infrastructure, to investigate how government, industry, and civil society discursively translate the concept of bias, and how their interactions shape power asymmetries in digital governance. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Foucault’s concept of governmentality, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this research develops a hybrid analytical framework. It critically revisits ANT’s notion of “translation” and proposes two original concepts: governmentalized translation structure and co-constructed Obligatory Passage Points (OPPs), to account for how dominant actors predefine governance boundaries rather than negotiate them symmetrically. Empirically, the study analyzes official policy documents, corporate brochures, and civil society reports using a two-stage coding process and network visualization. It finds that government and industry, by respectively providing and reciprocally deploying governmental discourses of legitimacy and technicity throughout the translation process, engage in a pre-defined collusion that defines bias as a technical issue of data optimization and risk management. This process marginalizes the critical translations of structural bias advanced by civil society. The paper contributes to critical scholarship on digital infrastructures by foregrounding how discourse operates as a technology of power. It offers an empirical analysis of SIS II bias governance, and proposes a critical extension to ANT for analyzing actor asymmetries in governance systems.

ABSTRACT. Global challenges such as climate change, resource depletion, and geopolitical instability increasingly require scientists to operate across disciplinary, institutional, and societal boundaries. Yet the capacity of researchers to participate meaningfully in transdisciplinary efforts depends not only on methodological expertise but also on how they understand themselves as scientists. This study investigates how early-career physicists construct their scientific identities and sense of agency in relation to contemporary crises. Drawing on relational, semi-structured interviews at a Dutch institute for applied physics, the analysis identifies three recurring identity orientations - Purists, Techno-Focussed, and Pragmatists- that shape how researchers position their work in relation to society. Building on intermediate cases and conceptual scholarship on scientific personae, the article also proposes a fourth, theoretical persona - Reflective Humanists - to capture orientations grounded in ethical introspection and existential inquiry. Together, these four personae represent distinct combinations of values, motivations, and perceived possibilities for action. The findings demonstrate that scientific identity is a precondition for transdisciplinary engagement: it influences how researchers interpret societal challenges, how they conceive responsibility, and whether they can imagine collaborating with actors beyond academia. The article argues that institutions seeking to support transformative, problem-focused science must attend to these identity orientations and create environments in which diverse forms of agency can flourish.

ABSTRACT. Using publicly available data on research funded by the European Commission combined with freedom of information requests to Dutch universities I build a picture of fossil fuel industry's strategies to keep false solutions in the air. Covering a thirty year period, I show how fossil fuel involvement skewed research and policymaking in the direction of incremental, fossil-friendly "solutions" such as CCUS and hydrogen to the detriment of disruptive socio-behavioural solutions with a greater transformational potential. In the formative period of climate policymaking in Europe, we see how a network of allied researchers, policymakers and industry representatives established a central position in research and policy; sneaked in dual use of CCS for enhanced fossil fuel extraction; and manufactured an appearance of consensus for false solutions that keeps criticism and uncertainties at bay.

ABSTRACT. When an unprecedented number of women entered the natural sciences during the 1960s and 1970s, they did so at a time of profound social and political turbulence. While feminist groups were challenging established power structures and early environmental movements were calling for greater environmental awareness, some scientists began to question how the scientific knowledge they helped produce reinforced systems of injustice. These early efforts to develop more accountable ways of producing knowledge were foundational to the emergence of STS.

This paper examines what we can learn today from both the successes and failures of these early interventions through two contrasting cases. Through the story of Ruth Hubbard, I present a perspective from “the inside,” highlighting the challenges, compromises, and negotiations involved in advancing a feminist political agenda while working within institutionalised science at Harvard University. In contrast, the case of Anne Innis Dagg illustrates the contestation of science from “the outside,” revealing both the possibilities and the costs of challenging scientific authority after losing institutional support. The stories of these women, activists and scientists provide a good example not only of the negotiations and challenges that were required for the institutionalisation of critical debates (now increasingly under scrutiny) surrounding the relationship between science and society, but they also serve as a reminder of the strong relationship STS has and needs to have with activists movements that demand science to be held accountable from a societal perspective and to hold on to the responsibilities of being citizen scientists in the original sense of the term, as practitioners who see their professional role as being directed by their concerns as citizens.

ABSTRACT. Relations are present across different aspects of knowledge infrastructures including data gathering and filtering, fieldwork practices, processes for configuring and supporting users, pipelines for analysis, and arrangements for access and accountability. The effect of obfuscating or foregrounding relations is significant, as is the process of deciding which relations to care for and about, using discernment. Relations therefore connect ethics, politics and epistemology. In relatable knowledge infrastructures, relations are visible, palpable, assessable, and can more easily be called into question and accounted for. This contribution describes what would be required to further develop such infrastructures, by considering change from three angles: in terms of the constituents of knowledge systems (systematicity, reflexivity and distributivity), in terms of strategies for STS scholars and organisations, and finally in terms of ensuring openness to liveable futures through imagination and hope.

ABSTRACT. Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) could be considered a hot topic of scholarly practices: Some researchers are turning to editorials, opinion pieces, and articles to either denounce or encourage the use of genAI in knowledge production processes (e.g. Jowsey et al. 2025, Nguyen and Welch 2025, Anis and French 2023). Meanwhile, the promise of increased efficiency may create a sense of necessity around adopting these tools for everyone else (Bin-Nashwan et al. 2023).

As general application tools, the use of genAI is already shaping research processes, the peer review system, and higher education (Barros, Prasad, and Sliwa 2023). Next to these touch points within academia, the impact of genAI can also be seen in the published output: Andrews et al. (2024), for example, discuss the emergence of pseudoscientific language and assumptions in machine learning research. Shardlow and Przybyła (2024) identify tendencies of anthropomorphising language in NLP research reporting.

In the proposed mini-workshop we draw on speculative design (Auger 2013) and fabulation methods (Hartman 2008, Rosner 2018), inviting participants to imagine diverse futures for academia and its touch points with genAI. Structured in three parts, we invite participants to examine different areas of academia, for example research, education, self-service or peer review, based on their respective interests. Following a short introduction, participants engage in word-building supported by brainstorming exercises, before entering the paper prototyping phase to speculate and imagine, how a curriculum, abstract or call for papers might look like in their imagined world.

Overall, the workshops aim is to bring together interested scholars to discuss questions such as: At which points might academia resist or embrace generative artificial intelligence? How might processes of scholarly production be shaped by the introduction of this technology? What are the roles and responsibilities of researchers and educators in these scenarios?

ABSTRACT. In the last decades design education has shifted their lens from the product-level to the systemic-level. It is proposed that new design pedagogies are needed to teach students how to deal with the complex and contested topics at hand. This paper elaborates on a design education toolkit that incorporates The pedagogy of discomfort as proposed by Boler & Green into design education contexts. Circumstantiated with the work from philosophers Donna Harraway on narratives, and Judith Butler on ethical violence. So, to create a toolkit that can be implemented in Design Education for the student to reflect upon their own position and ethics as a designer.

The toolkit mainly uses assignment cards, which are done in two parts. The Narrative Design Cases themselves are set up to ‘be impossible by designing first’. Whereas a diverting narrative in the first part makes 'the usual design analysis methodologies' fall short to create needed concepts. In the second part, the card is cut open to reveal more information about the actual complexities and accompanied with philosophic and ethical questions for reflection on the case itself. This toolkit has proven that the concept of Narrative Design Cases based on the pedagogy of discomfort, narratives, and ethical violence, stimulates critical reflection on difficult and uncertain topics, and place them inside the system the students aspire to design for.

(This project is the result of my MSc. Thesis which finished in November; therefore it can be experienced in workshop format)

ABSTRACT. STS has a long recognized the importance of stakeholder participation to ensure diverse forms of knowledge and plural values are incorporated in decision-making. At the European level, decision-making is increasingly characterized by polarisation. Even in this polarized climate, participation and consensus-oriented politics are prioritized, inspired by the dominant rational-deliberative political philosophy.

At the same time, a growing body of literature highlights the value of productive conflict and the necessity of agonism in a pluralistic society. The challenges posed by pluralism and polarisation for consensus warrant a critical look at the design of consensus-oriented stakeholder participation, and particularly the design choices aimed to generate consensus. We critically analyze one such participatory initiative: the Strategic Dialogue on the Future of European agrifood.

Launched by the European Commission at the start of 2024, this Dialogue mandated the heads of 29 influential yet highly diverse stakeholder groups to formulate – by consensus – a desirable future for European agrifood, intended to inform the European Commissions’ strategic priorities. After eight months, its participants presented a ‘conceptual consensus’ that suggested a successful convergence and integration of different values and forms of knowledge.

Through 19 interviews with participants, invited experts, and the chair of the dialogue, we analyse the design of the Strategic Dialogue to identify key choices that were conducive to find consensus, while critically considering the limitations of these choices for the legitimacy and transformative potential of such participatory initiatives. Integrating these insights with political science literature, we develop a framework of design choices for reaching consensus. Through our case, we identify the promises and pitfalls of each design choice for consensus-oriented participation in a pluralistic and polarised society.

ABSTRACT. Anthropological and scientific interests converge in an attempt to draw out new microbiomic knowledge at the nexus of health, nutrition, taxonomy, and the industrialisation of biological processes. “Microbes are becoming new links between separate worlds, assuming the role of connectors between human, animal and vegetable health” (Ilaria Capua 2019, 65 in Raffaetà 2023, 40). In an attempt to assemble the multiplicit processes that socially, technically and discursively construct scientific knowledge about our fragmented microbial counterparts, I trace the practices and histories of microbiome research through the lens of multispecies entanglements and affect theory, situating research within the epoch of anthropogenic aftermaths (Landecker 2024). Configuring the human as a microbially-entangled superorganism, nuanced relational understandings of human-microbe exchanges in bioengineering work emerge from within laboratory research practices (Lorimer 2016,70-71). To analyse the entanglement I leverage the Post-Pasteurian modes of affection that between researchers and their bacteria, manifest through the practice of care — an affective practice cutting across the social and technical materialities in the laboratory and an avenue of experiencing affect that transcends species confines. Microbial care is critically questioned as a formation of moral economies which contours its objects of care and disregards others (Martin et al. 2015, 636), building on new iterations of microbiopolitics in practice (Paxon 2008). My research question is as follows: How do microbiome researchers care for microorganisms, in relation to ecological and technoscientific futurity? What insights about changing microbe-human relationships emerge from current bacterial care practices in the lab? Through ethnographic observation in the laboratory and interviews with microbiome scientists, I investigate the affective care and politics embedded in and directive of microbiome research. I ask how microbiome sciences and its technoscientific applications shift when bacteria are no longer perceived as foe, but as symbiotic co-mediators of human health and scientific knowledge-making.

ABSTRACT. Including citizen participation in decision-making for sustainability transitions is often seen as a way to strengthen the legitimacy of decisions and to enlarge the support for decisions. Not solely considering academic knowledge but including lived experiences of citizens in governance structures ensures that decisions better reflect and fit to reality. In current decision-making processes, however, often citizens are not involved and if they are, power dynamics often hinder a fair involvement. Some academics point to the ‘sustainability-inclusivity’ dilemma that hinders an efficient involvement of citizens in transitions. This dilemma mentions that decision-making for sustainability transitions often requires acting when a momentum arises and therefore requires quick responses. Including citizens and especially including them in an inclusive way which comprises an equitable participation process and providing enough time for everyone, takes time. These two parts are then seen as difficult to correlate from a theoretical perspective. But how is this dilemma experienced in practice? In this paper, the reflections on experiences of practitioners and policy makers are provided concerning this dilemma. Practitioners of food system transitions reflected in a workshop on inclusive citizen participation and if they experience this dilemma or other dilemmas. Similar questions were asked in interviews with policy makers in the domain of food system transitions where they reflect on this dilemma and how they tackle issues like these in the organisation of participatory processes. By reflecting on this dilemma, this paper discusses an often-heard concern that is brought up when participatory practices are mentioned. It thereby aims to give guidance to forms of participatory governance in which power can be distributed differently and therewith to the development of inclusive and sustainable policies.

Because of the focus on participatory governance and power structures, a presentation in track 2 would be a good fit we believe.

ABSTRACT. Abstract STS conference 2026, University of Twente Robin Hillenbrink, PhD candidate at the University of Twente, Philosophy section

Technologies impact not only social and moral practices, but the conceptual frameworks through which we interpret, express and govern techno-social and techno-moral shifts. This paper analyses how Socially Disruptive Technologies (SDTs) induce conceptual disruptions in moral conceptual frameworks by focusing on the mechanisms through which technologies generate conditions that inherited moral vocabularies struggle to capture. First, I distinguish technology as driver or enabler of conceptual disruptions, following Woodward’s interventionist account of causation and Mackie’s INUS model. Technology-driven conceptual disruption occurs when a technology directly alters the empirical conditions presupposed by a concept’s application. This involves systematic dependencies where manipulating a technological capacity predictably modifies the world-state relevant for concept use. An example is the mechanical ventilator, which enabled respiration independently of brain function and challenged the assumption that cardiopulmonary failure and death coincide. Technology-enabled conceptual disruption occurs when technologies expand possibility spaces that only become disruptive through uptake within wider socio-technical constellations of discourse, norms, institutions, etc. Examples include AI companions, which enable new intimacy practices, and invite the migration of moral-relational concepts such as ‘partner’, ‘care’, or ‘infidelity’ into new technological domains. Second, I present a theoretical account in which I infer six recurrent mechanisms of SDT-induced conceptual disruption: (1) novel ontological phenomena, (2) new decision options, (3) novel socially meaningful practices, (4) new or reshaped relationships and social roles, (5) novel epistemic visibility that becomes morally salient, and (6) domain transposition, where concepts migrate into technological domains that outgrow their original conditions of use. Methodologically, the paper combines causal-mechanistic analysis with conceptual-discourse mapping to build a preliminary taxonomy of disruption mechanisms. It clarifies how SDTs create shifting conditions of epistemic and practical possibility that inherited moral classifications cannot accommodate. This in turn reveals how social and moral concepts come under pressure during large-scale socio-technical shifts.

ABSTRACT. Mission-oriented research and Innovation (R&I) offers promises for a better future. However, directing R&I activities towards transformative objectives requires systemic approaches that consider the context of the mission and the role of various actors in driving societal change. To contribute to societal transformations, forward-looking activities play a crucial role in creating collective visions of the futures to which R&I seeks to contribute. Within transformative R&I experimentations (e.g. research projects, co-creation processes or living labs), such collective visions contribute to scaling and embedding of alternative solutions in society. However, transformative change is challenged by systems’ multilevel and nested nature, and directionality and actors’ responsibility must be defined at each level. In this paper, we ask how a nested approach to visioning desired futures supports the contribution of R&I activities to societal transformations. Within the field of agricultural and marine systems, we use three case studies in which the ASIRPA Real-Time (RT) formative evaluation approach was an integral component. We study two French mission-oriented research programs—focused on pesticide eradication and on sustainable and just marine socio-ecosystems—as well as a living lab on natural farming in India. In all three cases, ASIRPA guided participating actors in envisioning collective desired futures. We show the importance of considering the nestedness of collective futures to achieve transformative change, between: 1) Scales – e.g. between projects, the program and the external context, or between an individual, a community and a region; 2) Temporal – e.g. visioning futures should be embedded iteratively within R&I trajectories; 3) Depth of change – e.g. visions oriented toward shallow or deep leverage for systemic change. We argue that, in contributing to transformative change, desired futures must be envisioned and articulated in interaction across all levels of the system.

ABSTRACT. In response to large-scale biodiversity loss in the Dutch agricultural landscape, sustainability transition programmes aim to stimulate systemic change towards biodiversity-enhancing agrifood systems in the Netherlands, such as agroecological systems. These systems are characterised by specific, complex interactions among multiple species, including microbes, soils, crops, animals, and climatic conditions, and necessitate changes in current practices around supporting such multispecies interactions. In this context, system learning is considered essential, as it can enable such transformations by exposing and reshaping current systems’ relationships and practices. How such transformations occur is insufficiently understood. This study, therefore, focuses on the changing multispecies interactions and system learning in the agroecological transition programme CropMix. Here, the focus was on the enactments of these interactions, which emphasizes that these are not pre-given but are actively brought into being through practice. Through participant observation in four online meetings of two living labs, it was examined whether and how shifts - from more general to specific - in the enactments of multispecies interactions contributed to processes of system learning. This research showed that there is no positive correlation between shifting enactments of multispecies interactions and system learning. Specifically, an inverse relationship emerges: the more specific multispecies interactions are enacted (such as interactions between ‘nasturtiums’ and ‘nematodes’), the less system learning is observed, and conversely, generalized and less specified enactments (such as interactions between ‘crop’ and ‘insect’) tend to coincide with more extensive system learning processes. Based on the findings of this study, it can be argued that while specific understandings and practices of multispecies interdependencies are essential for agroecological systems, they are insufficient on their own to support sustainability transitions. Instead, such transitions require deeper, system-level reflexive processes that critically engage with existing political, cultural, and institutional arrangements.

ABSTRACT. Mission‐oriented innovation policies (MOIPs) are increasingly promoted as vehicles for sustainable development, yet their politics remain under-examined—especially in the Global South. This article interrogates the Brazilian Amazon +10 initiative to “rewire” science, technology and innovation toward a new bioeconomy for the Amazon. We ask: how do competing sociotechnical imaginaries configure power, directionality and justice in its early governance? Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis of verbatim transcripts from four high-level “Science for the Amazon Day” panels (≈ 340 min) we trace how policymakers, scientists, Indigenous leaders and private-sector strategists publicly construct and contest missions for Amazon. Iterative inductive–deductive coding reveals three dominant imaginaries: (i) a techno-scientific, data-driven vision centred on satellite monitoring and enforcement; (ii) a bioeconomy-led green-growth vision that commodifies nature as genetic assets; and (iii) an Indigenous-led, community-centred vision grounded in Bem Viver and territorial self-determination. The first two coagulate into a powerful policy bloc that secures institutional primacy by aligning “science-based protection” with “green markets”, while risking marginalising debates over land-rights, colonial legacies, global market dependencies and epistemic plurality. For instance, bioeconomy proponents frame “green growth” as apolitical, ignoring how carbon markets recentralize control over Indigenous territories. Proponents believe this approach can mobilise resources across institutional boundaries and attract large-scale investments to drive rapid, systemic change toward a low‐carbon, bio-based economy that reduces deforestation and carbon emissions while boosting GDP growth trough exports. In contrast, the indigenous-led imaginary is mostly acknowledged as supplementary to those strategies, relegating indigenous epistemologies to a subordinate role. In conclusion, there is a need for MOIPs to recognise that some sustainability imaginaries are incompatible with existing governance models and socio-economic structures. Rather than closing off alternative pathways, MOIPs should remain open to multiple visions of future. This, in turn, demands a critical examination of the material, political and epistemic structures that shape participation and determine whose voices are heard – or silenced – in decision-making processes.

ABSTRACT. Solid scientific understanding of AI infrastructure underpins both tech regulation and recent European efforts for greater (AI) tech sovereignty. This contribution is primer to European AI infrastructure and an introduction to methods and approaches of how the social sciences and STS can contribute to explore, describe and evaluate the physical and digital aspects of AI infrastructure. The talk introduces recent work on the topic in the fields technology assessment, organisational ethnography, and infrastructure in STS.

ABSTRACT. Europe is pouring funding into building independent capacities in AI, and hopefully this will not just mean more of the current closed-source, corporate-monopolised and venture capital-fuelled generative AI models. In theory, the European approach to AI is open source – not mere ‘open weight’. Only true Open Source AI has the potential to address fundamental flaws such as alignment with some GDPR requirements and circumventing the fundamental hallucination problem of gen AI systems by allowing verification of information sources in the training data (for a proof-of-concept, see AllenAI’s OlMo Trace system). But this approach cannot be left to the private sector because full openness goes against business models. Instead, public bodies like universities need to lead the charge of advancing Open Source AI. This talk recaps recent developments in the field: (1) a survey of the current genAI landscape; (2) the potential of current OSAI proof-of-concepts and demonstrators, (3) policy work by the Open Future Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, and the Open Source Initiative. The aim is clear: a future-proof regulatory framework that builds on exemptions for OSAI laid out in the EU AI Act but preserves as much of the spirit of the GDPR as possible.

ABSTRACT. This contribution traces the role of values in constituting a European identity, from the Maastricht Treaty until today. Since the failure of formal attempts at European constitution-making, this political project of value-based identity building has been progressively delegated to the ‘sub-politics’ of institutionalized ethics in the form of expert groups opinions and research programs. After a broad chronological sketch of how ethics and values have been mobilized in the European Union to build an ‘internal’ European identity, from biotechnology (1990s) and nanotechnology (2000s) to early initiatives on the ethics of robotics in the 2010s, we move to the recent trends in AI. We focus, first, on the mandate, creation and output of the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence to produce ethical guidelines. Secondly, we delve into the increasing calls for technological sovereignty, especially because of the increased dependence of the EU on foreign critical digital infrastructures, which has become evident especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. What is distinct about ethics in the digital domain, compared to bio- and nano-tech, especially with the recent AI agenda, is 1) the move of ethics back to the political level, sometimes portrayed as an alternative to traditional law-making 2) the purposeful program to distinguish an EU technological approach of embedding its common values in digital infrastructures and achieving technological sovereignty. Building on STS debates on institutionalized ethics and the political construction of Europe, we argue that, despite the ambition of the EU to create value-based and ethical technologies as global standards, this approach does come with a cost, especially concerning democracy and the rule of law, as the initiatives made in the name of ethics and EU values lack democratic representativity on the one hand, as well as the procedural quality guarantees under the rule of law on the other hand.

ABSTRACT. Concerns regarding the vast training data being used by General-Purpose AI (GPAI) models has prompted the AI Act's Article 53(1)(d), requiring providers to publish a public summary of their training data which enables stakeholders to investigate rights violations and take corrective actions. Providers who do not publish this information may face fines, with enforcement beginning August 2026. It is highly likely that existing tech companies will not comply in good faith and the investigation and corrective enforcement will take a long time – thereby also prolonging the associated rights empowerment. It is also likely that small providers, especially those based in the EU and those who provide open models, may face difficulties in filling out the public summary due to lack of resources or legal expertise. In this work, we tackle both of these problems through investigating the research question: "To what extent can the information required in AI Act's Article 53(1)(d) public summary be determined from existing model documentation made available by the provider?"

Our analysis shows overlap of the AI Act's Article 53(1)(d) public summary with existing datasheets, model cards, and publications meant for technical audiences. Though this overlap has been the basis for the public summary as an obligation, no mapping yet exists that can benefit stakeholders. We show how this overlap can be utilized in investigating the consistency and accuracy of information in published summaries, and for developing evidence for enforcement actions through adversarial reconstruction of public summaries. We show how analysis benefits small and open-source providers by providing guidance for how their existing technical documentation can be adapted to meet the AI Act's public summary requirements. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our work by reconstructing and comparing public summaries with those published for the SmolLM3 and Apertus models.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary climate governance increasingly frames “tools of green transition” as a necessary route toward sustainable futures. This research approaches such initiatives as knowledge–political projects that do not simply manage ecological worlds, but participate in reconstituting them as economic and governable entities via complex power relations. Through policy devices such as nature-based solutions, and offsetting schemes, ecosystems are rendered calculable, and commensurable. In this process, multispecies relations become reframed as financial assets, infrastructures, and speculative frontiers. Drawing on decolonial theory, and feminist STS, this research argues that these developments extend capitalist rationalities under conditions of planetary crisis. Rather than encountering ecosystems as relational, multispecies worlds, tools of green transition repeatedly reframe them through shifting consumerist lenses: as climate solutions, investments, and risk-mitigation tools. Each reframing produces a new “version” of nature aligned with prevailing economic and governance priorities, layering on new and at the same time not new versions of nature. This continual ontological remaking remains grounded in anthropocentric assumptions: ecological value is affirmed primarily through usefulness to human prosperity and wealth accumulation. As a result, the agencies, vulnerabilities, and ethical claims of non-human others risk being subordinated to technocratic calculation.

This research adopts a conceptual and discourse-analytic approach to examine how policy vocabularies, funding infrastructures, and expert knowledge stabilise these shifting regimes of environmental truth. Such regimes normalise commodification as both rational and morally necessary, while obscuring the uneven power relations and forms of dispossession embedded in green governance. In doing so, this research highlights how ostensibly sustainable interventions can reproduce extractive and exploitative relations, even as their justificatory language changes continually. We will endeavour to present this research via a mixed media method and a performative dialogue as an alternative way to think and explore the multiple layers of constructed meaning ascribed to our socio-ecological systems.

ABSTRACT. Background Like other healthcare sectors, the field of general practice increasingly faces challenges that inform organisational innovations. Traditional models with mostly sole-practitioner practices have given way to a multitude of governance models. These are often purported by external actors (i.e., outside the healthcare field) whose core activities consist of non-care activities like management, accounting, finance and procurement.

External actors come in various shapes and guises. Some pursue profits through upscaling and centralising care delivery, whereas others follow a logic aligned with the doxa of general practice, emphasising cooperation and relieving general practitioners of non-care burdens. Both assume the role of a central governing organisation (cgo) in a network of general practices. As cgo’s they employ a distinct network governance model that is an assemblage of elements with political, managerial and valuating linkages.

Theory We propose that these networks can be understood as dynamic constellations that are shaped by the logic of the fields in which the actors operate, the role of the cgo and the governance tools that mediate these networks. We employ a relational perspective, combining insights from Bourdieu’s field approach, the network governance perspective of Provan & Kenis and Actor-Network Theory to interpret how these networks operate and are legitimised.

Methods and results To understand the governance structures operating within networks we employed a data-driven approach to explore organisational forms in Dutch general practice. We arrived at a first rudimentary typology of ‘mechanisms of influence’: hierarchy, executive board membership and contracts. We also observed hybrid networks that combine different mechanisms.

Implications We discuss how emerging networks may reshape general practice and address the increasingly complex and untransparent nature of these networks. We propose future research on the governance tools underlying the identified mechanisms of influence, with particular attention to how actors innovatively recombine them to create new structures.

ABSTRACT. In contemporary public challenges that lack clear ownership and cut across sectoral and institutional boundaries, reliance on consultancy has become routine. A paradoxical tension becomes visible: despite acknowledgement across both consultants as well as their clients that consultancy offers no guarantee of durable or structural resolution, these external experts continue to be hired as indispensable intermediaries. This persistence cannot be accounted for by outcomes or effectiveness alone. Taking this tension as its starting point, this paper examines how private knowledge practices reframe public issues in ways that enable continued action, while potentially leaving more fundamental questions unaddressed. This paper asks: how do private knowledge practices become entangled with public healthcare organisations in complex care networks, and how does entanglement shape the articulation of public care challenges. It draws on qualitative research in regional Dutch healthcare project networks within the Action Programme Misunderstood Behaviour. We approach consultancy as a heterogeneous set of epistemic practices. In this way, consultancy includes independent advisors, advisory firms, deployment agencies and hybrid actors who move between roles such as project leader, researcher, programme manager and grant writer. Consultants’ positions in these networks are relationally negotiated. Care organisations and public partners deploy consultants for multiple strategic reasons, including gaining access to expertise, shifting responsibility, and legitimising or temporarily stabilising contested issues. By foregrounding these practice-based dynamics, the paper moves beyond critiques that treat consultancy as an abstract managerial elite and frame the client as passive or lacking any form of agency. Rather, it traces how consultancy is enacted through collaborative knowledge work. This paper opens up a perspective on healthcare consultancy as epistemic practice situated at the intersection of public healthcare and private expertise. It proposes a reconsideration of how routinised performance of solutions sustains the paradox of action without resolution that shapes public care challenges.