Please  consider submitting a paper for the 4S-EASST 2016 conference (deadline February 21st) taking place from August 31st to September 3rd in Barcelona to our open track!

We’d be very grateful if you could also forward it to potentially interested colleagues. 

Wild research: Radical openings in technoscientific practice?

A collaborative spectre is haunting science and technology. In the past decades we have witnessed an explosion of radical openings of research practices where increasingly technified citizens and engaged professionals collaborate in the most diverse forms of knowledge production in both online and offline platforms of all kinds. In these efforts they generate and put into circulation documentation on the most diverse range of issues, attempting to materially intervene their everyday worlds with different political aims. Practices that, for lack of a better term, might be described as ‘wild research’ not only signal collaborative redistributions of the who, how, when and where of knowledge production, circulation and validation, but also more experiential and sociologically-related expansions of the knowledge registers and material interventions there emerging: a whole constellation of practices forging different versions of ‘science and technology by other means’. Paying attention to these transformations this track would like to welcome ethnographic and historical works analyzing in depth open, collaborative and experimental ‘wild research’ projects helping to expand what STS up to date has considered more collaborative or more democratic forms of technoscientific production: participatory engagements of lay people into expert-driven processes such as in citizen science or articulations of counter-expertise and evidence-based activism to engage in conversations with experts. We are particularly interested in analyzing not only the different forms of knowledge and the political, but also the forms of STS otherwise that these radical collaborative openings in technoscientific practice might be bringing to the fore.

Convenors: Tomas S. Criado (MCTS, TU München) & Adolfo Estalella (Spanish National Research Council – CSIC)

For more information on how to propose a paper, please check the conference’s call for papers

To submit a paper to this open track, please click here

IMAGE CREDITS: The Mars Society CC-BY-SA-3.0