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Fostering interdisciplinary and engaged scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine across the globe.

Latest 4S News

CfP | InterAcademy Partnership Competitive Grants

Published On: Oct 18, 2024

Deadline: Dec 2, 2024

The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) invites proposals from IAP member academies and regional networks, for projects that would help advance IAP’s mission and strategic goals. Proposed projects should preferably be collaborative across member academies and regional networks. Priority will be given to project proposals that aim to establish or continue support for collaborations across disciplines (for example, collaborations across academies of science, medicine and engineering), especially ...

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Chronicity and Its Social Lives: Reflections on Everyday Experiences of Osteoarthritis

Published On: Nov 7, 2025

Deadline: Sep 15, 2025

In this post, Perseverence Madhuku discusses the tensions between biomedical, social, and personal understandings of ageing, immobility, and care in Zimbabwe through the case study of Osteoarthritis.

Call for Assistant Editors for 4S Backchannels (Global South)

Published On: Nov 27, 2025

Deadline: Dec 15, 2025

The Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) is looking for STS graduate students, postdocs or early career scholars from/based in the Global South (especially Africa, Middle East, Asia) who can contribute as Assistant Editors for 4S Backchannels.
The candidate will be part of the team sharing and disseminating STS news, research from/about Global South in the form of short academic writings. Besides some editorial skills, they will encourage potential authors to contribute with their w...

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4S Publications

Science, Technology, and Human Values

For more than forty years, Science, Technology, & Human Values has provided the forum for cutting-edge research and debate in the field of science and technology studies.

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Consolidating the Strata: Geoscience and Underground Territory in South Korean Radioactive Waste Disposal

Sungeun KimDepartment II, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
In South Korea, the nation with the world's highest density of nuclear power plants, the disposal of high-level radioactive waste has become a pressing sociotechnical concern....

“Bogeymen,” “Murderers,” and “Loonies”: Emotions in Dutch Debates on 5G and Health

Floortje Moes, Christian Bröer, Klasien Horstman

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Scientific advice is often solicited in governance, yet it is increasingly challenged in the public domain. Public participation is often suggested to mediate opposing...

Rethinking Extractivism in a Changing Climate: Complementary Gold and Coffee Livelihoods in the Steep, Tropical Andes

Casey Gibson, Jessica Smith1Department of Engineering, Design, & Society, 3557Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
In the municipality of Andes, agriculture rules the steep surface ofla tierra, while informal miners pick and blast subterranean tunnels to make a living from gold. While...

Autonomy Where the Underground and Aboveground Meet: Processing Plants in Colombian Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining

Mateo Francisco Rojas, Jessica M. Smith, Juan C. Lucena, Oscar Jaime Restrepo Baena

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
Social science research about extraction often conflates mining and ore processing activities or disregards processing altogether. This article highlights the value of...

Indigenous Environmental Data Justice: Confronting Colonial Data and Activating Indigenous Sovereignty

María Fernanda Yanchapaxi, M. Murphy1Technoscience Research Unit, 7938University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Science, Technology, & Human Values, Ahead of Print.
This article offers Indigenous Environmental Data Justice (IEDJ) as a framework related to, but importantly distinct from, Environmental Data Justice. IEDJ points to the...

Engaging Science, Technology and Society

Engaging Science, Technology, & Society is an online, open access publication of The Society for Social Studies of Science.

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ESTS Incoming Editorial – A New Editorial Collective for ESTS

Published On: Jul 9 2026

Erika Szymanski, Greg Hollin, Aparajita Bhandari, Clément Dréano, Georg Hoehne, Dasom Lee, Óscar Moreno-Martínez, Lucas Nishida, Andrea Quinlan, Kendall Roark, Pankaj Sekhsaria, Federico Vasen, Richa Venkatraman, Susann Wagenknecht

We write to introduce ourselves as the new Editorial Collective for Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. This editorial describes how we are taking up the journal's mission of openness, building on the work of ESTS’s prior...

How Moderation Makes Science: Precautionary Valuation and Boundary-Making in the Early Circulation of Research

Published On: Jul 10 2026

Natascha Chtena, Irene V. Pasquetto, Alice Fleerackers, Stephen Pinfield, Melanie Benson Marshall, Juan Pablo Alperin

As preprint servers proliferate across scientific fields, moderation has emerged as a lightly structured form of gatekeeping that precedes—or bypasses—peer review. This article examines moderation as a site of precautionary...

Commitment Issues in Science & Technology Studies: On the Necessity of Compromising One’s Principles

Published On: Jul 10 2026

Bård Torvetjønn Haugland, Alexander Myklebust

There have been longstanding discussions regarding the place of normative commitments in Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship. Analysing STS critiques of Innovation Studies and accounts of the institutionalisation...

Sounding Uncertainties: An Embodied Strategy for Digital Ethnographic Archives

Published On: Jul 13 2026

Katja de Neergaard

STS scholars have discussed how the technologies we study are becoming part of our infrastructures for research, sparking new forms of collaboration and a growing interest in open research data and digital ethnographic archives....

4S Blog: Backchannels

AI Infrastructures and Their Ruins: Report from a Workshop

Ludovico Rella Benedetta Catanzariti
Oct 26, 2026
This contribution reports back from the workshop AI Infrastructures: Scales, Ecologies and Ruins, held on May 27-28 at the Royal Geographical Society in London (UK), and supported by the ERC-funded Algorithmic Societies project. The event was supported by the ERC-funded project Algorithmic Societies led by Louise Amoore, and included the following participants: Yawei Zhao, Karen Lai, Liz McFall, Loup Cellard, Fabian Ferrari, Nils Peters, Théophile Lenoir, Ulysses Pascal, Sam Hind, Angus D...
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Error!: a workshop on the status of error in digital technology

Christopher O'Neill & Mardi Reardon-Smith
Oct 19, 2026
The biases and mistakes of algorithmic culture and machine learning have often been subject to critique. In this workshop, convened by Christopher O’Neill (Monash University) and Mardi Reardon-Smith (Monash University), we brought together scholars from STS, media, anthropology, history, and law to reframe this kind of critical analysis through a new investigation of the status of ‘error’ in digital technology.
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Mechanical Turk Science Studies? Write like a New Science Studies

Laura Watts
Oct 17, 2026
In this Reflection, Laura Watts explores what it might mean to write like a new science studies. While LLMs can mimic our academic prose, academic prose itself is a kind of machine: a centuries-old literary technology designed to perform authority and objectivity. What forms of scholarship are lost when we all write like mechanical turks?
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STS, here and now: Reflections on ST&HV School 2026 in Seoul, South Korea

Miryang Kang / 강미량 (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology)
Oct 06, 2026
강미량 Miryang Kang reports on the 2026 Science, Technology, & Human Values (ST&HV) "STS School" in Seoul, where early-career researchers shared their work and received feedback from peers and mentors. She reflects on the transnationalization of STS, the role of language in shaping knowledge production and sharing, and how conversations across different worlds can shape STS as a field.

Backchannels content is contributed by our members to highlight news relevant to their work.

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Making and Doing: STS Beyond the Four Corners of the Paper

STS News

Items submitted by the community and emailed to members monthly.

CfP | The Four Horsemen of the Bropocalypse: Power and Culture Under a Tech Oligarchy

Oct 28, 2026
This academic conference, hosted at Indiana University Bloomington, is scheduled for March 25–27, 2027. The event examines contemporary tech founders as a political, economic, aesthetic, and theological problem. The planning committee invites proposals for individual papers, pre-constituted panels, and roundtables across three streams: the Horsemen, their Mounts, their Kingdom. Comparative, transnational, and historically minded approaches are particularly welcome.

CfP | Globally Contested Imaginaries: Power and Tensions in the AI Era

Oct 28, 2026
The Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the University of Pennsylvania invite submissions for the CARGC/ CDCS Fellows Symposium, "Globally Contested Imaginaries: Power and Tensions in the AI Era," that will be held on April 8-9, 2027 at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

New Book | The Politics of Open Infrastructures Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices

Oct 28, 2026
This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones. They are deeply political arrangements that embed values, distribute power and shape whose knowledge counts.

New Book | Innovations in the Modern Arts and Sciences: Explaining Lasting Change in Novelty-Driven Cultural Fields

Oct 28, 2026
This book examines how innovations emerge, gain recognition and reshape the modern arts and sciences from the late 19th century onwards. Through comparative case studies, it explores how artistic and scientific contributions become established as innovations and transform the aims, methods and practices of their fields.

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