Vibe Check: Reflections on Ten Years of Making and Doing 4S open panel #234, convened by Ben Gansky, Mascha Gugganig, and Yelena Gluzman Since 2015, hundreds of 4S members have had experience with Making and Doing as presenters, organizers, award adjudicators or audiences. STS research in audiovisual, experiential, or poetic forms has grown and matured, and there has been a proliferation of STS publications to theorize and make sense of various artistic and craft practices as STS methods. As we near ten years since its founding, this open panel invites reflections on the reverberations of Making and Doing for STS as a discipline. We particularly welcome first-person perspectives of M&D participants, broadly defined, and hope to gather contributions toward a 2026 special issue. Proposals may take up topics including, but certainly not limited to: - What and whose work makes Making & Doing possible, and how have the specificities of these interactions articulated and stabilized what M&D has been and could be? - Does M&D hail a cohering set of methodological, theoretical and/or political commitments? What interventions has M&D made in disciplinary norms or hierarchies of knowledge in STS or more broadly? - What is (or should be) the vibe of M&D? How does sharing knowledge happen at M&D in a way that is worth reflecting upon? While we welcome contributions in the form of panel talks, we also recognize that contributions may be in non-traditional formats. To be clear, contributions to this open panel should offer perspectives to reflect on M&D contributions to STS, but should not replace or replicate a contribution to the M&D Program at 4S Seattle. Submissions are due on Feb 2, 2025. Hybrid participation is possible. Submission portal URL follows: https://www.xcdsystem.com/4sonline/abstract/abstract.cfm

#4SSeattle abstracts are due Feb 2nd! For those working in #STS #MakingandDoing modes, check out our panel reflecting on 10 years of Making & Doing Programs at 4S. Does M&D hail a cohering set of methodological, theoretical and/or political commitments?...

Languages vibrate in the tongues and vocal chords of their speakers; languages beat in the fingertips of their writers; languages reverberate in the minds of mono, bi, and multilingual scholars worldwide. While the predominance of English is undeniable, it is not a logical necessity but the result of a series of historical, economic, and political factors. Many voices in the last decades have questioned its role as the so-called “lingua franca” of science. Instead, multilingualism is increasingly recognized as a more realistic representation of the practice of science and a desirable goal for the circulation of its outputs. This view is supported by international consensus such as the Helsinki Initiative, the Barcelona Declaration, or the UNESCO Recommendation for Open Science. Furthermore, with the advent of artificial intelligence and its immediate applications to translation (including that of scientific and academic texts), languages and linguistic expertise are now in the center of technical and political debates. As central as language is to the expression of human thought, a sociolinguistics of the scientific field has not been systematically integrated into STS studies and conferences. This panel seeks to build on previous experiences in past 4S conferences, bearing in mind that no discussion around language is ever exclusively about language itself. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) studies of bi, multi and translingualism in academic contexts, academic socialization and enculturation through language, languages for academic purposes, IA and automatic/machine translation, translation literacy, sociolinguistics and glottopolitics of the scientific field, language coverage in indexes and databases, languages and Open Access, languages for publication, linguistic biases in scholarly publishing, scientific and linguistic sovereignty, language value and hierarchization, linguistic and scientific centers and peripheries, language use across discipl…

And here's the panel's full description. Please share widely !

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We got accepted! More details to come. See you in Seattle next September!

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