Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), 2022 Preliminary Conference Program, December 7 - 10, 2022

Conference theme: Reunion, recuperation, reconfiguration: Knowledges and technosciences for living together

As we deepen our understanding of inequalities, forms of oppression, and the role of sciences and technologies in them, so deepens our need to act and our sense of responsibility. For many of us, an ethic of care permeates our practices of knowledge production in STS and calls us to new ways of relating to each other. These common questions of care, responsibility, relation and action arise whether our research focuses on laboratories, forests, genetic databases, smart cities or forced migrations. The current pandemic and the ongoing climate emergency make these common questions more urgent than ever and raise concerns about the status of expert knowledge, the reconfiguration of a global geopolitical and technoscientific order, and the decentralization of epistemic infrastructures. At stake is our capacity to recuperate valuable forms of life, to learn which forms we should let go of, and, as far as we are able, to critically join in the enactment of new ones. This brings to the fore the labor required to live well with others and provides an opportunity to reconfigure things differently. Living together is both a power relation, with some disproportionately bearing the costs and others reaping the benefits, and a hope for good, or at least better, relations. Thus, reunion does not imply reviving a previous union that may be idealized by some and highly criticized by others. Reunion indicates there has been a break in relations, providing an opportunity to engage differently, this time.

As we convene for the ESOCITE/4S 2022 Joint Meeting in Cholula, Mexico, we invite our colleagues to consider how to come together again (in difference), how to recover what was valuable (and dismantle oppressive structures), and how to reconfigure assemblages of humans and more-than-humans (and design and create new ones). We aim to provoke reflection on the practices, representations, materializations, and dynamics of social relations in which science, technology and knowledge are central elements. We thus propose to continue the tradition of a deep and broad understanding of the production, use and circulation of technoscientific knowledge, as well as its critical evaluation and the way in which it is articulated with economic, social, cultural, and political power structures. This second joint conference in Latin America, after the first in Buenos Aires in 2014, invites us to update debates that, although marked by the traditions brought together here, can transcend them, and trigger further encounters.