A TopEndSTS reflection on on STS Making and Doing
The AusSTS conference held in Canberra in 2024 was the first to feature an STS Making and Doing session. These sessions have been a long term and well-loved feature of international STS conferences held by the US Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) and more recently the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST).
At AusSTS 2024, the Making and Doing session ran for 2 hours in the afternoon of the first day of the conference. There were 15 presenters in the session, most of whom had requested one of the M&D stalls set up in the foyer of the conference venue, while others used meeting rooms and lecture theatres nearby to run workshops and screen films.
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Now, after the conference is over, all members of the session have been invited to generate a photos essay as a (re)presentation of their display, and as a (re)articulation of ‘Making and Doing STS knowledge work’.
This effort is being curated by TopEndSTS. All presenters in the AusSTS Making and Doing session are invited to submit an essay. In doing so, we ask you to please respond to the provocation below, and to take a look at the draft essays (see links below) already completed by Brit, Helen, Matt and Michaela.
In creating your photo essay, please respond to the following provocation…
We are interested in inquiring into STS M&D as itself a form of doubly situated STS knowledge work, seeing it as happening both in situ in the world, and in the institutional setting of STS professional meetings. We propose to take our displays-(re)presentations at the 2024 AusSTS conference in Canberra as the grounds of this inquiry. (If you have made M&D contributions in other STS professional meetings, they too could ground a contribution to this collection of photo-essays.)
We see STS Making and Doing as a methodological orientation, a stance of knowingly inquiring in explicitly recognising epistemic practices as entangled with political practices. STS M&D offers tales of politico-epistemics which travel, mouth to mouth in telling, hand to hand in showing, from people-place to people-place.
We ask that your essays emphasise experientiality in simultaneously displaying both the contextualizing involved, and your practices of (re)composing in doing people-places. It may be that your in situ people-place is a landscape feature (a mountain and catchment), a situation of institutional life (the storeroom of a museum; a particular policy intervention); a soundscape of people-place; a collectively owned story of people-place.
Such inquiry sees itself as actively refusing an epistemic politics of ‘extractivism’ of ‘waging war by other means’ to misquote Latour’s misquote of Clauswitz (Latour, 1988). We see M&D STS as avoiding participating through promoting scalability of agential entities and/or power differentiated relational networks. Instead, it insists on taking the entities beloved of constructivists, and the relations revered by (post)structuralists, as equally expressions of in situ practices-in-practice and as occupying a single plane in continually co-constituting and mutually disintegrating each other in “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016).
Each of our STS M&D display-presentations necessarily already embeds certain differentiations, or conceptual bifurcations arising from our involvements in the here-now of our inquiries and of the research project as funded. So too in its re-instantiation in the new here-now of an AusSTS conference session.
We want you to attempt to show the practices-in-practice of your intentional curation of your (re)presented project. We also want to hear and see what happened at the conference as people came as interacted with this (re)presentation. We suggest that holding onto these tensions, might offer a productive starting point for (another) new narration of M&D as STS knowledge work. We ask you to tell a story that holds these alternate enactments in view. In gathering all these re-narrations of re-presentations together, together we will see and reflect on what we hope will have become more apparent by the gathering together.
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