The 7th STS Italia Conference will be hosted at the University of Padova, Italy, June 14 through 16, 2018, by the Italian Society of Science and Technology Studies. The topic of the 2018 is Technoscience from Below broadly construed. The conference will be an opportunity to present empirical and theoretical work from a variety of disciplines and fields: history, sociology, anthropology, design, economics, philosophy, law, psychology and semiotics.

Between the Local and the Global: Connection, Sharing, and Entanglement in the History of Technoscience (Track 25)

This track solicits contributions focused on the historical critique of diffusionist models of technoscience which represent innovations as originating in a single centre and diffusing in a one-way relationship to centres outside of the centre. Postcolonial critiques of diffusionist “centre-periphery” models inherited from the Cold War era have been highly effective in their exposure of the deeply embedded Eurocentrism of prevailing historical narratives in which social, cultural, and political formations are depicted as one-way relationships of “sending” colonisers and “receiving” colonial subjects. Additionally, these critiques have generated other lines of critique which feature what have variously been called “connected,” “shared,” and “entangled” approaches to history that stress networked relations and processes of mutual influencing in establishing innovation relationships. These lines of inquiry permit a foretaste of what can be achieved by untangling and reconnecting local histories of technoscience in ways that throw highlight, on the one hand, on unique schemes of local development according to the distinctive needs of local populations and, on the other, how local infrastructures are reworked and redeployed from below to accommodate global processes of technoscientific innovation. The convenors seek to open up and develop these lines of inquiry with a track that explores the role of bottom-up innovation processes and departs from the deeply rooted territorial approaches of the past.

Contributions could include (but are not limited to) studies of “connected,” “shared,” and “entangled” relations of technoscience which:

– have occurred between colonial powers and (now) independent former colonies

– have occurred under (pre- or post-1989) first-second-third world interactions

– have occurred in the course of development (i.e., developing/developed nations)

– have occurred as a result of collaborations in international and/or supranational technoscientific projects (e.g., Human Genome Projects, LIGO Scientific Collaboration, CERN and SESAME, Millennium Seed Bank Partnership).

Submissions: To submit a paper for this track, we require an abstract of roughly 300 words submitted as .docx, .doc, or .pdf.

Please send submission directly to the co-convenors:  William Leeming, OCAD University, bleeming@faculty.ocadu.ca and Ana Barahona, National Autonomous University of Mexico, ana.barahona@ciencias.unam.mx

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: February 10, 2018.

Conference Website: https://www.frombelow-stsitaliaconf.org/