This week, the organizing team announced the theme for the 2025 Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference, which will be in Seattle next September.
The theme emerged in workshop discussions among the organizing team and encapsulates dynamic conversations in the interdisciplinary field and the specificity of the region:
Reverberations
“To reverberate is to echo, to repeat, to transmit further, to convey. Reverberations are also relays—wave-like, rolling, seismic or subtle—between points in space and time, felt evidence of distant yet interpenetrating events. In this sense, to reverberate is to exhibit a strange kind of force—an infinite regress of effects perceived as causes perceived as effects. For STS, reverberation figures science and technology not only as an effect of myriad practices and multiple agencies but also as normative sites where diverse politics and disparate struggles are resounded, reworked, and—consequentially—reactivated.
The 49th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S): Reverberations calls for presentations, panels, and adjacent gatherings that engage reverberations across form and content. The theme offers layered meaning, across the senses. For example, it invites an engagement with the past as it reverberates in the present, which reflects on varied STS histories – in the Seattle region, longstanding and ongoing colonialism and resource extraction, as well as protest and Indigenous resistance. Extending from that, Reverberations also has a spatial dimension, both geologically, as we will be gathering in a seismically active place, and in a broader sense, as what happens in one place can ripple outward with transcontinental impacts. On another register, Reverberations brings to mind music, which has been such an impactful site of Seattle’s pop cultural impacts. And there could also be myriad opportunities to bring the evocatively tactile theme of Reverberations into conversation with theoretical concepts impactful within STS, ranging from the classic interest in the agency of objects, to inquiries into what attending to diffraction might reveal, to sociotechnical systems and imaginaries – and so much more.
The meeting includes a Making & Doing exhibition alongside a special zine exhibition that showcases a plurality of formats and inquiries.”
The 2025 call for open panel abstracts will open in October. Abstract submissions will be due November 15, 2024.
For more information on 4S in Seattle 2025, contact Daniela Rosner at dkrosner@uw.edu
