Report from the Joint 4S & EASST Conference, August 2004
One large reunion (around 1200 participants I heard). That is one way of describing the 4S & EASST conference in Paris. It was a reunion for people who already knew each other in person and perhaps had not seen each other for a number of years; it was a reunion for people who knew each other from email and now had a chance to meet in person; and it was a sort of reunion for people who knew each other or the other from articles and books and were now able to put a face to these texts and names. Not surprisingly, the poster session on Spacing, timing and organizing with many of the well known names attracted a large audience despite the warning that access to the session was restricted which certainly reduced the number of people who tried to gain access.
With 28 parallel sessions, it was not always easy to choose, to me, the most interesting one, and it would be an impossible task to write a report on the conference as a whole. Therefore, I will reflect on three interactive sessions that formed a nice change in format from individual paper presentations. Choosing a session to attend at such a large conference depends on complex relationships between and among texts, names, and people. One can choose a session on basis of the abstract or title of the abstract; on basis of the combination of papers or people in a session; on basis of a relationship to the presenter who may be a personal friend or a co-author; or on basis the name of the author who is someone well known or someone one has read much work of and would finally like to attach a face and voice to. The three interactive sessions I will focus on below probably thanked part of their success to some well-known people attending the session and others using the opportunity to attach faces to names and texts. Yet, as we will see, they had a number of other attractive features.
Firstly, the 4S-EASST Student Meeting on STS Careers Across the Atlantic. This was organised by student members of 4S (Shobita Parthasarathy, Dave Conz, Robert Doubleday, Stefan Sperling) and EASST (myself) and was attended by over 50 graduate students. The panel members, Mike Lynch (Cornell University), Hélène Mialet (University of California), Trevor Pinch (Cornell University), and Mathew Ratto (Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services) shortly introduced themselves and discussed the difficulties they encountered when they decided to take themselves and their career across the Atlantic. When moving from America to Britain, from France to America, from Britain to America, and from America to the Netherlands, they found that requirements for application letters, interview procedures, teaching practices, contact hours with students, the importance of graduate students during the interview process, etc. differed greatly between the two continents (and countries within a continent). Students who were thinking about or planning such a move were urged to look into it a long time in advance to make sure that for instance the application letter meets the requirements of the country to which one applies. Ratto stated however that sometimes an unexpected opportunity may come along in a country one has not much knowledge about. Taking this opportunity, despite lack of preparation, can result in a great and valuable experience as well. After the introduction, the floor was open for students to ask their questions. The panel members answered questions on for example what it is like to go back to your country after having been away for a few years and on how to prepare for working abroad. A few questions centred on the importance of publications. Mike Lynch, as editor of Social Studies of Science, and the other panel members on basis of their experiences, discussed the question whether the number of quality of publications were regarded as most important and whether publications were always necessary when applying for a new post. Although publications are important, it was commonly agreed that the quality of publications was more important than the number. Examples were mentioned where candidates were accepted for a job without publications, but with excellent other written material. The panel members stressed that the written material (for instance a chapter of the dissertation) that one includes in a job application, needs to be well prepared and well written.
Another successful and very well attended session was Twenty years after “The social construction of facts and artefacts”. The past, present, and future of SCOT. This session was organised by Pablo J. Boczkowski and Nelly Oudshoorn and provided the audience with a sense of history of the STS community. Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker met each other for the first time at the very first EASST conference and decided to do some work together which resulted in the above mentioned article in 1984. A number of people reflected shortly on what this article and SCOT (the Social Construction of Technology) more generally meant for their work and careers. Rayvon Fouche had managed to find his first copy of the article together with the questions he had written down on the copy, one of which was: ‘is it really that easy?’ During the session the construction of technology approach (SCOT as an acronym was invented by David Edge) was criticised for not including for instance race (Fouche) and gender (Judy Wajcman) issues, although Wajcman recognised that gender was integrated in the first article. Donald MacKenzie asked how successful the SCOT-based politics of technology had been in practice. Despite these few critical notes, SCOT was regarded as valuable, influential, and as an approach that ‘had a lot of life left’ (Wajcman). Lucy Suchman remarked that it is now hard to remember that there was a time when the integration of science and technology was heavily debated. Trevor Pinch, in his response to the reflections on SCOT, remembered that a serious question for Social Studies of Science was whether the journal should publish on technology. Things have changed since then, partly thanks to that first article on technology that was published in Social Studies of Science. Jane Summerton pointed out that the yellow, or school-bus, book (Bijker, Hughes & Pinch, The Social Construction of Technological Systems) had even been used by students to contest traditional hierarchies of disciplines (who can interpret technology?). Andrew Feenberg, on a personal note, told the audience how he had academically been raised by Marcuse who saw technologies as politics of domination. He described reading the 1984 article on underdetermination and interpretative flexibility as liberating. Yet, the article and texts that followed were not only influential in the past. Pinch gave an example of someone who had recently read and reviewed a text on the construction of technology and had written that this was an interesting and valuable approach that should certainly be followed up. For some SCOT is still new. Beth Bechky had the impression that SCOT is used more and more in organisation studies. However, her search for references was not very successful. It thus seems that SCOT has only recently become better known in organisation studies. Bijker illustrated, in answer to MacKenzie, how SCOT or STS in general can politicise technology by clarifying hidden politics and by showing the need to discuss hidden politics. In one of his studies he alerted actors to the way in which they handle practices. The actors themselves then started using STS concepts. According to Bechky’s supervisor SCOT could be regarded as a hit record: ‘it has a good rhythm and you can dance to it’. Yet, this does not mean that SCOT has become a fixed object. Suchman congratulated Pinch and Bijker for being able to resist the hardening of categories. Bijker explained that he deliberately tells his students that there are many SCOTs and that SCOT has changed over time. Pinch exclaimed: ‘That SCOT may long change’.
The last session I would briefly like to reflect on was entitled SCOT and ANT in 5 minutes: a new counter-networking technique for STS and was organised by Nina Wakeford and Joseph Dumit. This was, in other words, a speed-dating session that would give people, who would not normally meet, the opportunity to exchange information about their research. Also in this session there was a nice mixture of graduate students and junior scholars on the one hand and well-known people on the other (Bijker, in his own words, has become well-known because he was ‘created by SCOT’ and the people who read and further developed SCOT). Two rows of people sat opposite each other. Both you and the person opposite you had three minutes to explain your research and get the other interested. Then one row would move one place and you would repeat the same with someone else. I very much liked the idea of the session and I did meet people who I had not met during the four days of the conference. But it was hard work, especially at the end of the conference, and at a certain point I decided to do some more in-depth networking at a slower pace with a beer at a terrace outside.
These three sessions were not only successful in the number of participants. They formed nice and informal interactive spaces in which younger and more established scholars could exchange ideas and in some cases advice each other and were a welcome change from sessions with individual paper presentations. I would like to encourage people to organise more such innovative and creative spaces at future conferences.
author’s address: R.Zeiss@fsw.vu.nl