Glimpses into the forthcoming EASST 2006 Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, 23-26 August: Reviewing Humanness
The theme A few years ago, Peter Sloterdijk, pointed to the peculiar animal species that human beings constitute.[1] In a short and stimulating text, he reminded us that we all begin our lives as fragile, dependant and ‘unfinished’ bodies. Compared to us, other animals are, at their birth, much stronger, autonomous and ‘finished’. This specificity of humanness implies that we need a protected space and a series of technologies of care to insure that our precarious bodies have a chance to survive. For this reason and a series of other reasons, the conference organisers suggest that human ‘nature’ is made and remade by ideas and practices assembling bodies, technologies, and spaces.[2]
How we conceive humanness and its transformation is at the centre of the 2006 EASST conference in Lausanne. We think that focusing on spacialities, technologies, bodies and their co-constitution is a fruitful way of organizing our discussions on this broad theme. We also suggest in the call that it is important, considering the state of the art and the themes of former EASST conferences, to put particular emphasis on the political dimensions of a reviewed humanness.
These discussions, but also many others on quite different topics, will be distributed in different plenary sessions and parallel sessions.[3] We would like to give you here a brief ‘sneak preview’ of what is going to happen on the shores of the Leman Lake this summer.
The plenary sessions The principle of each plenary is to create a (temporary) couple of keynote speakers: one being within the STS community and the other more of an outsider.[4] Our aim is to avoid the ‘chapel effect’ and to de-center our vision both of humanness and the STS world.
The opening plenary on the 23rd of August, entitled Reviewing Humanness, is dedicated to political issues in STS and to an historical approach to humanness through mind reading, with the contributions of two historians, Dominique Pestre (EHESS, Paris), and Michael Hagner (ETH, Zurich).
The second plenary which takes place the same day, Re-thinking Science, Policy and STS in the 21st Century: Analytical Insights from an Outsider Within, is organized by the Swiss Association for the Studies of Science, Technology and Society (STS-CH). It is articulated around a talk given by Helga Nowotny (European Research Council) on the relationship between science, policy and STS, and notably on STS in the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union.
The third plenary on the 24th of August, Queer Science: Transbiological ‘Facts’, will question the sexed body through an archaeology of feminist and queer theory, with the talks and discussions between Judith Halberstam (University of Southern California) and Sarah Franklin (London School of Economics).
The plenary on Friday the 25th, Accessing Space and Technology, will host a discussion between Stephen Graham (University of Durham) and Sally Wyatt (University of Amsterdam) on space, technology and inequality with particular emphasis on the electronic filtering of access (to places, facilities, etc.).
The fifth and last plenary session on the afternoon of 26th of August brings together two notable scholars to discuss issues of “Biopolitics, Biocapital and STS”: Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard) will revisit issues of biopolitics and Nikolas Rose (London School of Economics) will address the “value of life” in the context of biocapital.
The parallel sessions Examining the abstracts and sessions received for the parallel sessions, we can already identify a series of general trends. A first important point is the increasing number of participants (approx. 630) and, consequently, of parallel sessions, compared to previous editions. The disequilibrium in terms of the origins of participants however remains. Most participants come from the North and few from the South or from Eastern Europe. This being said, we are very pleased to welcome colleagues from countries as diverse as Brazil, Bolivia, Bengladesh, South Africa, United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Lebanon, Turquey, Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Japan, China, and South Korea, to mention those from outside of the European Union. The gender balance is quite satisfying at all levels of the conference programme and the mix of juniors and seniors, as well as of participants to previous conferences and new ones is very promising. These are clear and positive indicators of the vigour of the STS field.
In terms of content now, here are a few comments on the 144 parallel sessions of the Conference. Among the themes proposed by the organisers (in the call), some are well represented in the Programme. There is ample space for contributions on the biomedical and technological re-shaping of humanness. The sessions about biomedical practice, technology, and policy, as well as health care systems gather a large number of contributions (threads 1 and 2, and also 8 and 10). This thematic cluster contains a session organized by colleagues from South Korea, addressing the implications of the Hwang scandal for the S&T studies. There follows a series of sessions about the governance of stem cells and its controversies, testimony of the emergence of an important research network on this topic. Further in the same large cluster, the Bios Centre of the LSE prepares a ‘surprise session’, and there are series of sessions on neurosciences and the ‘cerebral subject’, bodies, patients and therapies, neonatology, genomics, the production and the commodification of knowledge.
Socio-economic approaches to S&T, innovation studies, and R&D policies, are also well represented. There is a broad range of different industries, strategies and markets in focus. Some sessions discuss f.i. the role of S&T in ‘transition economies’ with colleagues from Russia and Poland (see threads 4, 9 and 12). The parallel sessions also host a large bulk of papers on long-standing research themes, such as the ICTs (mainly threads 3 and 4). There are sessions on ‘the biography of software systems’, on ‘open source softwares’, on ‘instructional technology’, or on the relations between technologies, social organisation, work and daily life.
Noteworthy also is the variation of interest for certain themes between EASST conferences. Consider for instance the importance of risk studies and GMOs at the York Conference in 2002, and the scarce number of contributions proposed under these headings this year. What happened ? Are GM crops not controversial anymore? Did STS scholars jump to the more fashionable issue of nanotechnology? Things are certainly more complicated. Studies and assessment of agrofood, biotechnology, uncertainty, and precaution, probably reached their peak in Europe a few years ago. On the other hand, many factors influence the trends observable in the parallel sessions. It took for instance years of work to prepare what appears now in 2006 as a important network of research on nanoscience with sessions on ‘politics of expectations’, ‘visions’, and ‘public engagement’ with nanotechnolgy.
We could reflect along the same lines on themes such as technology assessment (TA) and participation, not quantitatively very important but still present in this edition. Is this a consequence of a certain disillusionment concerning such procedures (observed in other fields of social science and political analysis)? It could be the case, but it could also be related to the way such issues are framed today both by funding institutions and by the sessions’ organisers of EASST 2006. If there are few papers labelled “TA” f.i., there is however a large group on matters of governance, of expertise and public debate (thread 7). Other sessions are approaching these issues in terms of ‘social control of technology’, of ‘management of social conflicts’, theorizing at another level the governance of S&T.
Among the topics less represented than expected, there are sessions on sustainable production and consumption, urban development, human-technology interaction in built environments, ‘contested spaces’ and local participation (threads 5 and 6). A couple of sessions discuss the place of S&T studies in industrialising and developing countries (see thread 10). Contributions around science, culture, literature and arts are unfortunately not many, perhaps because we did not manage to give such issues enough visibility in the call.
Those who like the STS way to tackle issues directly ‘in the middle of socio-technical networks’, instead of framing them by using disciplinary categories, will certainly happy with the numerous sessions and contributions on non-humans, hybrids, cyborgs, boundary objects, or embedded norms (especially under thread 10 ‘knowledge objects, practice, and culture’). Last but not least, thread 13, about ‘STS in practice, methods, research networks, and computer tools’, has managed to attract a fair amount of sessions to help young researchers finding their way in the maze of the publishing world, sessions on constructivism, collaborative and interdisciplinary research, as well as e-research, and digital knowledge archives.
Finally, political issues are addressed under different guises in the sessions: such as the articulation of lab studies with macro trends in science and politics, the reframing of bioethics, the contemporary reforms in higher education, or the demands for the engagement of public debate in the course of the development of new technology. In a period when governments are actively participating in the ‘manufacture of uncertainty’ [3], downplaying f.i. scientific expertise in climate change, further reflections and experiments on the politics of, and in S&T studies may indeed be necessary.
What we now very much look forward to is to see these themes and questions coming to life this summer in Lausanne.
Notes
- Peter Sloterdijk, La domestication de l’être, Paris, Mille et une nuits, 2000.
- See call for papers: http://www2.unil.ch/easst2006/callpapers.htm.
- An EASST conference is of course a come-together of the STS community as much as a thematic colloquium.
- Except for the second plenary which has other aims.
- Sheldon Krimsky, Science in the Private Interest : Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research? Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.