Some random and personal impressions from EASST 2006 @ Lausanne

Your tireless editor through the years, Chunglin Kwa, has finally decided to spend his energies on other tasks. And though I’m already tired to begin with, I’ve decided to try to fill the post. Somehow, watching Chunglin rise to the challenge over and over has given me to courage to try. And that decision has given me the courage to try my hand at an EASST conference “travelogue” report. After all, one of the recurrent problems Chunglin faced was a shortage (at times) of contributions to the Review. And I am one of the guilty parties. I have never, before now, contributed. So, as a final gesture of gratitude to Chunglin, as a last-minute effort to build some moral standing now that I’ll be taking over at inviting others to contribute, as a self-introduction from the in-coming editor to the readership, and simply because I found it added extra enjoyment to the conference once I’d made the decision to write about it … here is my EASST 2006 conference travelogue:

4S and EASST conferences change “flavour” from year to year. The changes reflect shifts in research approaches (dare I say “fashions”?), perhaps also Kuhn-ian shifts between periods of normal science and years marking rapid changes. 4S and EASST conferences also have different flavours from person to person. Any given conference may seem boring, narrow, off-target, diffuse etc. to some and exciting, focused, relevant, varied etc. to others.

To me, this year’s EASST conference was exhilarating, but also exhausting. The organizers had chosen a topic that, even as it was central to current STS discourses, also brought in hundreds of new participants with fresh perspectives. This was not merely the desired yet arbitrary effect of potential participants’ responses to the call for papers; it was also emphasized in the structure of the plenary sessions. These were set up as insider/outsider reflections on STS meta-themes. Each morning or evening there was a plenary session where we were challenged to (re-)think questions such as “What is STS’s frontier?” “What are our questions?” “What sites should we focus on?” “Where do we go from here” and “Might the way forward involve taking a step back to rethink what we’ve come to take for granted?” And then, to top it all off, we were challenged to follow a Swiss work ethic by starting our mornings early and maintaining momentum ‘til late. Luckily the cafeteria sold good strong espresso drinks to keep my eyes open.

The challenge to look back and rethink former choices was a recurrent one for me throughout the conference. For instance, at one point my notes show that my thoughts were steered back to the York conference. Are there many out there who remember Steve Woolgar’s session on accountancy? I recall taking the role of a rather rude, snippety commentator at the time. Sorry about that, Steve. My choices then are now coming back to haunt me. Back then I thought Steve was just going on a rant about the nuisance of filling in forms. I challenged him to offer a more thorough constructivist analysis of what all those forms entailed: How are they weaving together the State, the public, and Academe? Are they democratizing Science? Are they distorting it? Now, four years later, the distortions are becoming clearer to me. Steve, are you ready to go back and update and revise that paper?

Of course, not all my reflections were coloured by regrets. I found my choice of research project confirmed time and again. My decision, a year or so ago now, to start a large project on the micro-practices of statistics - statistics’ role(s) in governance, the choice(s) to categorize citizens according to race/ethnicity (or not), the collection and deployment of crime statistics, the integration of statistics into diagnostics, and so on - has been resonating with more and more papers and lectures at STS events. Of course, my team and I still have a lot of work to do before we see whether our results and analyses will meet with expectations, but at least we no longer feel alone with a topic others have finished with. Now we realize we are in a well-populated area that many have re-discovered as not yet completely explored.

Another aspect of this year’s conference “flavour” was that my reflections kept following parallel paths: “But is it STS?” “But is it Science?” “But is it math?” “But is it art?” Of course, the plenaries were meant to make us ask such questions, and did so effectively. No wonder then that the questions stuck with me as I attended paper sessions. But it does speak to the consistency of the organizers’ vision that even the cultural event reinforced this pattern. Not just for me, I might add. In fact, not directly for me at all. I was exhausted and left early, but I heard others the next day reflecting on whether a woman screaming was art, whether the performances they liked were more entitled to be called “art” than those they disliked, and in extension of such questions - what made a performance “art” or qualified it to that term?

We might also ask what it is that makes a conference. One answer is certainly the efforts of the organizers and programme committee. Many thanks to them all! Another answer is that the participants make the conference. As I have come to expect, STS conferences, however large they may grow, are particularly congenial ones. Papers get commented constructively. Professors and students mingle, listen to, and speak with one another freely as colleagues within the field. Thanks too, then, to all attendees! The only destructive presence is the ghostly one of those who - having submitted abstracts and session programs and registered for the conference - nevertheless fail to attend. How rude to simply fail to show up! How inconsiderate to leave an audience sitting there waiting, missing their chance to hear other papers! Shame on you (you know who you are). Yes, you may have had a good reason. Perhaps you or a loved one fell ill. Perhaps you were frightened away by recent news of terrorist plots. Perhaps you simply ran out of time and didn’t get your paper written (well, that’s not a particularly good reason, but I guess it happens). So no, we don’t expect 100% attendance. Non-attendance in itself is nothing to be ashamed of. But next time you realize you won’t be attending, at least send a message to the organizers so they can announce a program change.

Looking forward to hearing from you, and to seeing you at future conferences!