EASST Review: Volume 35(2) June 2016

Научно-образовательный центр социально-политических исследований технологий (PAST-C) организован в Национальном исследовательском Томском государственном университете в 2012 году. Цель Центра – развивать новое для российских социальных наук направление “социальные исследования науки и техники” (STS), и как исследовательское поле, и как образовательную дисциплину. Основной фокус исследовательской программы PAST-C: исследование технологий в контексте не западных стран, в частности, в России. Мы фокусируемся на исследованиях инноваций в больших технических системах и на исследованиях инноваций в медицине.
В образовательной сфере в настоящее время работаем при поддержке программы “Эразмус+” в коллаборации с рядом европейских университетов над развитием магистерской программы “Инновации и общество: наука, техника, медицина”, которую открываем в 2017 году.

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience is a new online, open-source, peer-reviewed journal that has created a publication platform for the ongoing re-activation and remixing of the field of feminist science and technology studies. Catalyst explicitly embraces work that falls within the rubric of called feminist science and technology studies even as it propagates that work within a broader panoply of geographic sites and disciplines as well as through myriad practices, including art, maker culture, and new media praxis. The journal publishes both conventional monographic articles as well as a variety of experimental writings, roundtable conversations, and digital and new media projects. Moreover, Catalyst recognizes the dispersed, divergent, and intersectional political commitments that constitute feminist STS by purposefully moving beyond gender and sexuality as discrete topics to invite scholarship engaged with militarism, blackness, decoloniality, anti-racism, queer politics, political economy, and disability. The journal acknowledges feminist STS as an intersected, many-sited, under revision, and heterogeneous field.

The exhibition Reset Modernity! adds usefully to Latour’s ongoing work on modernity. By deploying a range of artists across several media his ideas – as developed in particular in We Have Never Been Modern (1993) and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013) – become more accessible to a larger audience.

Bruno Latour stages his new co-curated Reset Modernity! exhibition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe as a thought experiment or, in official German, a Gedankenausstellung. As recent visitors to the show, and as keen followers of Latour’s version of science and technology studies (STS), this framing strikes us as rather telling. More than the many photographs and installations, what is put on display in Karlsruhe, in fact, are the thoughts of Bruno Latour himself. And yet, while the setting is populated with significant works of contemporary art, nothing much experimental seems to be happening to these thoughts along the way. In this short commentary, we reflect on how and why that might be so. Despite the promising set-up, we conclude, Reset Modernity! leaves you hungry for more – including, not least, the always thought-provoking (written) work of Bruno Latour, the STS scholar of the modes of existence of the moderns.

For the anthropology of knowledge “reset Modernity!” offers a studying ground for representational work in the mode of exhibition: What kind of spatial arrangement could express this very representational work that is the making of an exhbition? Would space be reserved for reflection on how this Gedankenausstellung became an Ausstellung? The exhibition includes traces of the original working practice of AIME in the form of “stations” implemented in each procedure. I argue that these arrangements point directly to another, virtual actor – potentially a zettelkasten of the AIME team and its collaborators. However the question which lines were drawn between artworks and references that became part of the spatially, temporally, financially limited exhibition-project, and those that were excluded, remains largely open within the exhibition space. The catalogue and website give some insight into these processes. Nevertheless the argument of this mainly large-sized-images-exhibition realises itself in the more secluded sections in a way that the urge for a Gedankensprung may be directly experienced.

The aim of the workshop was to initiate a cross disciplinary systematic discussion about the role of history and more particularly of the history of techno-sciences in techno-scientific policy making. Emphasis was given on histories of innovations and technologies in the energy sector, environmental innovations and the information and communication technologies. The main questions of the event were: What is or what can be the role of history in public policies relevant to science and technology? What historiographical perspectives are more pertinent to historically informed techno-scientific policies? Can a historian of science and technology have a role in policy and decision making? Ten papers were presented organized in three sessions: Infrastructures, Technologies and the Environment; Innovation Transitions, Governance and Path Dependencies; Nuclearities, Techno-sciences and Nuclear Policies. There was a concluding roundtable that gave the floor to four external commentators from Innovation Studies, Sociology, as well as from NGOs and the corporate world. Their role was to provide insights about the ways in which historical discourses and reconstructions can be relevant to public policies.

The conference held in Budapest between 3–5 September revolved around the role of technosciences in socialism and post-socialism in Eastern Europe. Participants gathered from a very wide geographical and thematic field, and the organizers strove to extend the regional scope of Eastern Europe, to encourage reflections on comparative and global aspects. The event’s first aim was to connect mainstream STS with much neglected political economical approaches and the experiences of the former socialist bloc in connection to technosciences, materialities and knowledge production. The second was to reflect on the historical ruptures or continuities between “pre-socialism,” “socialism,” and “post-socialism” in light of geographical relativity and the global embeddedness and interconnectivity of “socialisms” and “capitalisms.” Sessions included topics such as subjectivities and material infrastructures, the technopolitics of nature, the role of engineers and entrepreneurs, objectivity and quantification across East and West, the global circulation of high-tech, and the internationalization of technocracies.