Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS), published by The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), is a vibrant, fully open access (OA) journal for cultivating, evaluating, and sharing cutting-edge research in the social studies of science, technology, and medicine in transnational contexts. Established in 2015, ESTS publishes peer-reviewed articles, thematic collections, and a wide variety of short-form writing that engage both scholarly and broader audiences.

Starting with Volume 7 (2021), ESTS came under the editorship of a new transnational editorial collective (EC). Under this collective, ESTS will continue publishing work that represents the full range of STS scholarship. ESTS’s incoming EC will also make concerted efforts toward:

Strengthening Transnational STS: STS journals published in English have largely accompanied the emergence and consolidation of the field in the United States and Western Europe. However, the world of STS is much more diverse and globally distributed. ESTS reflects this diversity through its transnationally organized editorial collective and editorial board. It also seeks to actively collaborate with authors and reviewers from different geographical regions and intellectual traditions. We encourage contributors to identify issues that are experienced and dealt with in different ways in different localities, and to compare across borders. In doing so, we hope to enrich the dialogue between established and emerging intellectual currents in STS, and extend the journal’s audiences and impact around the world.

Deepening Open Access (OA): OA facilitates democratic access to knowledge, a value we cherish. We want to extend ESTS’s OA infrastructure, by making it a space for experimentation (through e.g. data sharing, open peer review, and collaborative writing), in order to explore the full potential of OA scholarship. Our digital repositories, with transparent governance mechanisms, call scholars to experiment with data sharing, re-use, and reinterpretation, as well as to publish non-conventional scholarly outputs, such as short-form writing, multimedia content, and pedagogical repositories. Such publications may not be the usual means to achieve career progress; nonetheless, we believe that developing new and more diversified forms of knowledge production and quality metrics constitute important first steps in moving beyond current scientific assessment regimes.

Building STS Communities and Audiences: ESTS wants to convene a diversity of STS traditions and practitioners from across the globe to ensure the field’s vitality and relevance. ESTS is not only a venue for intellectual exchange but also a place for engaged STS, following past 4S president Gary Downey’s vision for scholarship as a form of “critical participation.” In addition to more conventional forms of scholarly writing, ESTS welcomes a range of short-form writing and multimedia submissions aimed at engaging a diversity of audiences.

Cultivating Scholarship on STS Pedagogies: ESTS is committed to promoting scholarship on STS pedagogies. Recognizing teaching as a form of scholarship, we seek to make visible the work of STS scholars in translating STS theories for education in and outside of the classroom, and building STS curricula and programs in a variety of institutional contexts. STS pedagogies are critical not only for training the next generation of STS scholars and strengthening STS programs, but also for their affordances as practices of critical participation, intervention, and engagement. As such, we encourage a form of STS practice that enables not only scholarship of pedagogy but also scholarship via pedagogy through challenging the linear model of knowledge production and diffusion, and approaching STS teaching and learning as lively and messy sites of co-production.