Standards, Pedagogies, and Celebrating the STS Infrastructure Award to ESTS

ESTS EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE:

Abstract

Volume 10 comes in two parts, issue 1 and 2 published together. The double issue includes two Thematic Collections, “Standards and their Containers” and “Pedagogical Intersections.” It also includes two Original Research Articles and an Engagements piece. With these issues, ESTS also celebrates winning the Infrastructure Award 2024 awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).

Keywords

pedagogy; standards and containers; vaccines; pedagogy; science and technology studies

Introduction

Welcome to volume 10 of Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. Though it comes late in the year, this double issue is full of new STS scholarship, including two Thematic Collections, two Original Research Articles, and a piece in the Engagements category. These issues also celebrate the journal’s editorial team being awarded the 2024 STS Infrastructure Award at the joint meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) in Amsterdam in July.

The two Original Research Articles in these issues cover the greenwashing of bioenergy in the United States (Powell et al. 2024), and the disappearance of human workers in data work in India (Chaudhuri and Chandhiramowuli 2024).

“Renewable Ruse” (Powell et al. 2024) is a collaboratively researched and written piece that details an energy transition that is not really a transition in North Carolina. While touted as a positive move towards sustainability, the development of bioenergy sources (wood fuel and methane drawn from agricultural and forestry industries) leaves intact existing forms of extractivism, intensifying rather than ameliorating environmental injustice. The essay is notable for a number of reasons, including its collaborative, polyvocal approach to research and writing, which enacts social and material connections and differences that the ruse of “renewability” they examine elides.

“Tracing the Displacement of Data Work in AI” (Chaudhuri and Chandhiramowuli 2024) examines a different kind of elision, bringing into relief how the opportunities of data workers in the Global South get enclosed. Sited in Bangalore, once the icon of IT outsourcing, the web startup at the center of this article run a price matching tool. While an indispensable tool for bargain hunters, these seemingly intelligent systems rely on teams of human data workers to be “in the loop” to be of any value. The article shows that while work in the platform economy is often seen to be a precarious world of endless gigs, more secure workers in India are deskilled, devalued, and made invisible as logics of labor organization and the transnational IT economy intersect.

The entry in the Engagements genre originates with the Author-Meets-Critic session held at 4S’s 2022 meeting in Cholula, Mexico. Sophie Chao and Kregg Hetherington (2024) discuss monocropping, monocultures, and the agribiopolitics of industrial food systems with Hetherington’s Rachel Carson Award winning book, The Government of Beans (2020).

Among the many characteristics of a piece of strong academic writing, one may be how well it embodies a scholarly connoisseurship. Understood as a skill of discernment cultivated through deep engagement with the details of a subject, connoisseurship is essential to all scholarship, and it is certainly on display in the issues’ Original Research Articles, grounded in detailed qualitative work in-situ. But other manifestations appear in historical work, especially of the type on display in the Thematic Collection, “Standards and Their Containers.” Edited by Aro Velmet and Claas Kirchhelle (2024), the articles in the collection cover an impressive historical and geographic span in painstaking detail to draw attention to the colonial and post-colonial vicissitudes of human-microbe relations (Kollmer 2024; Kirchhelle and Kirchhelle 2024; Pouget 2024; Tousignant 2024; Vanderslott 2024; Velmet 2024). The pieces in the collection track pathogens as they are brought into socio-technical infrastructures that impose various forms of standardization, but which are continually transformed by microbial unruliness. From hygiene in Europe and its colonies to the asymmetrical biopolitics of global health, the collection conceptually contributes to how we think about microbes, disease, and the technoscientific practices deployed to epistemologically and clinically capture them. What’s more, the collection’s connoisseurship lies in the grasp of a swathe of primary sources with eyes tuned to draw out the sense they embody.

Pedagogy as STS

Another quality of good scholarship becomes apparent when, as journal editors, we don the hat of “teacher.” Many of us are teachers introducing students to new ideas, and impart to them an appreciation for the crafts of reading, writing, and analysis. As we read through new submissions, part of our attention is always on the question, “How might I use this research in my teaching?” (York and Okune 2024; York et al. 2024).

There are so many factors at play that there is no one way to approach this question. Class size, subject area, and student level are all considerations, as are new teaching styles, classroom techniques, as well as the easy availability of texts to students. Long gone are the days when a teacher could compel an entire class to purchase a photocopied class reader.

But of course, as we often hear “students don’t read anymore.” This refrain has echoed across the years, but it tends to diminish the fact that students are different now, more diverse in background and perspective, and far more nimble, savvy and economical with their time than we might be able to perceive from the lectern. And as Monamie Haines shows, teachers need to be attentive and respond thoughtfully to the predicaments generated by intensifying transnational circuits of higher education, which may bring students and teachers into the same physical classrooms while occluding the historical and socio-cultural distances that structure them (Haines 2024).

It is not lost on us that the social, technological, and political economic shifts washing over academic publishing are not so different from those that are changing the landscapes of higher education. The corporate enclosure of the intellectual commons is as much an existential risk for scholarly publications as it is for universities, as is the bizarre notion spreading in some parts of the world that university teaching need no longer be “research-driven.” But, perhaps by recognizing this shared plight we might begin to see guides for navigating it. We might start by bracketing off the impulse to see research as prior to teaching. Instead of asking first “How might I use this research in my teaching?,” we could ask instead “How is teaching a form of research?”

This is the kind of problem examined by the articles in the “Pedagogical Intersections” Thematic Collection. The collection was coordinated by Emily York and Angela Okune (2024), two of the editors in this journal’s editorial collective driving its aim of strengthening STS pedagogies (ESTS 2024). Taking up Ruha Benjamin’s call to employ education to “hack the current system” as much as to equip people to “play the game of life” (Benjamin 2016), the collection is an experiment and provocation in collaboratively rethinking the practices and loci of knowledge production, critical analysis, and activism to foster new formations of STS.

The collection is also a multi-modal invitation to pedagogy as a way of doing STS. From reconnecting to histories of multi-modal, student-led practices of doing critical pedagogy before the age of the digital, for example through student “zines” (Chan 2024), to theater as a feminist practice that can involve students and teachers together in pondering over what it is that they learn as they engage in theoretical readings (Aushana et al. 2024).

The modality can also be the physical space of a “Lab,” that does not only welcome teaching and research in a same space, but also different disciplines, and that can thus contribute to ‘enliven’ the ways research, teaching, and interdisciplinarity may come together through pedagogical efforts—as exemplified by Douglas-Jones et al.’s ETHOS lab, a critical feminist lab at the IT University of Copenhagen (2024). EthnoData is a Lab of a different kind—a multimodal and multimedia digital platform designed to critically engage different publics with data production and circulation about violent deaths in Ecuador. It relies on the digital as a pedagogical space to learn about the political effects of numbers, and how experimenting with numbers can bring about new understandings about violent deaths and meaningful political interventions (Suarez et al. 2024).

The multi-modal invitation to pedagogy as STS can also be seen in the many data artifacts associated with the contributions, and made available on the platform STS Infrastructures. The collection builds on the online workshop “STS as a Critical Pedagogy” that took place during the summer of 2021, and all contributors were invited from the start to work closely with each other and with the STS Infrastructures platform. Rather than the manifestation of an ad hoc decision, the data made available in these issues is part of a continued, dialogical process. As such, it can be seen as both resources and contributions to what will hopefully become a broader archive of practice, theory, and reflection about what STS as a critical pedagogy might look like in different spaces, places, and times.

With contributions like these awaiting your engagement, this volume reaffirms this journal’s commitment to extending and opening up fruitful new directions in science and technology studies.

With these issues, ESTS also celebrates winning the Infrastructure Award 2024 awarded by 4S. In their award statement, the 2024 STS Infrastructure Award Committee: Zheng “Vincent” Li (Chair), Michael Barany, Hsin-Hsing “Dikoh” Chen, Luisa Fernanda Grijalva-Maza, and Anne Pollock, noted our editorial team’s “often-subtle infrastructural work” in promoting “new visibilities and priorities for STS scholarship.” Below, we reproduce our award acceptance statement:

The editorial team of Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS), the diamond open access journal of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), is delighted to accept the STS Infrastructure Award 2024. We thank the prize committee for their work and the 4S community at large for their continuing support to the journal. We are honored to follow in the foot-steps of individuals, institutions, and sister journals who have infrastructured the field in profound ways.

Informed by STS scholarship, our editorial team has worked with a keen awareness that infrastructures of scholarly publication crucially underwrite how research can circulate, as well as the kinds of scholarly communities that we hope to build. We have purposefully sought to publish content at the interface of different global reference points for STS, developing ESTS’s infrastructure in ways that encourage greater participation in the journal community across boundaries of language, genealogy, and geography. This has entailed ongoing experimentation with genre and form, development of data repositories and pedagogical materials, collaboration with other journals, and participation in efforts to deepen the ecology of open access publication more broadly.

We hope that the award serves to further entrench this commitment to inclusion and openness in the field and as a reminder that the more-than-human infrastructures to realize these values are not given but need to be built, maintained, and cared for collectively (4S 2024).

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Callan Sait for guest editorial assistance for this double issue.

Data Availability

Data published in these issues can be accessed in STS Infrastructures at: https://n2t.net/ark:/81416/p4ns3t.

References

Aushana, Christina, Michael Berman, Yelena Gluzman, and Sarah Klein. 2024. “Feminist Theory Theater: Acts of Reading as Embodied Pedagogy.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 134–141.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1491.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2016. “‘Set Phasers to Love Me!’ Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology and Society.” International Society for Technology in Education, Keynote. Denver, Colorado, June 28, 2016.

Chan, Anita Say. 2024. “Teaching and Learning with Situated Data: Socio-Technical Pedagogy and Reform at the Community Data Clinic and Biological Computer Lab.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 187–205.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1627.

Chao, Sophie, and Kregg Hetherington. 2024. “Storying Monocrop Infrastructure: A Conversation on Governance, Scale, and Failure.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 69–87.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2024.2987.

Chaudhuri, Bidisha, and Srravya Chandhiramowuli. 2024. “Tracing the Displacement of Data Work in AI: A Political Economy of ‘Human-in-the-Loop.’” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 8–31.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2024.2983.

Conley, Shannon N., Emily York, Eleanor S. Armstrong, Marisa Brandt, Anita Say Chan, Martín Andrés Pérez Comisso, Shelby Dietz, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Maxwell Etka, Sean Ferguson, Courtney Forberg, Anna Geltzer, Monamie Bhadra Haines, Nolan Harrington, Matthew Harsh, Alexa Houck, Eric B. Kennedy, Alison Kenner, Crystal Lee, James W. Malazita, Nicole Mogul, Sharlissa Moore, Cora Olson, Elizabeth Reddy, Ashley Shew, Ranjit Singh, sam smiley, Lindsay, Smith, Ellan Spero, David Tomblin, Danica Tran, Raquel Velho, Andrew Webb, Damien Williams, Matt Wisnioski, Hong-An Wu, Kari Zacharias, and Malte Ziewitz. 2024. “Provocations from the ‘STS as a Critical Pedagogy’ Workshop.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 103–133.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1927.

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society Journal. 2024. “Aims and Scope.” Website. Last accessed November 7, 2024.
https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/aims_and_scope.

Haines, Monamie. 2024. “(Self) Critical Pedagogy: Performing Vulnerability to Teach STS in Singapore.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(12): 142–158.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1185.

Hetherington, Kregg. 2020. The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Kollmer, Charles A. 2024. “Laboratory Hosts: Postcolonial Parasites, Growth Factors, and the Fabrication of a Molecular Gaze.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 262–291.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1451.

Douglas-Jones, Rachel, Baki Cakici, Marisa Leavitt Cohn, Simy Kaur Gahoonia, Cæcilie Sloth Laursen, and Mace Ojala. 2024. “Spaceships and Poetry: Enlivening the Lab as a site of Feminist Critical Pedagogy.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 159–186
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1915.

Kirchhelle, Claas, and Charlotte Kirchhelle. 2024. “Northern Normal: Laboratory Networks, Microbial Culture Collections, and Taxonomies of Power (1939–2000).” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 292–336.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1445.

Pouget, Benoît. 2024. “On Medical Standardisation in Times of Scientific Uncertainty: The Management of Flu Epidemics by the French Military Medical Service After the World Pandemic (1920s–30s).” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 383–401.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1403.

Powell, Dana E., Jefferson Currie II, Danielle Melvin Koonce, Mac Legerton, and Rebecca Witter. 2024. “Renewable Ruse: Bioenergy Development in North Carolina’s Coastal Plains.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 32–68.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1305.

Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). 2024. STS Infrastructure Award 2024: Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS). Acceptance Statement.
https://4sonline.org/sts_infrastructure_award_2024.php.

Suarez, Maka, Jorge Núñez, and Mayra Flores. 2024. “Teaching the Politics of Numbers with EthnoData: Ethnographic Experimentations through Statistics in Ecuador.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 206–220.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1595.

Tousignant, Noémi. 2024. “The Politics of Scheduling: Vaccination as Infrastructure, Spectacle, and Market in West Africa, 1960s–1980s.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 356–382.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1413.

Vanderslott Samantha. 2024. “‘Worm Wars’: The Unravelling of the Randomised Control Trial Success Story.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 235–261.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1469.

Velmet, Aro. 2024. “‘Actions Imposed by Circumstances’: The Colonial Origins of The Yellow Fever Vaccine Debate, 1940s1970s.” En gaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 337–355.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1421.

Velmet, Aro, a nd Claas Kirchhelle. 2024. “Standards and Their Containers: Introduction to the Thematic Issue on Histories of Microbial Infrastructures.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 221–234.
https:/ /doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1419.

York, Emily, and Angela Okune. 2024. “Collaborative Formations at the Intersection of Pedagogy, Engagement, and Research.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 88–102.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests202 3.2389.

Copyright, Citation, Contact

Copyright © 2024. (Editorial Collective: Grant Jun Otsuki Clément Dréano, Noela Invernizzi, Ali Kenner, Duygu Kaşdoğan, Aalok Khandekar, Angela Okune, Sujatha Raman, Tim Schütz, Federico Vasen, Amanda Windle, and Emily York). This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Available at estsjournal.org.

To cite this article: Otsuki, Grant Jun, Clément Dréano, Noela Invernizzi, Duygu Kaşdoğan, Ali Kenner, Aalok Khandekar, Angela Okune, Sujatha Raman, Tim Schütz, Federico Vasen, Amanda Windle, and Emily York. 2024. “Standards, Pedagogies, and Celebrating the STS Infrastructure Award to ESTS.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 1–7.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.2945.

To email contact Editorial Collective: inquiry@estsjournal.org.