Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

The Difference—and Promise—of ESTS

Aalok Khandekar — 2025-12-31

In this final editorial for the 2020–2025 Editorial Collective, we reflect on how we have worked to action on our key editorial commitments, which included: cultivating greater transnationalization in the field, deepening open access infrastructures, foregrounding pedagogies as a vital domain of STS scholarship and practice, and engaging audiences beyond STS. We share how editing Engaging Science, Technology, and Society has foregrounded different dimensions, namely of community, infrastructure, and labor, in the context of running a scholar-led and -run journal like ESTS. Understanding the journal in this way, we suggest, surfaces both the difference-and promise-of a diamond open access journal like ESTS.

What Do We Mean When We Say Carbon Capture and Storage? STS and the Open Questions of a Technology in Emergence

Vivian Underhill — 2025-12-31

Carbon sequestration is a relatively recent phrase that refers to a broad suite of technologies meant to minimize the amount of carbon emitted to the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many scientific organizations have recently emphasized that carbon capture is a necessary part of attaining net-zero or negative carbon budgets. It has also become a particularly controversial set of technologies, funding streams, economic proposals, and imaginations of energy justice in place. However, we—during our joint work as social scientists on the justice dimensions of one specific carbon sequestration feasibility study—have found that the dominating arguments for and against carbon capture erase the fact of its multiplicity. From our situated location, it seems an urgent time to ask, within a larger industrial decarbonization agenda, what are the specificities of carbon capture and storage and how might we (the collective ‘we’ of engaged researchers and thinkers with interests in science & technology or environmental and climate engineering) address them? In this Engagement, we sketch some of the ways in which STS brings important insights to the growing literature on carbon capture and storage (CCS) and, at the same time, what new directions carbon sequestration agendas might require of STS scholarship.

How Transnational is 4S? Institutional Scaffolding and the Long Road to a Global STS

Noela Invernizzi — 2025-12-31

This article examines the transnationalization of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), analyzing its evolution from a predominantly North American and Eurocentric organization to a more globally inclusive scholarly community. Drawing on data from governance structures, conference participation, scholarly recognition, and editorial work, the study highlights key trends and challenges in 4S’s efforts to diversify its membership and perspectives. Findings reveal gradual progress, such as increased representation from Latin America, East Asia, and Oceania in conferences and governance, alongside persistent disparities in prestigious awards like the Bernal Prize, which remains dominated by Euro-American scholars. The article underscores the tension between 4S’s foundational Euro-American identity and its aspirations for epistemic diversity, particularly in light of critiques from postcolonial and feminist STS scholars. By exploring how 4S scaffolds transnationalization – through multilingual conferences, regional collaborations, and editorial policies – the study argues that these efforts are crucial for fostering a more diverse and globally engaged STS field. The analysis concludes that while 4S has made strides in broadening participation, there is still a long road ahead to enrich STS scholarship and to fully accomplish the global scope of the Society’s mission.

When ‘Open’ is Still Far from Good Enough: The Work of Counter-Mapping with Political Software

Luis Felipe R. Murillo — 2025-12-31

What does “openness” mean when it comes to crafting digital tools and infrastructures for housing justice action research? This question is particularly urgent as global internet companies unleash new geospatial technologies to track and surveil. In this article, we examine the corporate software dependencies and organizational practices that the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) have encountered in its counter-mapping work. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects for counter-cartography have been developed to support both social research and housing justice work, but little collaboration between FOSS developers, critical cartographers, and community organizers has been fostered and sustained to date. In order to address this critical gap, we analyze project documentation alongside software development practices to discuss AEMP members’ experiences in developing open technologies for the “Covid-19 Housing Map.” We elaborate on the distinction between “political software” and “software politics” as an analytic device to describe contrasting modes of engagement with digital design. We demonstrate that FOSS adoption is not a simple matter of technological choice, but rather a complex sociotechnical process that fundamentally alters technopolitical relations and forms of political action. For the conclusion, we reflect on the broader implications of the technopolitical challenges that AEMP encountered, while also examining possibilities for creating and supporting “political software” aligned with the goals of housing action research.

Retooling: A Model of Sociotechnical Change for Turbulent Times

Christy Spackman — 2025-12-31

Retooling is a ubiquitous practice that mobilizes innovation, maintenance, and repair to address sociotechnical change in times when transformations seem difficult to accomplish. Retooling entails an intentional reorientation of purpose, foregrounds the nonlinear trajectories of technological and scientific shifts, and focuses our attention on the meso level of organizational and collective life. This paper offers a theorization of retooling grounded in two case studies: one about water reuse technologies in the United States and the other about efforts to refashion the sugarcane industry in Brazil. We suggest that retooling is a useful analytic tool at a time when both innovation and maintenance seem not only difficult to differentiate but also insufficient for explaining sociotechnical change on their own. Furthermore, during turbulent times when change seems difficult to accomplish, retooling offers a capacious conceptualization that highlights the political orientations that inspire all sociotechnical transformations and the possibilities that emerge from mobilizing what-is to bring about what-should-be.