On the penultimate day of the 2024 EASST-4S Conference, Geoffrey Bowker argued that processes are just as important as things. STS practitioners, he said, are good at naming things, but not so good at naming processes. In many ways this is as expected. It is difficult to name the processes we use to make sense of the world. We try different names on for size: ontology, epistemology, methodology. Each one asks what there is to know and how we can know it. Spaces where we share our knowledge, and consider how we acquired it, are crucial as we grapple with the increasing complexity of our world. This year’s EASST-4S in Amsterdam was my first experience of a space filled with people who make sense of the world in the same ways that I do. The inquisitive atmosphere of the conference gave me the opportunity to engage with innumerable topics that interested me, and the time to reflect on my own use of STS. This was an opportunity to consider ‘things’ as well as ‘processes.’
Since my earliest days at school, I have drawn parallels between seemingly disparate subjects. It always seemed odd to me that our education systems divide subjects so sharply when they all seem to inform each other. I owe my own exploration of STS to a dearly departed member of the sociology faculty at Vassar College. While Marque Miringoff passed away before I could tell her my dream of moving to Scotland to study STS had come true, it was she who introduced me to the field as a first semester undergraduate. At the time, I was entirely overwhelmed and unsure which subject to choose as my academic home. I became enamored with the myriad paths opened up by STS’s interrogation of knowledges, artifacts and histories. I soon realized that these paths could allow me to take classes in the natural, earth and social sciences, and use each to interpret the others. The Vassar STS department was small, close-knit and supportive, but still hosted an unbelievably diverse number of thesis projects. This balance between unity and variety was also evident at the EASST-4S Conference. Both spaces raised questions about future directions and the processes that will get us there. The constellation of topics, stories and knowledges from around the world prompted me to reflect on my early encounters with the field.
STS research constantly promotes collaboration, be it with colleagues, research participants or the communities in which STS researchers are embedded. This was reflected during many of the conference presentations. In the theme plenary, Making and Doing Transformations, there was a shared emphasis on co-definition of problems and solutions by researchers and communities. I found these processes everywhere I looked – in panels, projects and conversations with others. We might not be so good at naming them, but these processes of collaboration, collectivity and connectivity are STS. During my week at EASST-4S, it became apparent to me that STS is the process: the process by which we make sense of the world, share our ideas, and interrogate the artifacts and knowledges that constitute them.
As each presentation reminded me, we are living in an ever-intensifying complex of interactions. Our world operates at levels of speed and intricacy that are at times impossible to comprehend. However, society often seems to forget about the complexity of the world we have inherited. We have lessons, too many to count, still to learn from the natural world. Too often, we look for solutions to problems by the same means by which we brought them into being. It was reassuring that the EASST-4S panels on the Green Anthropocene, post-growth futures and perspectives on societal change, by and large, avoided falling into this trap. Each panel suggested promising avenues of future research, loci of knowledge, and means of holding ourselves accountable when we engage with them. As STS researchers, reflexive awareness of the processes that create technological artifacts and socio-technical systems is central. At the conference, processes of co-creation and co-definition were evident in many of the directions taken by STS scholars in their research. A shared commitment to contexts, reasons, artifacts and their relations to each other meant that processes were given as much attention as our final results.
Some would argue that all research is about process from the outset. Even choosing a topic to investigate entails a process of claim-making (Marshall 2015) that must balance the dynamism of social life, the meanings that encircle our artifacts, and the reciprocal impacts they have on each other. The contexts, peoples and technologies discussed by many of the panels were, at the very least, ever-changing, kaleidoscopic ‘things’ if indeed they were things at all. In some cases, the object of study was more like a process of creation. Conference participants thus engaged in one of the most decisive processes of all: that of future-making. EASST-4S featured an abundance of rhetoric around imagined futures, from AI to space exploration to soil restoration. As ‘technologies not only intervene in present realities, [but] also create future realities, both symbolically and materially,’ this ‘rhetorical construction of future worlds directly (and indirectly) influences which technologies are brought into existence’ (Selin 2008, p. 1879). In making and doing transformations, our forecasts can bring the futures we predict into being.
The panel I was involved in – ‘Experimentation on Future Mobility and Society’ – was very much concerned with these future predictions. Each presentation attempted to understand mobility technologies and shape their future direction. The wonderful organizing group from TU Munich convened the panel to discuss sites of experimentation such as testbeds and living labs. Living labs utilize public spaces, such as cities, to understand the potential implications of new technologies. As STS scholars we know that testing technologies means testing society, and that successful technologies require an environment in which they will be adopted and thrive. My fellow panelists theorized future mobility scenarios in various contexts, from e-cargo bikes to autonomous vehicles (Philips et al. 2024, Tennant and Stilgoe 2021). The panel centred processes of experimentation, familiarization, and above all, storytelling. Recognition of the importance of testing our visions and the critical role of storytelling in shaping our future has grown in recent years (Bergman 2017, Moezzi et al. 2017). Stories are a crucial part of the STS process, especially when it pertains to the immense environmental and social challenges that we collectively face. These are stories of curiosity and uncertainty which should be held in equal regard, as they help co-create meaning around our technologies.
Throughout the week in Amsterdam, I wondered how someone would tell the story of the conference. What were the narratives and processes at work here? As someone who spends much of their time thinking about mobility technologies and practices, one of my first observations was the sheer volume of air traffic that passed over the VU Amsterdam campus. When outside for lunch breaks or conversations with colleagues, I found myself distracted by the constant hum of planes overhead. I wondered where they had come from, and how the human race manages to send over 100,000 flights across our skies on a daily basis. Then, on the last day of the conference, the planes suddenly stopped, and I became aware of the complex processes governing our world in another way.
The irony of attending an STS conference during the largest information technology outage in history was not lost on conference participants. As panelists struggled to catch trains and rebook grounded flights, the world seemed to grind to a halt. We were reminded of a crucial tenet of STS: that infrastructure disappears when working correctly but is instantly rendered visible when it breaks down (Gupta 2015). The processes at work in these vast socio-technical systems often escape our awareness, and our control. This was a timely illustration of Bowker’s claim that processes are difficult to name, and thus to comprehend. A single software update by one cybersecurity firm effected tens of thousands of their customers, many of whom were companies we rely on every day. As blue Microsoft error screens appeared in airports around the world, an STS conference was perhaps the best place to be. The conversations I had that day were among the most compelling of the week. What came out of these conversations, for myself at least, was the realization that, just as in the natural world, the diversity of our systems is what makes them strong. This was yet another lesson we have to learn from the complex planet we have inherited. When every company uses the same cybersecurity software, one glitch can impact millions of devices and upend millions of lives. As these companies grow it becomes impossible for smaller firms to compete and our systems become centralized and homogenized. The diversity that gave those systems their strength is thus compromised.
Similar processes play out in STS research. The diversity of topics and interests is what makes STS healthy – a thriving, heterogeneous space that is not pigeon-holed by one dogmatic theory, but rather unified by a shared processual approach. It was this approach that first drew me to STS at Vassar and remains an integral part of why I love the field as much as I do. We must hold on to our ambivalence about technology rather than fall into techno-optimist or deterministic traps. As Wendy Faulkner (2001, p. 79) said, STS ‘steers a course between uncritical endorsement and outright rejection of technology.’ We use technologies to learn about society, but ‘an interest in the “social” does not lead to society as a source of explanation’ (Latour 1999, p. 9). Bruno Latour emphasized that ‘things’ are in fact assemblies, a definition that lies at the center of contemporary STS. Assemblies are created through processes: of exchange, symbiosis, acquisition, and entanglement. Our work uses artifacts and events to tell us something about the contexts from which they came, to make sense of the processes governing the world at that time and place. These processes are often invisible, like the infrastructure protecting the planes that fly into Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Without our work, technologies are taken for granted as the inevitable result of unseen forces. In STS’s fight against determinism, this mythological arrow of progress, we focus on processes: the things we are not so good at naming, but – for that reason – are all the more consequential to understand.
References
Bergman, N. “Stories of the future: Personal mobility innovation in the United Kingdom.” Energy Research & Social Science, vol. 31, Sept. 2017, pp. 184–193, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.028.
Bowker, G and Star, S. (1999). Sorting Things Out. The MIT Press.
Faulkner, W. (2001). “The technology question in feminism.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 79–95, https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-5395(00)00166-7.
Gupta, A. (2015). “An anthropology of electricity from the Global South.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 4, 2, pp. 555–568, https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.4.04.
Latour, B. (1999). “When things strike back: A possible contribution of ‘science studies’ to the Social Sciences.” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 107–123, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2000.00107.x.
Marshall, C. (2015). Designing Qualitative Research. Sixth Edition, SAGE Publications, Inc.
Moezzi, M, et al. (2017). “Using stories, narratives, and storytelling in Energy and climate change research.” Energy Research & Social Science, vol. 31, pp. 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.034.
Philips, I., et al. (2024) Domestic Use of E-Cargo Bikes and Other E-Micromobility: Protocol for a Multi-Centre, Mixed Methods Study. Preprints, 2024092049. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202409.2049.v1
Selin, C. (2008). “The sociology of the Future: Tracing Stories of Technology and Time.” Sociology Compass, vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 1878–1895, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00147.x.
Tennant, C., & Stilgoe, J. (2021). The attachments of ‘autonomous’ vehicles. Social Studies of Science, 51(6), 846-870. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127211038752
Author biography
Eva Gray is a third year PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh in the department of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies. Her research centers automobility: particularly car cultures, narratives around electric vehicles and climate change, and technologies as social and gendered endeavors. She has studied STS since she was an undergraduate at Vassar College. Her undergraduate thesis examined female race car drivers during her four year internship at the historic Lime Rock Park race track. Her current project ‘Electric Vehicles and the Race to Road Transfer: Identity, culture and the transition to sustainable mobility’ studies Formula E and Extreme E. This work focuses on the building of the socio-technical identity of the electric vehicle through storytelling.
