Dear colleagues,
We would like to invite you to submit an abstract to our open panel at the STS-Hub 2025 at Humboldt University in Berlin, 11-14 March 2025.
Please find a panel abstract below and on the conference website.
If you are interested, please submit a 200-word abstract and a 75-word bio to pollozek@europa-uni.de and paul.trauttmansdorff@tum.de, no later than 31 October 2024.
Best wishes
Paul Trauttmansdorff and Silvan Pollozek
Open Panel
Critical formations in STS approaches to border and migration regimes
Convenors
Paul Trauttmansdorff (Technical University of Munich)
Silvan Pollozek (European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder))
Abstract
The notion of critique, or “the critical,” has been integral to scholarship on borders and migration—from autonomy of migration perspectives to critical security and border studies. This open panel aims to reimagine the role of critique within STS approaches to border and migration regimes. We propose to explore the range of critical practices that can be mobilized and enacted within and beyond the boundaries of STS research on borders and migration. By considering the interplay of ecologies, infrastructures, scales, and networks that characterize today’s border regimes and their datafication, we would like to understand how researchers can critically engage with and intervene in these systems in transformative ways. The panel discusses the conditions and frameworks that make critique possible and, conversely, when critique is rendered ineffective or impossible. It asks what traditions and modes of critique can be developed and what potential implications they have for methodological or conceptual STS approaches. By reflecting on how “the critical” is entangled with various dimensions of border and migration control, we also ask where STS has underutilized its critical potential and where it could be reoriented to foster new alliances and interventions.
We invite contributions (empirical papers, theoretical reflections, or other types of interventions) that expand the conceptual/methodological toolkit of critique for STS scholars, enabling more robust and impactful engagements with the challenges, threats, and violence posed by borders and their digital transformations. Contributions may, for example,
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