Call for contributions for STS Encounters: Special issue “STS by Aesthetic
Means”
Edited by Hannah Star Rogers, University of Copenhagen, RWTH’S KHK-
Expanding STS
Deadline: May 9, 2025
Submissions and questions: hannahstarrogers@gmail.com
Please title your email: Encounters, Last Name.
Most STS scholars work with text, but what if there was another way? By
Aesthetic Means investigates science and technology-engaged artists
practicing STS using contemporary art. These artists share in STS’s
concerns: major questions and issues in contemporary science, questions
about who gets to set the agenda of science, participate in its workings,
how science creates and maintains its knowledge corpus, and related power
structures. Many of these artists understand themselves as activists with a
specific agenda at the site of a political or ethical question in which
science, medicine, or technology is central. Other artists think of their
art as a form of research, or even explicitly as experimentation, about
what art can add to public conversations about science. And those arts take
many forms from installations to interventions, sonifications to
performances– these aesthetic means and their relationship to science are
the subject of this special issue.
By examining a series of artworks engaged with science and technology
subjects in relation to humanities and social science scholarship (STS,
MedHum, history of science/medicine, literature, and more) which deals with
related subjects, this proposed book argues that many core STS ideas are
being represented through materials by communities of contemporary artists.
Reading art together with a diverse array of disciplinary lenses has the
potential to unlock new doors to our understanding of the ways knowledge is
produced and verified, and the ways that other disciplinary traditions
might learn from work with materials on subjects already in its wheelhouse.
STS Encounters Issue Format and Community Building
For this special issue of STS Encounters, STS-engaged artist folios
consisting of 3-4 pages of images (or links to video, audio, new media
materials etc), a one page description of the artwork, and a response from
an STS scholar who has experience on the science or technology implicated
in the artwork (of no more than 5 pages) will be published. These
publication collaborations are meant not only to shed new light on
art-science but also to help form relationships between artists and
scholars with shared interests. To that end, after initial submissions, the
editors will connect artists and scholars for further conversations as they
see fit in order to produce final coherent publication materials for the
special issue.
Submissions by Art-science practitioners should include:
1.5 - 2 pages of description of your
art-science work
3 pieces of media from your practice
(images, sound files, video etc.)
200 word bio and website link
Submissions by scholars (STSers, humanists,
social scientists, scientists, etc.) should include:
1.5 - 2 pages of description of your
research work
200 word description on your
interest in art-science
200 word bio and website link
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