Epistemic Dizziness
Spinning-On STS Workshop on 27–29 September 2023, Central Laboratory, Berlin

In an era fraught with dizzying socio-political events and burgeoning ecological catastrophes, this workshop for a special issue delved into the concept of epistemic dizziness as a disordered state of whirling vertigo, applying it to the contemporary state of STS. As we navigate the tumultuous landscape of an open-ended pandemic, war, and socio-ecological devastation (Stengers 2021), the research practices of STS itself risk inducing ›epistemic dizziness‹. This workshop, inspired by Donna Haraway (2016), drew on ›serious fun‹ as a means of staving off paralysis and fainting, urging that knowledge production can serve as both a coping mechanism and a source of resilience. Repurposing the concept of ›ilinx‹, as delineated by Roger Caillois (1961), the series of lecture performances critically examined playful dizzying practices in Western, indigenous, and other worlds as a pathway towards comprehending our vertiginously speedy world.

EASST Fund supported the workshop, which served as a frame for a closed editorial workshop to prepare a special issue on the theme and also aimed to reach an interested public in Berlin and beyond to engage with the state of contemporary STS and scholarship in general in creative manners.