Please forward to your departments, centres, colleagues, and anyone else you think might be interested
(and apologies for any cross-posting)
Dear all,
The conference is being held in Toronto, 7-10th Oct 2026.
Conference Theme: TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures
The 50th Anniversary for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S):
calls for presentations, panels, and adjacent gatherings that engage our theme of
TechnoPower. Science, technology, and innovation are not neutral; as STS scholars, we understand them as socially, culturally, and economically constructed and deeply entangled with a specific form of technoscientific power. The theme emphasizes that
money and wealth are increasingly shaping our technoscientific futures, raising urgent analytical and normative questions about how to reclaim power from “tech” billionaires and oligarchs. At this critical juncture, our task is not only to critique
and demystify technoscience but also transform how others perceive and engage with technoscience. From the reinforcement of harmful value(s) systems to the assetization of knowledge and the erosion of ecological and social justice, a specifically technoscientific
capitalism has embedded market logics and elite control into our knowledge institutions, innovation choices, and into technological change itself. Yet, as we also know so well, technoscience is always contested, and STS offers plural and grounded alternatives
to understanding and reframing technoscience, from citizen science to community engagement in innovation to Indigenous knowledge. A key challenge now is to accelerate our interventions into public, policy, and political debate by using our empirical, analytical,
and normative tools to shift technoscientific futures away from the dictates of a wealthy few towards a technoscience that fosters collective wellbeing, justice, and sustainability.
Look forward to seeing you there!
Kean
Kean Birch
Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy
Co-Editor,
Science
as Culture
Series Editor,
Technoscience
& Society Book Series, University of Toronto Press
Editorial Board Member,
Social
Epistemology;
Progress
in Economic Geography;
IEEE
Transactions on Technology and Society;
OMICS:
A Journal of Integrative Biology; and
Digital.
Bluesky
|
Website
|
LinkedIn
Tel.: (+1) 416-736-2100
Department of Science, Technology & Society | York University
4700 Keele Street Toronto ON, Canada M3J 1P3
NEW BOOKs
Kaltenbrunner, W. and Birch, K. (under contract) Trend Economies in Academic Publishing, MIT Press.
NEW ARTICLES
Komljenovic, J., Williamson, B., Birch, K. and Beiter, K. (forthcoming) Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’: Education platforms, publisher databases, and AI model training, Higher Education.
Komljenovic, J. et al. (2025)
Digitalised higher education: Key developments, questions, and concerns, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 46(2): 276-292. [Open Access]
Komljenovic, J., Sellar, S. and Birch, K. (online)
Turning universities into data-powered organisations: Dimensions of change,
Higher Education 89(5): 1369-1386. [Open Access]
Birch, K., Komljenovic, J. and Sellar, S. (2025)
Architectures
of assetization: Legacy infrastructures and the configuration of datafication in higher education,
New Media + Society 27(4): 1868-1887. [Open Access]
Birch, K., Komljenovic, J. Sellar, S. and Hansen, M. (2025)
Data as asset, data as rent? Rentiership practices in EdTech startups, Learning, Media & Technology 50(1): 15-28. [Open Access]
Birch, K. and Adediji, D. (2025)
Undermining competition, undermining markets? The implications of digital personal data for competition policy,
Big Data & Society 12(1): 20539517241311584. [Open Access]
