10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17508
This short essay by the departing board of STS Italia (Italian Society of Science and Technology Studies) introduces a Special Section of the Journal collecting a set of writings that present and develop some of the key themes of the VIII STS Italia Conference, held in June 2021 as a virtual event. The Special Section features an invited essay by Dimitris Papadopulos and Andrea Ghelfi followed by a short commentary by Luigi Pellizzoni. In addition, the Section includes ten different “Conference Reflections” – as situated perspectives on the meeting – written by colleagues who had a major role in organizing the event, or who convened one of the conference thematic tracks. As a whole, the Conference Reflections help broaden and improve our understanding of the manner and extent in which contextualized meanings and local socio-material practices constitute the fabric of the socio-technical environments where we live, thus unveiling the inextricable entanglement of novel vulnerabilities and technoscience.
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2038-3460
17508
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Assunta Viteritti
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
justice
STS Encounters in Pandemic Times
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
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Editorial
2022-03-26
2023-06-28
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
7-11
TS
Assunta Viteritti
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17508
7
Sapienza University of Rome
2038-3460
2
justice
en
11
STS Encounters in Pandemic Times
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17508/16352
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                                                                                 Introduction
                                                                                                 7




 STS Encounters in Pandemic Times
  Simone Arnaldi                      Stefano Crabu                Assunta Viteritti
     University of Trieste              University of Padova       Sapienza University of Rome




      Abstract: This short essay by the departing board of STS Italia (Italian
      Society of Science and Technology Studies) introduces a Special Section of
      the Journal collecting a set of writings that present and develop some of
      the key themes of the VIII STS Italia Conference, held in June 2021 as a
      virtual event. The Special Section features an invited essay by Dimitris Pa-
      padopulos and Andrea Ghelfi followed by a short commentary by Luigi Pel-
      lizzoni. In addition, the Section includes ten different “Conference Reflec-
      tions” – as situated perspectives on the meeting – written by colleagues
      who had a major role in organizing the event, or who convened one of the
      conference thematic tracks. As a whole, the Conference Reflections help
      broaden and improve our understanding of the manner and extent in which
      contextualized meanings and local socio-material practices constitute the
      fabric of the socio-technical environments where we live, thus unveiling the
      inextricable entanglement of novel vulnerabilities and technoscience.

      Keywords: Dis/Entangling Technoscience; Conference Reflections;
      Vulnerability; Responsibility; Justice.

      Submitted: November 10, 2021 – Accepted: January 14, 2022

      Corresponding author: Simone Arnaldi, Department of Political and
      Social Sciences, Piazzale Europa, 1, 34127 Trieste, Italy. Email:
      sarnaldi@units.it




                                                         In memory of Trevor Pinch (1952 –2021)

Our colleague Trevor Pinch passed away during the preparation of this Special Section.
We publish this collection of essays in remembrance of his passing. Trevor contributed
greatly to the development of this journal and of the Italian STS scientific community. The
next issue of Tecnoscienza (June 2022) will feature a collection of articles by STS Italia
members to honour his memory.




 TECNOSCIENZA
 Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
 12 (2) pp. 7-11 - ISSN 2038-3460
 www.tecnoscienza.net                                    2021
8                                                             Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
    The VIII STS Italia Conference is a tale of two meetings. Initially
planned in the Italian town of Trieste in June 2020, the gathering was post-
poned as the Covid-19 pandemic struck in Spring 2020 and was held online
one year later (June 17–19, 2021). Two utterly different events, but united
by an understanding of the entanglement of science, technology and soci-
ety, whose relevance Covid-19 unexpectedly and tragically reminded all of
us of.
    “Dis/entangling Technoscience”: that was the title, and the ambition,
of the conference. While we observed Sars-Cov-2 travelling across seas and
lands and we anxiously waited for biomedical advances able to counter the
infection, Covid-19 called our attention to the relevance and ambivalence
of such entanglement: we were all prompted to acknowledge that science
and technologies play a critical role in shaping our societies – making pos-
sibilities flourish, but also creating new vulnerabilities, hence solving and
creating societal challenges in equal measure (Jasanoff 2020). The pan-
demic was, and still is, an extreme example of how, in societies largely
shaped by technoscience, vulnerability can be understood as an emergent
property of the relationships between human and non-human entities, such
as biological materials, technical objects and infrastructures, knowledge-
making practices and social processes. And yet, the effects of these socio-
technical entanglements (in terms of levels, intensities and types of vulner-
abilities) are unevenly distributed across space, time, and social worlds.
    Dis/entangling technoscience proves to be quite a slippery task, one
possibly overwhelming due to the multivocality that the notion of “entan-
glement” itself assumes in the STS community. Demanding as it may be,
this task is nonetheless an urgent and necessary step in effectively exploring
the socio-technical fabric of human existence, as well as in grasping the
issues and problems at stake when science and technological developments
are normatively defined, measured, legislated and assessed in search for a
just and responsible technoscience.
    As the debate over vaccine supply has forcefully demonstrated, unequal
distribution of such a critical preventive biotechnology points to the un-
derlying, fundamental question of justice in technologically dense societies.
Understanding the nexus between technoscience and justice requires us to
explore and critically assess topics such as the forms and sources of power
and public participation, the limits of social control via technical dispositifs
and epistemic uncertainties, the expectations, media representations, dis-
courses and interests of the social actors and the assumed neutrality of sci-
entific knowledge and infrastructures, as well as the pitfalls and failures of
public decision making and health policies in ordering the relations be-
tween science, technology and society. Ultimately, issues of justice demand
to examine how responsibilities for this state of affairs are defined and as-
signed to and by different stakeholders, public agencies, research organi-
sations and concerned groups of people. They call for addressing topics
such as models of governance and regulation, ethics and values, hegemony
and contestation.
Arnaldi et al.                                                             9
    Vulnerability, responsibility and justice were thus the guiding concepts
of the VIII STS Italia Conference, in an effort not only to explore im-
portant research subjects for STS and related fields but also to delineate
potential trajectories of STS’s public. Three plenary sessions, two
roundtable discussions and 28 parallel tracks, encompassing over 200 pa-
per presentations, sparked a lively debate on these three notions and their
implications for a broad range of issues and fields, from genetics and bio-
medical innovation to disability, from platforms and infrastructures in me-
dia industries to surveillance technologies and inclusive communities.
    A dedicated online conference platform (Fig. 1) was designed and set
up to foster peer-to-peer interaction and engagement despite the online
format of the event. Before the conference, each participant was encour-
aged to record a short video highlighting the key takeaways of their own
presentations. Prior to the meeting, approximately 200 videos were made
available online in a “Video Library” on the platform, so that track partic-
ipants could spend more time in debates and discussions, thus making the
conference more engaging and interactive.




                   Figure 1. The VIII STS Italia Conference platform

    This is the backdrop of the present Special Section of Tecnoscienza.
While this Special Section does not claim to cover all the topics discussed
during the conference, the collection of articles highlights some of its most
salient themes by hosting ten “Conference Reflections” – as situated per-
spectives on the meeting – written by colleagues who had a major role in
organising the event, or who convened one of the 28 thematic tracks.
    The conference thematic tracks largely benefitted from the three Con-
ference Plenary Talks, which were invaluable in providing conceptual and
methodological entry points to explore the mutual relationship between
vulnerability, justice, responsibility and technoscience. In her opening lec-
ture entitled “Postcolonial Flows and Forensics as an Art of Paying
10                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
Attention”, Amade M’charek (Professor of Anthropology of Science at the
Department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam) shed light
on the material traces of today’s migration tragedies in the Mediterranean.
In her talk, she explored the current shift and extension of the notion of
forensics – from a practice of conferring evidential relevance to facts and
materials about a single event, to an art of paying attention that allow us to
re-configure the realities of death and dying and helps to critically examine
the current politics of colonial relations. The second Plenary Talk by Rene
von Schomberg (Senior Research Fellow at Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cul-
tures of Research of RWTH Aachen University, and formerly Team Leader
for Science Policy at the European Commission) called for an institutional
transformation of science, technology and innovation systems to foster so-
cially responsible research and innovation. His talk, which was entitled
“Responsible Innovation: A Call for Institutional Change”, questioned the
current market-centred innovation paradigm and reclaimed a stronger role
for public authorities in science regulation after decades of privatisation.
In doing so, von Schomberg argued for institutional changes that encom-
pass Open Science and Responsible Innovation and that can prove effec-
tive for addressing the frequent failure of market mechanisms in delivering
socially desirable outcomes of innovation. Dimitris Papadopoulos (Profes-
sor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Nottingham)
delivered the Closing Plenary Talk of the conference, on “Elemental Jus-
tice: Necrochemicals, Ecological Reparation and Generative Chemical
Practice”. The talk unveiled a paradox permeating our life: if our socio-
technical worlds are paradoxically unsustainable without anthropogenic
chemical interventions, what does it mean to experience and live in such a
toxic regime, where human made substances are deeply ingrained into eco-
systems and society? What are the implications of this forced coexistence?
    The great political relevance these questions have for STS is further dis-
cussed in the article “Ecological Transition: What It Is and How to Do It”,
which Papadopoulos and Andrea Ghelfi (Leverhulme Early Career Re-
search Fellow at the University of Nottingham) co-authored and which is
published in this Special Section. In a companion commentary, Luigi Pel-
lizzoni (Full Professor of Sociology of the Environment and Territory at
the University of Pisa) critically examines the current convergence between
an unshakeable faith in technofixes and the hollowing out of both tradi-
tional representative and participatory democracy in the context of the cur-
rent ecological crisis.
    A broad set of “Conference Reflections” follows these two essays.
Though differing in their subject matters, theoretical questions, and epis-
temological stances, these articles share a common interest in investigating
how shifts in socio-material and knowledge-making practices (see Viteritti
and Piromalli; Cozza), living bodies (see Moretti and Morsello; Miele and
Nunes), socio-technical regimes and (digital) infrastructures (see Bonini &
Magaudda; Olivieri and Pelizza; Sciannamblo and Zampino), instances of
technological weaknesses (Bory and Di Salvo), power relations in
Arnaldi et al.                                                                    11
technologically dense environments (Bruni and Tirabeni) and public par-
ticipation and jurisdictions (see Giardullo et al.) are predicated and per-
formed, simultaneously creating novel and unexpected vulnerabilities and
opening pathways for justice and responsibility. As a whole, these writings
help improve our current understanding of how the local meanings of tech-
noscience and their related practices emerge in different socio-technical
environments where novel vulnerabilities and technoscience are entangled.
The VIII STS Italia Conference and its legacy, coalesced in this Special
Section, demonstrate that the STS community is unafraid to take up the
challenges characterising our increasingly turbulent socio-technical worlds,
and is experimenting with novel practices of academic knowledge-making
and -sharing. However, as doing so is likely unable to demonstrate to soci-
ety the promise of STS for shaping desirable, just and responsible socio-
technical change, new types of affective engagement and public commit-
ment are required in order to forge a shared responsibility to care for and
nurture the human and more-than-human relations life on our planet is
made of (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).


Acknowledgements
    Organising a large international conference is a demanding collective
endeavour, and we would like to thank all those who made it possible. Firstly, we
are very grateful to the community of STS Italia (The Italian Society for Social
Studies of Science and Technology) and, especially, the VIII STS Italia Conference
Scientific and Organising Committee, which offered invaluable support in realising
the conference: we are very grateful to Attila Bruni, Paolo Giardullo, Paolo
Magaudda, Veronica Moretti, Barbara Morsello, Federico Neresini, Giuseppina
Pellegrino, Manuela Perrotta, Leonardo Piromalli, Mariacristina Sciannamblo and
Paolo Volonté. A heartfelt thought is dedicated to Marina Maestrutti, the former
vice-president of STS Italia and a force behind the organisation of the association’s
biennial meetings, who suddenly and prematurely passed away on January 22, 2021.
Secondly, we would like to thank the keynote speakers (Amade M’charek, Dimitris
Papadopoulos and Rene von Schomberg) and all the participants and convenors
who joined the conference. More than 250 STS scholars participated to the
conference, debating the complex ways in which technoscience and society are
mutually entangled. These outstanding contributions were essential to making the
conference a success. Last but not least, we thank all the authors participating in
this Special Section thus helping establish a collective legacy of the conference.


References
Jasanoff, S. (2020) Ours Is the Earth: Science and Human History in the Anthropo-
    cene, in “Journal of the Philosophy of History”, 14(3), pp. 337–358.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than
   Human Worlds, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
