Addressing the care needs of older adults, especially for those with cognitive impairment, is a major challenge in contemporary societies. Some argue that technology can play a role and its presumed goals are to increase both the quality of care for older adults and the working environment of carers. In this regard, several studies have looked into views and perspectives inscribed in technology. However, most studies focus on the description of human and non-human actors connection, and there is a lack of empirical research focusing on the user representations embedded in technological objects and analysing the way users interact with others through the lens of care ethics. This study is based on interviews with actors and on ethnographic observations of various social robot uses in long-term care (LTC) facilities in different sociocultural situations (France and Japan), with an aim to understand how users are represented in the design of social robots. The study found the shared characteristics among distinct representations and identified divergent characteristics: boundary-based and relational representations. The findings suggest that different characteristics of user representation may challenge established social orderings. This research contributes to critically examining the practical and ethical implications of technology design, for a better understanding of the LTC context.
An extensive body of research inspired by feminist epistemology and feminist science and technologies studies has contributed to deconstructing the supposed gender-neutrality of biomedical research by shedding light on the persistence of gender biases that threaten the accuracy of scientific results. Against this background, this research analyzes the factors hindering the adoption of a gender perspective in research by considering, as a case study, the field of oncology. To date, most literature has focused on researchers’ gender blindness and stereotypes and how to enhance their awareness. In this paper, we have shifted the focus in two ways, moving from cultural to material explanations on the one hand, but also from individual (micro) to contextual (meso and macro) factors on the other. Both aspects have been under-explored so far. In order to do so, an organizational approach to the study of bioscience becomes essential in order to understand the role of work and organizing in reproducing gender biases. Based on interviews and focus groups conducted at the European Institute of Oncology, a research and healthcare organization in Italy, our results suggest that the reasons underlying sex and gender inequalities in scientific research are complex and multi-level, comprising epistemological, methodological, technical, organizational, contractual, financial and normative constraints. As such, they require complex solutions designed not only to “fix” researchers, but also to “fix” institutions, their underlying structure and culture.
Inspired by the “labour for good” roundtable at the 10th STS Italia Conference, this Crossing Boundaries section brings together leading scholars on the relationship between technology and labour, with a focus on the role of digital platforms in shaping the negotiation dynamics, the forms of resistance, and even the very redefinition of labour and work practices, beside the power relationship between platforms and workers. This section aims also to provide a forum for STS to engage with and open up to kindred currents and fields of research such as labour studies, political economy and cultural studies, thereby fostering a cross-fertilization of frameworks and empirical results to better understand what and how we, as scholars and researchers, can mobilize STS for the “good” of workers and labour institutions, within but especially beyond the thresholds of academia.
During the 10th STS Italia Conference (11-13 June 2025) at the Politecnico di Milano, Chris Hesselbein sat down for an interview with Ruha Benjamin who delivered the conference’s opening keynote. This interview is not just in lieu of a transcription of her keynote speech, but serves also as an opportunity to draw out the (dis)connections between imagining, critiquing, and doing. In the interview, Benjamin also reflects on the role of emerging technologies in shaping and limiting our imagination, on the relationship between academic critique and political action and how this has shifted in STS over the past decades, and last, on the importance of solidarity as the bedrock for politically-engaged scholarship.
This article explores how theatre can serve as a tool for self-reflection and co-creation of knowledge for healthcare professionals, particularly those who have faced the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. A case study is presented of doctors and nurses in Bergamo who used a theatre workshop to rework their experiences, culminating in the creation of a theatre play performed for the city. The article contributes to the fields of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) and Medical Humanities, arguing that theatre, as techne (practical knowledge), not only disseminates research findings but can also provide epistemic work generating new narratives and fostering a deeper understanding of care practices, highlighting the importance of affective communication. The article illustrates how the project served as an epistemic laboratory where knowledge is co-generated among healthcare professionals, theatre professionals, and researchers, and then divulged to the public. The detailed analysis of the project’s unfolding, from the theatre workshop to the performances, shows how art can engage critically with science, challenging traditional conceptions of knowledge production and communication.
This Scenario analyzes the relationships between STS, postcolonial studies, the decolonial approach, and other frameworks that address planetary issues and the heterogeneous positioning of social studies of science and technology. First, it defines STS as a “Science of the North”, not only because it has been largely produced within the Euro-Atlantic area, but also because its conceptual apparatus presents itself as universal, even though it originated in a limited region of the world. Next, after outlining the main postcolonial and decolonial approaches, the article explores the openings that have emerged – especially in recent years – toward a fruitful hybridization between the two perspectives, both methodologically and theoretically. In particular, it highlights the encounters between non-Western and Western epistemic practices and the questioning of taken-for-granted roles within STS methodological practices themselves. Finally, the richness that STS can contribute to postcolonial studies is identified in its focus on materiality and planetary concerns, and thus in the fact that it does not restrict analysis solely to the discursive, semiotic, or representational dimensions of coloniality, as often happens in classical postcolonial studies.
In Science & Technology Studies and beyond, administrative instruments are recognized for their capacity to impact organizations and institutions. Whether intended or not, administrative instruments rework the core activities that organizations or institutions are put into the world to conduct. In this article, we study an important type of administrative instrument in universities, namely workload allocation models (WAMs), and how it impacts a core activity of universities, namely teaching. In order to explore this question, we draw on the concept of performative effects from Science & Technology Studies (STS). We conceptualize these effects as “collateral pedagogies”, drawing inspiration from the Science and Technology Studies approach to performativity and building on John Law’s concept of “collateral realities”. We argue that, while some performative effects of administrative instruments such as workload allocation models are visible because they constitute matters of concern in the contexts where they are introduced, such instruments may also produce more subtle effects. These effects may not be immediately apparent yet impact fundamental aspects of organizational practices. For example, most WAM’s in our study enacted university teaching as a standardized/able enterprise disconnected from its context and content by way of standardized formats and quantities, instead of an open process that takes the students, the particularities of the course, or teachers’ professional backgrounds and experience into consideration. Thus, it is important to examine WAMs closely.
Our journal remembers with deep gratitude Mario Biagioli (1955-2025), a towering figure in the STS community who served as member of Tecnoscienza’s International Advisory Board since 2012. We honor his legacy through Alessandro Delfanti’s tribute, which traces Biagioli’s groundbreaking contributions from the study of Renaissance courtly networks that enabled Galileo’s endeavour to the investigation of contemporary circuits of science, law, and economics, celebrating his intellectual generosity and enduring influence as scholar, mentor, and builder of collaborative communities.
This article theorizes the climate hack as a space of overlapping and clashing timescapes: indebted to speed; set against catastrophic climate change and slow institutional change; and threaded with care, community, and collective intelligence carrying different temporalities. The case study examines a Swiss-centered, globally-dispersed group of climate activists, tech entrepreneurs, software engineers, designers, researchers and students meeting weekly since 2021 to build climate technologies. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how participants negotiate temporal dissonances in their hacking practice. The online meetings employ agile methods oriented towards speed, efficiency, and disruptive action. The urgency of “the hack” promising to “do something now” clashes with slow legacy infrastructures and bureaucratic systems, alongside contrasting temporal outlooks like long-term planning. Participants prioritize start-up methodologies to “get stuff done”, yet acknowledge this model’s imperative for action is part of the late capitalist timescape that accelerated climate change. Expanding on cognitive dissonance, we introduce temporal dissonance and propose that living with conflicting temporalities is a condition of climate action. Beyond recognizing that any space incorporates conflicting timescapes, we suggest addressing the climate crisis “now” means dealing with potentially unresolvable temporal dissonances. In the hack, temporal dissonances are side-lined to synchronize action. Efficiency-based temporal orders dominate despite investments in alternatives. We argue that not foregrounding temporal dissonances risks reproducing entrenched, privileged temporal orders that may accelerate rather than mitigate the climate crisis.
In the last years, a rich literature has emerged at the intersection of Internet Governance as a field of study and Science and Technologies Studies. This Scenario retraces the complex social and technical historical developments that favored the integration of these two fields. This hybridization process can be described as a "product of necessity" - a descriptive label highlighting how the integration of STS concepts responded to evolving analytical challenges. It is delineated through a reconstruction in three phases, whose aim is to describe key intersections and to capture the ongoing trends within the Internet Governance community. The analysis shows that the first "turn to infrastructure" (Bowker et al. 2010) in the 2010s oriented scholarly interest towards materialities and protocols of the Internet as information infrastructure, thus favoring the study of its "control points" (Musiani et al. 2016). On the other hand, today's focus on geopolitical competition and informal governance practices provokes renewed interest in the social and situated components of the Internet infrastructure, such as imaginaries, contestations, and reappropriations. The Scenario finally discusses possible future approaches and research interests.
This work aims at contributing to the debate around the social representations of ageing, here by considering the theory of “biomedicalisation of ageing”, for which getting older is transformed into a medical problem with specific health risks that can be treated thanks to the help of technoscientific innovations. A considerable body of literature has created and developed this theoretical perspective, mainly through conceptual contributions or with qualitative methods, but different from most research, our paper contains a comparative-quantitative analysis of two large datasets, consisting of all the articles regarding the older population published online on the Guardian (UK) and la Repubblica (Italy). These articles underwent a quantitative analysis based on topic modelling techniques to identify and analyse the relevant topics. In parallel, we developed some synthetic indices to support the analysis of how news about older people is “biomedicalised” in media coverage. First, our analyses show how, during the period under scrutiny (1985-2021), while older adults have been increasingly framed as subjects at risk, the technoscientific solutions typical of the biomedicalisation era (i.e., personalised medicine and devices for self-monitoring vital parameters as well as lifestyles) have become increasingly relevant in the media sphere. Second, the analysed data show how biomedicalisation processes are interwoven with the ongoing social, cultural and economic arrangements (e.g., reduction in welfare state spending and exacerbation of the ageing population). Finally, focusing on the 2020-2021 period, it is observable how during COVID-19 public attention to the health risks of older adults has further increased; at the same time, there has been a diminishing emphasis on technoscientific solutions within the public sphere.
This Crossing Boundaries celebrates 20 years since the foundation of STS Italia, the Italian Society for the Study of Science and Technology, reflecting its ongoing commitment to disseminating STS and critical perspectives on the relationship between science, technology, innovation, and society, both in academic contexts and among the general public. Promoted by the Editorial Board of Tecnoscienza, this contribution brings together three authoritative voices exploring new frontiers in Science and Technology Studies. Barbara Allen examines the role of participatory science in environmental justice, highlighting the importance of involving local communities in scientific knowledge production. Barbara Prainsack proposes the use of systematic utopian imagination as a method to critically rethink technological futures, emphasizing the role of solidarity. Lucy Suchman offers an incisive critique of military datafication, questioning the epistemological premises of data collection and use in security contexts. Together, these contributions challenge traditional STS boundaries, proposing innovative approaches to re-engage with technoscience in ways that promote justice, equity, and critical reflection.
