Hello all, 

We are really looking forward to 4S Toronto this year. 

Where does critique live now? From corporate ethics boards to AI fairness teams, the institutional homes of critique in practice have multiplied. We invite you to submit an abstract to our 4S Toronto panel and join a conversation that pushes STS into new territory.

Panel Abstract:

Nearly two decades after Latour (2004) asked whether critique had "run out of steam," it has found new institutional homes: from corporate ethics boards to AI fairness teams. How might we transform our investigations by treating critique itself as an object of analysis (Boltanski & Thévenot 1999)? How does critique circulate through organizations? What effect does this critique have in the world (or not)? How do we trace the arc from external critique to its transformation and materialization into novel technologies (Bhattacharjee and Ribes, 2025)? 

This panel examines the conditions under which actors acquire critical capacity and the novel networks that need to be assembled when navigating organizational terrains of critique. We invite contributions examining critique symmetrically, as an empirical phenomenon in the world and methodological challenge for our investigations. How can we compare the distinct purchase of different models of criticality across settings? We welcome contributions from across disciplines addressing (but not limited to):

• Theoretical frameworks for analyzing communities of critique, their affordances and limitations
• The novel networks organizations assemble to engage or manage critique
• Where practitioners draw lines between evaluation and criticism
• How critique functions as fuel for organizational change or not
• How complicity relates to critical practice
• Comparative studies of criticality's purchase in different institutional settings