Dear all, f you are looking for a reason to visit Milan and critically interrogate hype as a sociotechnical phenomenon, nothing prevents you from submitting an abstract to our panel at STS Italia. *The Call for Abstracts closes on February 3, 2025 with no extensions to this deadline to be granted.* The field of hype studies is ever-growing, but what remains a challenge is its absence of a unified approach. During last year’s 4S/EASST conference, we called to leverage collective experiences, to cocreatively build foundational structures and establish an STS-rooted, but outer-disciplinary, field of critical hype studies. This panel will target a twofold aim: (1) firstly, we want present our current progress as a collective of researchers focusing on critical hype studies as part of our introductory presentation; (2) secondly, we aim to invite new contributions explore dynamic transformations, implications, and theoretical underpinnings of hype. We, thus, invite researchers and scholars interested in problematising the complexities of hype as a multi-dimensional phenomenon that operates at sociotechnical, epistemic, psychological, transmedial, and environmental levels. We are particularly interested in insights into the intentional production of hype as a media and persuasion strategy or the unintentional emergence of hype driven by, or influencing, material, political and economic factors, as well as psychological, affective, and embodied ones. We wish to explore and problematise deterministic narratives about hype cycles, the social and psychological processes engendering hype, and the consequent effects on both innovation and public perception. Further, and in alignment with the theme of STS Italia 2025, we are committed to explore aspects of hype that have been revealed as nascent tendencies during our research, such as responsible hype or the mobilisation of hype for socially beneficial purposes. We are therefore interested in treatments of hype as boundary object, not only as a force of alienation, but also as motivational force, with heightened focus on the empowerment of marginalised social groups while attentive to capitalist processes of co-optation and appropriation of critical voices for profitable gain. In this regard, we are interested in investigations regarding responsible hype or hype assessment. *https://stsitalia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/11.Critical-Hype-Studies_-T... * *https://stsitalia.org/call-for-abstracts/ * Best in the name of the critical hype studies research group (PS. probably some of the group will also be present at theEU-SPRI <https://euspri-forum.eu/eu-spri-2025-conference-call-for-abstracts-and-papers/> in Dortmund, happening at the same days). Jascha Bareis -- *Jascha Bareis*(Profile) <https://www.itas.kit.edu/english/staff_bareis_jascha.php>(Scholar) <https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bf1gf9AAAAAJ&hl=de&oi=ao>(LinkedIn) <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jascha-bareis-36082523b/> Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis(ITAS) <https://www.itas.kit.edu/english/index.php> Karlsruher Institute of Technology(KIT) <https://www.kit.edu/english/index.php> Research Group Digital Technology and Societal Change(FG DigIT) <https://www.itas.kit.edu/english/rg_digit.php> *Recent Publications* Ask Me Anything ! 😈How ChatPGT Got Hyped Into Being.SOC ARXIV Preprint <https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jzde2> The Trustification of AI. Disclosing the bridging pillars that tie Trust and AI together.Big Data & Society <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517241249430> Technology Hype: Dealing with bold expectations and overpromising, with M. Roßmann and F.Bordignon.Journal of Technology Assessment in Theory and Practice <https://www.tatup.de/index.php/tatup/article/view/7073>