Dear all, We look forward to your submissions in the following panel: "Flipping the Tables: Or an STS of humanities and social sciences" at the 7th Nordic STS Conference, 11-13 June 2025 in Stockholm. The submission is open till 1st March 2025. Title of the panel: Flipping the Tables: Or an STS of humanities and social sciences Organisers Cheshta Arora, Western Norway Research Institute, car@vestforsk.no<mailto:car@vestforsk.no> Debarun Sarkar, University of Bergen, debarun.sarkar@uib.no<mailto:debarun.sarkar@uib.no> A description of the issues and themes that the panel will address: Though the field of science and technology studies (STS) has been able to interrogate the messy contours of technoscience, the panel seeks to flip the tables, to re-deploy and re-think the methods and sensibilities that have been developed in relationship to the natural science and technological domains and turn the gaze towards humanities and social sciences. Even though humanities and social sciences, in particular the allied disciplines of anthropology/sociology, celebrate and defend self-referentiality, relationality and perspectivism as key sensibilities, there has been a reluctance to turn the gaze towards the labour one does (Arora and Sarkar 2022), the flow of capital that enables these disciplines in the contemporary, and the nitty-gritty of how knowledge is produced in these disciplines. Following Rabinow (1986) and echoing Sangren (2007), Hey notes the hesitancy of anthropologists/sociologists “in addressing the significance of ‘corridor talks’” (Hey 2001, 67) and how they appear or disappear in the “documents” (Smith 1974), or “inscriptions” (Latour and Woolgar 1986) emerging from these disciplinary practices. Similar to the ability of science and technology studies “to document and ask questions surrounding the practice of scientific knowledge-making in the lab and outside”, the panel calls for interrogating “knowledge-making practices in the fields of social science” and humanities (Sarkar 2022, 115). The mandate for interdisciplinarity has been a long-standing one (Apostel et al. 1972) and has been formalised in the European Union due to the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development. However, this long-standing call and formalisation has not meant smooth integration, a strong tradition of cross-disciplinary collaboration or non-hierarchical collaborations (Bruce et al. 2004; Clark and Wallace 2015; Arora and Prabhakar 2023). Differences between trans-disciplinarity, inter-disciplinarity, and multi-disciplinarity are often noted to articulate the spectrum of collaboration between disciplines. The changes in modes of knowledge production (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000) have also echoed in debates in the scientific method as complexity has emerged over the decades as the key problematic (Prigogine and Stengers 1997; Kitchin 2014). These changes have affected the everyday lives of social sciences and humanities as much as the natural sciences and engineering disciplines in terms of materials, interfaces, and infrastructures. However, an adequate global account of these changes within academic labour and knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences is lacking. The panel seeks papers and provocations that can think through the conditions of knowledge production, the process of hiring, grant-making, research-funding, tenure-track hiring, etc” (Arora and Sarkar 2022) and how knowledge is “assembled, accumulated, compiled and curated” (Jaton 2020) or practised and performed in these disciplines. The list is non-exhaustive, and we welcome concerns that echo or resonate with the following list: * How has the funding regime reshaped the contours of humanities and social science in recent decades in Europe and beyond? * How has labour relations reshaped the contours of humanities and social sciences in recent decades in Europe and beyond? * How has STS as a field been shaped by funding mandates in Europe and outside? * How is knowledge generated, codified and evaluated in humanities and social sciences in Europe and beyond? * How have mandates of interdisciplinarity shaped humanities and social sciences in recent years in Europe and beyond? * How does knowledge production differ in non-governmental organisations, research institutes, universities and for-profit organisations in Europe and beyond? * How can STS method and sensibilities be redeployed for unpacking knowledge production in humanities and social sciences? We encourage writings from diverse geographical sites and particularly encourage comparative perspectives across different regimes of scientific knowledge production. We welcome texts that wish to experiment with varied forms of writing and sense-making. Bibliography Apostel, Léo, Guy Berger, Asa Briggs, and Guy Michaud. 1972. ‘Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities’. Paris: OECD Publications Center, Suite 1207, 1750 Pennsylvania Avenue, N. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED061895. Arora, Cheshta, and Tarunima Prabhakar. 2023. ‘To Think of Interdisciplinarity as Intercurrence: Or, Working as an Interdisciplinary Team to Develop an ML Tool to Tackle Online Gender-Based Violence and Hate Speech’. Journal of Interdisciplinary Methodologies and Issues in Sciences Vol 11-Thinking interdisciplinarity in practice (Subject Area 1: Interdisciplinarity as a field of research). https://doi.org/10.46298/jimis.8915. Arora, Cheshta, and Debarun Sarkar. 2022. ‘No Publication, No Degree: Of Knowledge Production in Anthropology/Sociology in India’. Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology 28:84–104. https://doi.org/10.36950/sjsca.2022.28.8003. Bruce, Ann, Catherine Lyall, Joyce Tait, and Robin Williams. 2004. ‘Interdisciplinary Integration in Europe: The Case of the Fifth Framework Programme’. Futures, Transdisciplinarity, 36 (4): 457–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2003.10.003. Clark, Susan G., and Richard L. Wallace. 2015. ‘Integration and Interdisciplinarity: Concepts, Frameworks, and Education’. Policy Sciences 48 (2): 233–55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-015-9210-4. Etzkowitz, Henry, and Loet Leydesdorff. 2000. ‘The Dynamics of Innovation: From National Systems and “Mode 2” to a Triple Helix of University–Industry–Government Relations’. Research Policy 29 (2): 109–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(99)00055-4. Hey, Valerie. 2001. ‘The Construction of Academic Time: Sub/Contracting Academic Labour in Research’. Journal of Education Policy 16 (1): 67–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930010009831. Jaton, Florian. 2020. The Constitution of Algorithms: Ground-Truthing, Programming, Formulating. Inside Technology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Kitchin, Rob. 2014. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & Their Consequences. SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473909472. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1997. The End of Certainty. Simon and Schuster. Rabinow, Paul. 1986. ‘Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology’. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 234–61. University of California Press. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1525/9780520946286-012/html. Sangren, P. Steven. 2007. ‘Anthropology of Anthropology?’ Anthropology Today 23 (4): 13–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2007.00523.x. Sarkar, Debarun. 2022. ‘Toward a Feminism Without Scaffoldings: Mapping a Research Project, a Narrative from the Field, and a Draft Bill’. Journal of International Women’s Studies 23 (2): 103-118–103. https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol23/iss2/8. Smith, Dorothy. 1974. ‘The Social Construction of Documentary Reality’. Sociological Inquiry 44 (4): 257–67. https://www.academia.edu/49243314/The_Social_Construction_of_Documentary_Rea....