Call for Papers: STS Across Borders Graduate Student Conference March 20-22, 2009 | Blacksburg, Virginia Keynote Speakers: Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Fa-ti Fan, SUNY Binghamton Abstract submissions: Please send an abstract (minimum 250 words, maximum of 400 words) dealing with the issues mentioned below and/or related issues to Bob Darrow (dar...@vt.edu) or Cora Olson (cow...@vt.edu) in DOC or RTF format. If you do not plan to present in person, please indicate this in your abstract. The deadline for submissions is December 5, 2008. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by January 9. Since the emergence of EuroAmerican STS, the field has gone to great lengths to mitigate the pitfalls endemic to knowledge production, in part through the principle of reflexivity. If the field's focus on the relationships between wider sociopolitical and historical contexts and the production / appropriation / translation of technoscientific knowledge has been a point of reinvention, then it might be time for a reinvention of STS by making the production of STS knowledge itself an object of study. In this sense, we hope to explore questions of a critical STS of STS that stays true to the principle of reflexivity, and further decenters, rehistoricizes, and pluralizes what has been taken to be "STS" by asking, "What does STS look like across and within Borders?" This conference builds on the concept of "border crossings" by conceptualizing borders not just as geopolitical boundaries, and thus seeks to understand what STS practice, intervention, methodology, and thinking look like across and within a multiplicity of borders. We intend this conference to help foster a transborder space for STS practitioners / theorists/ interventionists. We believe STS scholars and practitioners worldwide would benefit from a plurality of STS approaches. We ask participants to explore such 'border crossings' as: · STS across geopolitical borders — such as Daiwie Fu's position paper "How Far Can East Asian STS Go?" in EASTS. Fu asks "whether a distinctive historical experience and thus probably a shared East Asian STS theoretical perspective" is "indeed different from simply applying Western STS perspectives to East Asian 'area studies.' [Then] we indeed would expect distinctive East Asian STS theories, not to mention distinctive STS stories, case studies, and histories." · STS across academic and activist/interventionist borders, exploring STS work with/in NGOs, social entrepreneurship organizations, theatre and community groups, and other 'non-academic' spaces. · STS across new intra-academic disciplinary borders such as STS and Postcolonial Studies, STS and Feminists Studies, STS and Environmental Studies, STS and Art, STS and Peace Studies, and other fields In the spirit of reflexivity, we ask participants to keep in mind such questions as: · What epistemological and institutional changes need to be made in our current practices to facilitate exchanges across borders? · What is at stake in the move to further diversify STS across borders? · What does it mean to "enroll" previously absent "actors" into STS? · How do we recognize the importance of constructing and maintaining borders in relation to power? And how does an STS with a tendency to deterritorialize grapple with these historical 'border politics'? · How do we avoid the pitfalls of essentializing identities? · How do we theorize the tensions between STS as universal and STS as multiplicities? Acknowledging that the usual conference settings contribute to the power differentials of STS across borders, we invite participants to partake in the integration of innovative modes of exchange including: sessions in the virtual world of Second Life, submission of pre- recorded video presentations, and other alternate modes mixed with traditional conference modes of presentation. While we recognize that these approaches do not solve the multiple asymmetries that exist, we hope that they serve as a beginning for extending the possibilities of STS across borders.