Our annual STS Conference Happening Now

As I always state, I am lucky to be one of the convenors of STS Turkiye, a platform for social scientists focused on Science and Technology Studies. While the political agenda is always hectic and chaotic, we work to coordinate STS-related studies that are distracted by it.

Call for Papers

The STS Turkey 2025 Conference invites participants to explore how the relationship between science, technology, and society has been imagined in the past, present, and future; and how these imaginings have shaped everyday life, social order, and regimes of knowledge. We propose the concept of “Technotopia” as a framework that allows us to consider socially imagined futures shaped by technology, along with their environmental, spatial, and cultural dimensions, focusing on the multifaceted relationships that exist across a broad spectrum rather than on dichotomies. This concept offers an interdisciplinary space for thinking and discussion, enabling both theoretical and empirical contributions. Under the heading of technotopia, different theoretical and methodological approaches within STS, such as posthumanist, feminist, and actor-network theory, can be combined with perspectives from different disciplines such as sociology, design theory, philosophy, medicine, communication, information technology, and engineering.

Science and technology should be considered not only as technical objects and areas of expertise, but also as multiple fields that shape social life, cultural values, power relations, and our power of imagination. In this context, investigating how scientific knowledge production and technological transformations intersect with everyday life and with ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions is one of the fundamental goals of STS.

This year’s conference encourages studies that focus on, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How do technotopias transform our social and cultural imaginations?
• How do knowledge productions about future technologies shape today’s policies and designs?
• In an interdisciplinary approach, what kinds of epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic questions do technological imaginations raise?
• How do technological utopias of the past (re)shape socio-technical memory today?
• How do you track how your technical solutions are received, transformed, or rejected in users’ everyday lives?
• What past, present, and future visions do the technologies you develop reflect? What power relations do these visions point to?
• What does “good technology” mean? How do different socio-cultural and technical contexts shape this definition?
• What discussions might there be about the potential for technological visions to turn into dystopia/utopia?
• How do utopian/dystopian visions of the future shape today’s engineering decisions and design practices?
• How do engineers, designers, and scientists confront these risks—or should they?

Examples of inclusive but not limiting topics:

• Science, technology, and the power of imagination
• Digital technologies, everyday life, and inequalities
• Environmental technologies, energy transition, and climate
• Participatory design, user imagination, and technological subjectivity
• Design philosophy, speculative design, and aesthetics
• Fiction about future technologies: science fiction literature and cinema
• Artificial intelligence, human enhancement, and posthumanism
• The roles of technological objects in everyday life
• Technology and space: smart cities, infrastructures, and socio-technical imaginations
• Surveillance, data regimes, and the digital age
• Feminism, body politics, and technoscience
• Epistemological boundaries, technical knowledge, and alternative forms of knowledge
• The reflections of past imaginations about the future in today’s technological infrastructures

All researchers, students, and independent thinkers directly or indirectly related to the above topics are invited to the conference. Conceptual clarity, methodological approaches, and establishing a connection with the “technotopia” framework are important in abstract submissions.

Here is the DeepL translated version of the conference program:

STS-Turkiye-2025-Konferans-Programi en-US-1