4S Open Panel: What Can a Conference Panel Do?
A conference reverberates. Sometimes as an echo chamber, things recapitulated. But a conference is also an unruly density—a format for waves of circulation, a temporary structuring of materials and hunches, nerves and notebooks, modes of listening or distraction. A conference is an ordinary nesting of interiors that shapes how thought resonates (the ways we transduce and echo each other, how an idea resounds or fails). STS is attentive to matters of knowledge work in labs and fieldsites: objects, networks, technics. But sometimes it forgets the mundane, the felt, what is improvised or patched together in scenes of knowing. After all, a panel is a fifteen-minute interval that consolidates and performs all the hard work of living that precedes.