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. It is a conduit for presence, scheduling the sociality of thought into order so it might pulse out into the world. A panel is a city, a conference center, worn hallway carpet, how chairs are arrayed, bodies angled, imposter syndrome, fluorescent lights, lanyards, sweaty palms, possible futures.
In this open panel, we mess with the space of the academic conference as assemblage and atmosphere, asking participants to pace the theme of “reverberation” through STS, critical university studies, theories of performativity, and creative methods of writing and presenting to dream up new means of communicating STS research. What modes of relation can be choreographed at a conference center? What can be done with the air of the room, the chairs, the floor, laptops, lightbulbs, a PowerPoint? Drawing on STS precedents (figuration, fictocriticism, science and performance), we invite experimental “papers,” performances, and workshops that set off interdisciplinary reverberations to explore the conference panel as format and event. What gets moved? How are knowledges contingent on modulations of substrate, volume, duration? What happens when STS theory becomes haptic, sonic, spatial, felt?
Submit at 4sonline and choose open panel #109: