CFP: Assemblages of the Broken World panel at STS Italia Conference, 11-13 June, 2025

Call for Papers: Assemblages of the Broken World panel at STS Italia Conference, 11-13 June, 2025

Please consider submitting an abstract to a panel I will be chairing at the STS Italia Conference. The conference theme is Technoscience for good: Designing, caring, and reconfiguring.

The concept of the ‘broken world’ suggests that a more sustainable future lies in commitments to repair, maintenance, and care of existing systems. Following the invitation by Jackson (2014), this panel invites scholars to “take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress” as starting points for their presentations. This shift in perspective requires us to acknowledge the limits of our fragile world and recognize the importance of reimagining what needs to be studied and how amidst all the brokenness.

The presentations of this open panel can explore the configurations of the broken world and related practices of repair, maintenance, and care in research settings, research methodologies, and eventually research ontologies and epistemologies. Different types of presentations from provocations to research papers and from research ideas to work-inprogress are welcome. Proposals may respond to, but are not limited by, the following themes:

• failures and fixes of digital infrastructures;
• resilience and vulnerability in broken systems;
• consumerism, repair and maintenance;
• technological obsolescence and sustainable innovation;
• imagining beyond brokenness;
• cultural narratives of breakdown and repair;
• ethics of care in research and knowledge production;
• indigenous knowledge and traditional practices of repair;
• urban decay, renewal, and community care;
• art, aesthetics, and visualizations of brokenness and repair.

Deadline for submission 3 February 2025. Submit your abstract here.