Panel Convenor: ASTS, EASST 2026

The conference

EASST is the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, and its biennial conference is one of the main gatherings for Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars and practitioners worldwide. EASST2026 was hosted at AGH University of Krakow, from 8 to 11 September 2026, around the theme More than now: Exploring resilient futures.

I led the convening of the panel - Practicing creative collaboration: Art, science, and technology studies and the making of more-than-now futures - working with my collaborators. I coordinated the evaluation of submissions based on their strength and fit with the panel’s questions, co-curated the sessions, and led the communication with authors.

The panel

Practicing creative collaboration: Art, science, and technology studies and the making of more-than-now futures was an open panel of four sessions across two days. It brought together presentations, making and reflection. Rather than arguing that art is valuable in collaboration, the panel asked how art, science and technology collaborations are actually practised, what knowledge they produce, and how that helps us imagine more resilient futures.

It was organised around two areas of research. The first - drawing on my PhD research - is creative and relational labour: how the work of building relationships in collaboration can disrupt exclusionary ways of producing knowledge. The second - drawing on the work of Ulrike and Zeynep - is boundary work. The contributions ranged from glacier science and sculpture, to theatre in dementia care, to sonified forest data, maritime energy projects and accessible performance. You can see the full panel program at the EASST26 website.

This panel built on a 4S–EASST 2024 panel where ASTS emerged as a central theme, and it pushed the conversation into aesthetic, speculative and embodied territory. Convening it meant helping to shape how the field talks about its own practice, with scholars and artists from across the world, at the conference where STS comes together. It also supports my wider research programme, which is developing ASTS as a distinct field of practice.