A big thank you to everyone who was involved in our Biennial conference, held at the Manchester Alliance Business School on 4th and 5th of September – invited speakers, the conference organising team, conference helpers and of course those who attended as participating speakers or audience members.
The 58 attendees from 24 different organisations – with every major STS centre represented. This year’s theme was Dis-Ruption, with various strands and subthemes around disruption emerging, including disruptive and disrupting technologies, disruptions of and with ‘nature’ and the environment, disruptive
methods and processes – in research, music, education, healthcare and society.
Through our biennial conference we aim to offer our members, STIS researchers and aligned friends and colleagues, fantastic opportunities to meet new people, showcase new work and ideas, and to debate current issues facing the science, technology and innovation studies community (broadly defined). Thank you again to those who attended for your financial support – AsSIST-UK is free to join, and this is our only money raising activity. The profits raised will go straight back into putting on future events for you, our STIS community. And thank you for those who provided feedback. We want our future events to be
well-run, enjoyable, inclusive and good value, so we will take onboard your comments, keep the good bits that worked well and will work on addressing any issues where we can make improvements.
We were lucky to receive a diverse variety of submissions and as a result we had a diverse programme of traditional and disruptive formats. Highlights included: An STS DJ set: Using Lego to think about concerning emergent technologies and ‘moving slow and fixing things’
- Getting outside to tackle real ‘troublesome’ trees and that challenge our ability to account for them
- ECRs making use of the rent-a-mentor scheme
- A meet-the-author and meet-the-publisher session
We were delighted too that Maja Horst, President of EASST and Professor of Responsible Technology at Technical University of Denmark (DTU), formally opened the conference with a thought-provoking keynote speech on the subject of Disruption as narrative, in which she reflected on how collective narratives serve as sense-making tools. Narratives enable us to understand the world, help us form and maintain identity and suggest ways of interpreting both technologies and the role of science in society. The talk drew particularly on resources from rhetoric, cultural theory and controversy studies and her
slides featured a range of Maya-inspired and AI-generated ‘artworks’.
We were lucky to receive a diverse variety of submissions and as a result we had a diverse programme of traditional and disruptive formats. Highlights included:
- An STS DJ set
- Using Lego to think about concerning emergent technologies and ‘moving slow and fixing things’
- Getting outside to tackle real ‘troublesome’ trees and that challenge our ability to account for them
- ECRs making use of the rent-a-mentor scheme
- A meet-the-author and meet-the-publisher session
Manchester’s weather was particularly kind to us during the event which meant that we were able to hold the evening reception on the first day outside in glorious warm sunshine. We took it as a measure of success that we had to shepherd people towards the next part of the programme – perhaps next time we need a gong!
We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at our 2025 AsSIST-UK conference. In the meantime, we hope to see some of you in Amsterdam next year at EASST’s 2024 Biennial Conference.
A copy of the organiser’s post event report is available on request from the organising committee.