Translating Across Worlds: Refelections on Careers, Care and Coherence in STIS
By Valeria Ramirez
What does it mean to build a career in STS/STIS Science and Technology Studies and Innovation Studies) today? How do we remain critical while also engaging with institutions, funders, policy, publics and partners? And how do early career researchers navigate a field that often asks us to translate, intervene, organise, analyse and care — sometimes all at once? These were some of the questions that shaped the recent AsSIST-UK Early Career Researcher Summer School that was hosted by SPRU at the University of Sussex (27 May 2026). Operating under the central theme ‘Greater than the Sum: Collaboration and Impactful STIS’, the event brought together more than 45 senior, mid, and early-career researchers to collectively reflect on the trajectory of the field.
Across the event, one phrase introduced by Alex Ghionis stayed with many of us: you are a boundary object. This was offered partly as reassurance, partly as provocation. As described by Susan L. Star (Star, 2010), boundary objects can be understood as arrangements that enable different social worlds to work together without requiring them to fully share the same assumptions. They are characterised by interpretive flexibility: they can be understood and used differently by different groups, while still providing enough shared structure to support coordination. Their usefulness is therefore not uniform, but depends on how well they fit the practices, needs and purposes of each group that engages with them.
Early career researchers often move between disciplines, sectors, communities and expectations. This can feel uncomfortable, even incoherent. But the discussions reminded us that this ability to move, translate and hold different positions is not a (weakness or a) form of incoherence (;) it is a demanding and valuable skill.
We heard (from Jane Calvert) that coherence is often retrospective. The story of a career rarely makes sense while one is living it. It is assembled afterwards, through the connections we learn to make between projects, methods, roles and commitments.
The event also offered an important insight into impact, a concept increasingly prioritised in today’s academia. Looking back at past STS and STIS interventions, Adrian Smith encouraged not to see partial uptake, difficult outcomes or unrealised futures simply as failure. Even when advice is not fully taken on board, something often gets through: a concept, a vocabulary, a relationship, a hesitation, a shift in how a problem is framed. In this sense, unfulfilled aims are not always a failure because they often achieve something. This provoked a deeper discussion on the messy, highly political reality of shifting policy paradigms. Kieron Flanagan challenged the room by calling impact a “zombie concept,” while Jane Calvert suggested that STIS scholars might instead aim for “intervention and usefulness”, noting that sometimes simply getting in the way and denaturalising established modes of thinking is a useful intervention in itself.
There was also a generous recognition of the particular legacy of STS/STIS: its agile articulation, its long-standing capacity to engage with different publics, institutions and forms of expertise. Other social science fields are increasingly learning how to work across these boundaries. STS/STIS has been doing this for a long time, and this is something to value, maintain and cherish.
The conversations were also practical and honest. Josh Moon spoke about impostor syndrome — not as something that simply disappears, but as something one learns to live with, perhaps becoming a more qualified impostor over time. Anna Dorwick spoke about (the) approach to ‘saying no’, protecting wellbeing, and recognising that balance is not a luxury but a condition for sustaining good work. The panel did not shy away from the realities of massive career setbacks, nor the uneven playing field of academia, explicitly exploring how structural barriers can disproportionately penalize women, immigrants, and early-career researchers.
The panel, ‘STIS within and beyond academia’, gave me an opportunity to reflect on the current upheavals the academic system is traversing, and on the need to imagine different ways of persisting and working well within it while making external connections. Recognising the importance of focused, one-to-one conversations, the summer school also provided mentoring sessions on topics ranging from grant writing to navigating inequalities. Reflecting on the “Surviving the Viva” roundtable, SPRU Early Career Researcher Kanika Balani shared an empowering takeaway from Professor Robin Williams: a reframing of the viva not as something to fear, but as a “luxury spa”, a rare opportunity to engage in a deep intellectual discussion with experts who have read your work closely.
During my presentation, I shared some thoughts on shifting the lens from precarity as a condition of scarcity, towards the creation of new conditions for resourcing our work in changing and unpredictable environments. This means learning new languages, developing new skills, identifying our knowledge assets, and finding ways to grow them with the right partners. Knowledge exchange, policy engagement, independent work, funders and beneficiaries all emerged as part of a wider ecosystem in which STS/STIS scholars can act — not alone, but with communities that share values and help sustain the work overtime.
These complex dynamics between meaningful research and institutional demands resonated strongly with attendees. Dominic Watters, a first-year PhD researcher at SPRU, highlighted how the event captured these exact pressures: “(T)he early career researcher discussion highlighted the tensions that can arise between meaningful STIS research approaches and demonstrating the kinds of impact that are prioritised by the university ecosystem… and the challenges of securing funding for research that challenges dominant modes of operating… I’m excited to connect more with the STIS research centres across the UK in the future”.
Many of us stayed on (for the second day) to May 28 for a joint celebration of the 60th Anniversaries of SPRU and STIS – two of the earliest centres for STS/IS scholarship established at Sussex and Edinburgh Universities. Hearing from alumni, established scholars, and early career researchers, the event reflected on the field’s past and future. While Andy Davies and Robin Mansell celebrated the centres’ unique interdisciplinary history and early digital work, Robin Williams pointed out a recent divergence between innovation studies and STS, calling for renewed collaboration between these historically partnered aspects of the field. Addressing the current political context, Andy Stirling and Jane Calvert discussed the pressures on researchers to subordinate work to policy agendas, inviting us to embrace the many roles we take in interdisciplinary work: historian, translator, agitator, and trickster. Finally, looking to the future, a panel of early career researchers from both universities explored the emerging questions and challenges posed by novel technologies.
By the end, the question was not simply how to make STS/STIS impactful, but how to repair, maintain and care for the ST(I)S communities, practices and inheritances that make such work possible.
With warm thanks to all the AsSIST-UK and University of Sussex teams who made the event possible and these two days a reflective space for STIS scholarship.
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Star SL (2010) This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept. Science, Technology, & Human Values 35(5). Sage Publications, Inc.: 601–617.
