Call for Pitches

Call for Pitches – Issue 1: Pandemic

What insights and impacts can science and technology studies (STS) provide in a time of crisis? Simultaneously, what failures and opportunities for improvement do current events reveal in our research and attempts at public engagement? What modes of STS scholarship are appropriate in the face of crisis?

The CFP is closed. Thank you to all who submitted!

As a community and as an intellectual perspective, STS constitutes a powerful way to respond to crisis. In 2020, we are faced with multiple crises, not only a global pandemic but also new episodes of ongoing violence and systematic racism. STS has the capacity to reveal and critique the sociotechnical configurations that predate these events and that make them possible in the first place. STS scholars fulfill this potential, in part, by highlighting the entanglements of public health and political order, the epistemic and technological underpinnings of injustice, and the making of futures and pasts. 

Now more than ever, we are in a position to cultivate this type of inquiry as a responsive mode of STS in society. But doing so carefully requires us to extend our analyses beyond expertise as performed by others, to also evaluate our own presence and authority in the public sphere. We must think together about the contribution of our scholarship in moments of crisis and our role in fostering better, more inclusive futures.

To this end, we are launching STS&Crisis, an online media project at the Harvard Program on Science, Technology, and Society. For this year’s issue, we invite pitches for accessible blog posts and short interviews that take this destabilizing time as a pedagogical moment; we aim to foster a shared understanding of STS perspectives within and, especially, beyond the research community.

Pitches are welcome on any current event (not limited to pandemic). Contributions can draw on both academic literature and personal experiences, must exhibit methodological reflexivity, and should be oriented towards one of two formats:

  1. A 750-1000 word blog post that responds to one of the above thematic questions in conversation with current events and 1-2 STS concepts/ideas. Cross-posting with other sites is welcome.
  2. A short interview that engages a member of your non-academic community or a colleague who you think may have a valuable perspective; suggest 3-5 questions that in some way connect technoscience, social order, and the interviewee’s experiences of current events. Remote video/audio recordings or edited transcripts are acceptable.

Pitches will be reviewed as they are submitted. Accepted pitches will be invited to submit a full piece, to be revised promptly with the editorial team and launched here and on social media.