Dal 27 settembre al 1 Ottobre si è tenuta a Padova la VI Summer School STS Italia, intitolata “Disentangling Futures: Promises, Scenarios, Experiments”, organizzata da STS Italia in collaborazione con il dipartimento di Filosofia, Sociologia, Pedagogia e Psicologia Applicata (Fisspa) e l’unità di ricerca Pa.S.T.I.S dell’Università di Padova, con l’STS Lab dell’Università di Losanna e grazie al supporto dell’European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST).
Complessivamente, sono pervenute 52 richieste di partecipazione e sono stati selezionati 34 partecipanti, a 10 dei quali è stata riconosciuta una borsa corrispondente alla quota d’iscrizione, per la gran parte giovani ricercatori o Ph.D. students, mentre 4 studenti si sono ritirati prima dell’inizio dei lavori. La partecipazione si è caratterizzata in senso marcatamente internazionale; 10 gli studenti italiani. Le provenienze sono state estremamente variegate, con partecipanti dal Belgio (1), dalla Francia (1), dalla Finlandia (2), dalla Svizzera (4) dalla Germania (3), dalla Grecia (1), dalla Svezia (1), dall’Olanda (1), dal Regno Unito (2), dal Lussemburgo (1), dagli Stati Uniti (1) e dal Giappone (1). Da sottolineare anche la composizione di genere abbastanza bilanciata, con una lieve prevalenza femminile (16 su 30). Alla realizzazione della Summer School hanno contribuito diversi studiosi provenienti da vari ambiti disciplinari, consentendo così di affrontare numerosi aspetti del futuro e delle promesse tecnoscientifiche e di offrire un programma denso di stimoli che hanno favorito un intenso scambio fra i partecipanti. Nello specifico Kornelia Konrad è intervenuta come keynote speaker sul ruolo performativo delle aspettative nell’ambito della governance dell’innovazione tecnoscientifica, mentre Barbara Prainsack ha posto l’accento su come la mancanza di aspettative possa ugualmente plasmare i futuri ed avere un forte impatto sul presente. Le aspettative sono state quindi un tema trasversale anche negli interventi di Marc Audétat e Philippe Sormani che si sono soffermati in particolare sul ruolo dei media nella produzione e circolazione di immaginari e promesse tecnoscientifiche in diversi ambiti.
I feedback dei partecipanti, docenti e studenti, sono risultati molto positivi, sia per quanto attiene alla dimensione scientifica della Summer School, sia per il buon clima interpersonale, favorito anche dalle varie iniziative proposte, che hanno compreso anche una visita guidata alla Biennale d’arte di Venezia, introdotta da una lecture di Silvia Casini sul rapporto fra scienza e arte. Infine, siamo rimasti molto soddisfatti delle sei presentazioni finali realizzate dai gruppi di studenti nell’ultimo giorno, che hanno declinato il tema del rapporto tra tecnoscienza e futuro attraverso oggetti, approcci e modalità particolarmente originali. Nel complesso si è trattato quindi di un’iniziativa che continua e rafforza quanto già realizzato nelle precedenti summer school organizzate da STS Italia.

2° rapporto del progetto TIPS – Technoscientific Issues in the Public Sphere: 2022 È ANCORA PANDEMIA
Finalmente è online il secondo rapporto TIPS– Technoscientific Issue in the Public Sphere che indaga l’impatto della pandemia sulla copertura mediale della tecnoscienza. Dallo studio, coordinato da Federico Neresini e a cui hanno preso parte diversi membri di Pa.S.T.I.S tra cui Paolo Giardullo, Stefano Crabu, Barbara Morsello e Andrea Sciandra emerge quanto la pandemia sia ancora centrale nel contesto della comunicazione pubblica: i dati rilevati sui quotidiani mostrano chiaramente come gli avvenimenti pandemici si riflettano ancora sul discorso pubblico sulla tecnoscienza.
Call for participants in a Workshop within the ISRF 2021-2022 “Digital Intimacies and Emerging Adults in Southern Europe: Crisis, Pandemics and Resistances project”
We invite doctoral and post-doctoral researchers who are working in the following fields to participate in the Digital Intimacies and Emerging Adults two-day workshop which will take place at University of Padova (Italy) on 02 and 03 September 2022:
- Sexual content production and consumption
- Sex workers and digital platforms
- Discourses about platformed sex labour
- Sex industry and representations of the sexual body
- Intersections of age, gender, race and sexuality
- Sex work as aesthetic labour
- Intimacy repertoires in public and private spaces
- Social movement organizations around sex work and / or digital platforms
- Debates about labour precarity and digital forms of work
- Digital / online harassment connected to sex work
- Censorship and regulation of the sex industry
- The impact of mainstream financial companies in the pursuit of self-managed sex work
- The multiple meanings of pornography, post-pornography and diversity in sexuality representation
- The roles of physical media in a digital, networked, society
- Porn literacies and intimate citizenship
The workshop will provide the participants the opportunity to discuss their research with the colleagues and a team of scholar experts in the field.
At the opening of each day the workshop will host a keynote speech from two relevant scholars in the field: Jamie Hakim and Katherine Tiidenberg that will also take part in the discussions with the participants.
For this Call, please kindly submit, in no more than 1000 (a thousand) words:
- A short overview of the area of work you’re developing or plan to develop
- A short overview of the type of data that you are collecting, and that you would like to discuss and present during the Workshop
- A few ideas about the type of feedback that you would like to receive during this Workshop by the research specialists that will be attending
- A short rationale about why you think this workshop will considerably develop your research skills and how it aligns with the topics and framework(s) you are currently working on, or intend to work on.
We also ask you to include your current academic status (e.g., postdoctoral research fellow, PhD student), your host institution(s), country of origin, and whether you have any specific accessibility requirements that might impact your participation in this event.
Please send your submissions by 22nd May 2022 using the form that you can find here: https://ulusofona.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6R0mYCLhWv6CIxo
The team:
Cosimo Marco Scarcelli – University of Padova, Italy (cosimomarco.scarcelli@unipd.it)
Daniel Cardoso – Universidade Lusófona, Portugal; Nova University of Lisbon, Portugal (daniel.cardoso@ulusofona.pt)
Despina Chronaki – Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (dchronaki@jour.auth.gr)
Scientific Committee
Daniel Cardoso, Despina Chrnoaki, Mirco Costacurta, Jamie Hakim, Cosimo Marco Scarcelli, Katherine Tiidenberg.
Organisational Commitee
Mirco Costacurta, Matilde Francisca, Davide Gerardi, Giulia Giacomelli, Rachele Reschiglian, Maria Zappi.
WORKSHOP PROGRAMME
DAY ONE – 2nd September 2022
14.30 Introduction
15.00 – 16.30: Keynote Jamie Hakim
17.00 – 19.00: Participants’ presentations 1
DAY TWO – 3rd September 2022
10.30 – 12.00: Keynote Katrin Tiidenberg
12.00-14.00: Break
14.00 – 16.00: Participants’ presentations 2
16.00-16.30: Break
16.30 – 18.30: Participants’ presentations 3
18.30 – 19.00: Conclusion
Visualizing science on screen: un nuovo progetto sugli Science Film Festival è in corso!
“Anziani, salute e società” di Francesco Miele
OPEN CALL: 6th STS Italia Summer School
PASTIS Research Group – University of Padova
STS Lab – University of Lausanne
STS ITALIA – Italian Society for Science and Technology Studies
is organizing the 6th STS Italia Summer School, “Disentangling Futures: Promises, Scenarios, Experiments“, to be held in Padova (Italy) from September 27th to October 1st, 2022.
The Summer School aims at providing a theoretical, analytical, and methodological toolbox to carry out STS-inspired research into the role of futures in co-producing technoscience and governance, and in reshaping science-technology-society interfaces.
Goals, main topics and aims
In the last decade, Science and Technology Studies (STS) have paid increasing attention to the performative role of “futures”, anticipatory expectations, and “forward-looking statements” in co-defining knowledge-making processes and technological developments. Currently, this broad interest in disentangling the nexus between the future and technoscience flows into several research streams: from the assessment of long-term futures of technological innovation, setting out how future-oriented socio-technical imaginaries act upon real-time technoscientific innovation, up to actionable anticipatory frameworks and normative scenarios adopted to intervene in science, technology and innovation governance and policy-making.
The 6th STS Italia Summer School aims at providing a theoretical, analytical, and methodological toolbox to carry out STS-inspired research into the role of futures in co-producing technoscience and governance, and in reshaping science-technology-society interfaces.
Main themes that will be addressed:
Science-society interface approaches related to the future, including technoscientific expectations, sociotechnical imaginaries, and technological promises;
The role of future scenarios in shaping policies and processes of innovation;
The role of emerging technologies in shaping technoscientific imaginaries and public discourses;
Investigating technoscientific expectations, imaginaries and promises in newspapers and online media;
The relationship between imaginaries and fictional representations in shaping technoscience;
Taking inspiration from art, exhibitions and ‘art/science’ experiments to enhance the study of innovation in the future.
Organisation
The Summer School will be organised around lectures and seminars. To make the coursework more responsive, the participants will be engaged in seminars in which they will investigate the main themes of the Summer School working in small groups, through activities, discussions, inputs and examples. A group of scholars from STS Italia will participate in all activities as facilitators. Moreover, the School will include a guided tour to an exhibition art space in Venice, in order to offer materials and inspiration for workshop activities related to the relationship between art, technoscience and the future. All lectures and seminars will be in English.
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS
Marc Audétat | (University of Lausanne – CH) |
Silvia Casini | (University of Aberdeen – UK) |
Kornelia Konrad | (University of Twente – NL) |
Federico Neresini | (University of Padova – IT) |
Barbara Prainsack | (University of Vienna – AT) |
Philippe Sormani | (University of Lausanne – CH) |
Schedule, costs, and accommodation
All participants are expected to attend the entire duration of the Summer School and a Certificate of Attendance will be provided at the end. The fee for participation is 250 €. The fee includes:
- Access to all lectures and workshops
- Lunches and coffee breaks
- Social dinner
- Welcome aperitif
- A guided tour to an exhibition space in Venice
- A two-month access to TIPS, an online platform for media analysis
Attendants will be responsible to arrange their own accommodation. A list of selected hotels, B&Bs and budget accommodations will be provided to participants.
Who should attend?
This Summer School is intended for PhD students and junior researchers from different fields and disciplines (including science and technology studies, social study of health and medicine, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and/or related fields) who are interested in developing a STS sensibility toward this field of study.
The maximum number of participants is limited to 25 people. Candidates will be selected based on their CV and research interests as well as with a view to maintaining a balance of genders and nationalities.
Scholarships
The Summer School includes two different scholarship schemes:
- • Up to 5 scholarships (covering the participation fees) will be available for talented students. Scholarship applicants must send a statement of purpose (maximum 500 words) explaining why attending this summer school would be important for their academic studies or career and also outlining the reasons why a scholarship is required. Scholarship recipients will be selected on the basis of documented academic performance, personal achievements, and financial needs.
- • Up to 5 scholarships (covering the participation fees) are available for PhD students and talented undergraduate students affiliated with Padova and Lausanne Universities. Scholarship applicants must send a statement of purpose (maximum 500 words) explaining why attending this summer school would be important for their academic studies or career.
Benefits of attending
Through both attending lectures and practicing concepts, theories and empirical methods in group discussions and workshops, students will gain insights and suggestions on how to develop STS sensibility in relation to the study of futures in technoscience-making processes. Moreover, the school is intended to act as an intellectually and socially stimulating environment. Drawing upon previous experience, the school is organised to foster informal learning opportunities, sharing of ideas, and developing networks among participants.
Participants will be granted two-months of free access to the research online platform TIPS (Technoscientific Issues in the Public Sphere, http://www.tipsproject.eu/tips/#/public/home). The TIPS research online platform allows users to implement automatic procedures for collecting, classifying, and analysing digital contents available on the web – mainly online news – in order to monitor science and technology topics and their evolution. The platform includes UK, US, French, Spanish, Russian and Latin-American daily newspapers, with more than 2.6 million documents.
How to apply
The application form is available here. After space for personal details, the form includes a place to upload a short scientific CV (maximum 2 pages) and a statement of interest (maximum 300 words), which should describe the applicant’s current research and its relevance to the aims of the summer school. Finally, a statement of purpose (maximum 300 words) is mandatory only for scholarship applications.
Applications must be submitted electronically to the Summer School Organizing Committee at: stsitaliasummerschool@gmail.com.
The application deadline is April 30th, 2022.
Schedule
− April 30th, 2022: Application deadline
− May 15th, 2022: Notification of acceptance and scholarship eligibility.
− June 15th, 2022: Registration deadline
Scientific and Organising Committee
- • Marc Audétat (University of Lausanne)
- • Simone Arnaldi (University of Trieste)
- • Silvia Casini (Aberdeen University)
- • Luca Chiapperino (University of Lausanne)
- • Stefano Crabu (University of Padova)
- • Paolo Giardullo (University of Padova)
- • Paolo Magaudda (University of Padova)
- • Barbara Morsello (University of Padova)
- • Federico Neresini (University of Padova)
- • Francesco Panese (University of Lausanne)
- • Annalisa Pelizza (University of Bologna)
- • Philippe Sormani (University of Lausanne)
Please do not hesitate to contact the Organising Committee via email at stsitaliasummerschool@gmail.com for any further questions regarding the school.
Antropologia dei microbi. Come la metagenomica sta riconfigurando l’umano e la salute di R. Raffaetà
I microbi, questi sconosciuti!
Già, perché è soltanto da poco più di una decina di anni gli scienziati sono in grado di studiare il mondo microbico e l’impatto che questi hanno sulla nostra salute e sull’ambiente. Con il libro “Antropologia dei Microbi” di Roberta Raffaetà ci racconta della sua esperienza di ricerca presso il CIBIO – Center for Integrative Biology di Trento illustrando come gli scienziati esplorano questo mondo microbico tra biologia, medicina e informatica, attraverso avanzate tecnologie di sequenziamento, big data e sistemi di intelligenza artificiale. In questo processo, l’autrice racconta, biologia, medicina, informatica e antropologia si riconfigurano e ciò porta a riconsiderare cosa significhi essere umani e il nostro ruolo in un mondo che esiste e persiste grazie, soprattutto, ai microbi. Questo ed altri aspetti saranno discussi il 30 settembre ore 17.00 presso il FISSPA dell’Università di Padova insieme a Paolo Magaudda, che introdurrà i lavori, Federico Neresini e Barbara Morsello che avranno modo di confrontarsi con l’autrice.
L’evento sarà aperto al pubblico in presenza e online previa prenotazione all’indirizzo mail: info@pastis-research.eu. Sarà necessario indicare nella mail nome, cognome e affiliazione (ove possibile) e se si preferisce assistere online oppure in presenza.
In conformità a quanto prescritto dai vigenti provvedimenti legislativi, fra cui in particolare il decreto legge 22 aprile 2021, n. 52, convertito, con modificazioni, dalla Legge 17 giugno 2021, n. 87, con le modifiche apportate dal decreto-legge 23 luglio 2021, n. 105, sono adottate le seguenti misure per il contrasto ed il contenimento della diffusione del COVID-19.
– L’accesso sarà consentito esclusivamente ai soggetti muniti di Certificazione verde COVID-19 (di cui all’art. 9 del decreto-legge 22 aprile 2021, n. 52, convertito, con modificazioni, dalla legge 17 giugno 2021, n. 87): la relativa verifica verrà effettuata secondo quanto previsto dall’art. 13 del D.P.C.M. 17 giugno 2021 “Disposizioni attuative dell’articolo 9, comma 10, del decreto-legge 22 aprile 2021, n. 52, recante “Misure urgenti per la graduale ripresa delle attività economiche e sociali nel rispetto delle esigenze di contenimento della diffusione dell’epidemia da COVID-19”.
The intricacies of power relations and digital technologies in organizational processes
E’ uscito sulla rivista Studi Organizzativi lo special issue “The intricacies of power relations and digital technologies in organizational processes” curato da Francesco Miele assieme ad Attila Bruni, Daniel Pittino e Lia Tirabeni. Il volume, ospitando sei contributi di autori italiani e internazionali, si propone di contribuire al superamento della visione determinista del rapporto tra cambiamento tecnologico e asimmetrie di potere sui luoghi di lavoro. Ponendosi all’incrocio tra studi organizzativi, sociologia del lavoro e science and technology studies, i lavori proposti riflettono sui complessi intrecci che coinvolgono le tecnologie e i loro usi emergenti, i processi organizzativi nel loro complesso e le dinamiche di potere e controllo nelle organizzazioni contemporanee.