2026 marks 40 years since the founding of the Centre for Science Studies (CSS) at Lancaster University. Much has changed over these 40 years, within Lancaster University, within STS, and within the higher education context more generally. Using ‘temporalities’ as our guiding construct, we take the 40th anniversary of CSS as an opportunity to explore pasts, presents and futures in/of STS and the local, national and global shifts that shape our field and our work.
Over the course of the year, we will be hosting three online seminars, followed by a concluding workshop. The seminars will each focus on a topic connected to one of our research themes: politics & practices of knowledge production, data cultures & quantification, and climate, energy & environment. The final event will bring together discussions from across the preceding events, to consider the futures, pasts, and presents of STS at Lancaster and beyond. Further details of the events will be announced in due course.
Time, in its various guises, is an analytic that has been central to much STS work. Exposing the historicity of knowledge, technologies and practices has been a powerful tool to show that ‘things could be otherwise’. Yet, pasts continue to exert effects in their ‘hauntings’ of the present, and in how, for example, colonial legacies, operating both through archival practices and technological possibilities, continue to reshape and restructure the dynamics of racism into the future. In the present, practices of repair, maintenance, and care preserve some worlds while others are neglected, left to decay. And a focus on preparedness, precaution, anticipation, and foresight has brought future-making, as a technoscientific project, into view.
All these invocations of time convey ideas about pace, rhythms or transitions that have been used to reconceptualise collective relationships and entanglements with process and change, ranging from how ‘slow emergencies’ (e.g. of climate change) foreclose the capacity to become otherwise, to the monetization of past and futures in high finance, to the exploitation of temporal simultaneities and probabilities in quantum computing.
This series invites participants to explore how temporalities figures in their work, as well as to consider the temporalities in and of STS itself. How are STS pasts being remade in the present? Which possible futures of STS do we wish to amplify? How do our STS concepts and methods need to adapt to the reconfiguring temporalities of the present?
If you are interested in receiving further information about these events, as they are announced. Please join our mailing list.
Image [titled ‘portrait of ourself (myself being as a time of understanding-with others)’] by Stan Bonnar, 2019. Used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.
