STS-CH Conference, Zurich, 10.-12.09.2025

Regenerative STS? The Repurposing of Critique in the Anthropocene Through Care, Craft, and Imagination

Panel Format: Roundtable discussions
Convenors: Lora Koycheva, Astrid Schwarz

Destruction and loss define our epoch of multiple nested -cenes—marked by biodiversity collapse, rising authoritarianism, and the erosion of the humanities and social sciences, increasingly dismissed as impractical. Yet destruction, (via Bataille or Schumpeter), is also framed as creative, with innovation seen as the necessary response to crisis. These dynamics and phenomena operate via processes of erasures and deletion - whether willful and accepted or as an unintended consequence; of unthinking and undoing followed by re-thinking and re-doing. They create voids, ruins and leakages that bring into sharp focus new ways of relating and new assemblages of people, things, species, and technologies. Contradictions abound—robots may mitigate climate change, yet training their LLMs consumes unsustainable resources, particularly water. Ongoing critiques remain largely ignored.

Against this backdrop, this roundtable discussion engages recent calls for STS and innovation to collaborate (Irwin 2023), asking, as a start: How can we understand survival as a form of holding together the uneasy juxtapositions in innovation between the erased, the residual, and the emergent in life in such ruins? How can STS and innovation – as conceptual and as practical fields – work towards regenerations of old forms of critical engagements and the generation of new forms of interventions? Can the already established debates in the context of ecotechnology, alliance technology or convivial technology contribute to this shift? Is the gardening language, widely used from geoengineering to urban agriculture, and closely interwoven with care conceptions and crafting techniques an essential part of this game?