Linguists first used the term backchannel to refer to the spontaneous responses and signals that provide interactivity to what is only apparently a one-way communication. Social media users have adopted the term to refer to the unofficial, multi-directional online conversation that parallels formal academic exchange at a lecture or conference. The Backchannels blog is intended to have a similar relationship to scholarly discourse in STS. It provides an outlet for alternative-format scholarly communications, publishing shorter, timelier, media-rich communiques of interest to the global STS community. The editors welcome proposed contributions.
Apr 27 2026
In this post, Fisher and Schütz present key ideas from their 4S paper, “Documenting Environmental Procedural Injustice: Archival Tactics,” written for a panel convened by Kim Fortun entitled “Parsing Environmental Procedural Injustice: A Call for Collaboration.” Their contribution centers on addressing two questions: first, how procedural injustice takes shape across their Louisiana field sites; and second, how scholars might respond methodologically to the exclusion...
Apr 21 2026
This report reflects on the panel “Simondon and AI,” held at the 10th STS Italia Conference in Milan in June 2025. Across eleven presentations, the panel explored how Gilbert Simondon’s thought can help interrogate contemporary AI systems and contribute to the development of a technical culture adequate to our technological present.
Apr 20 2026
This post reports on the symposium “Cultures of Platformization in Africa,” held on March 13, 2026, which brought together scholars from across Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States to examine platformization through a range of perspectives and empirical contexts. It highlights how Africa’s digital landscape is rapidly expanding, with platforms playing an increasingly central role in economic and social life.
Apr 13 2026
Reflecting on the effects of lithium mining in Brazil, which results in the double degradation of local landscapes and their inhabitants, this article offers the concept of “the Common Body” to describe the interpenetration and reciprocal affectation between bodies.
Mar 30 2026
Biomimicry informs and expanding array of 'nature inspired' approaches to technological innovation, scientific knowledge production, and social organization. These range from biotechnologies operating at genomic levels, velcro closures inspired by plant burrs, to city planning systems modeled after the behavior of slime molds. Proponents envision a biomimetic world modeled after ecological systems and principles, alongside critiques marking the appropriation of biovalue and biocapital. 4S Backch...
Mar 16 2026
In this cross-listed post from Polyphony, Kristin D. Hussey and Hannah Star Rogers draw on Science and Technology Studies (STS) to think through how the ‘lab’ is being employed across the medical humanities. Connecting the intellectual space of the Medical Humanities’ emphasis on the clinic and STS approaches to the laboratory, the authors propose the productivity of further exchanges between these two fields around these complex concepts.
Mar 2 2026
As part of the research that considers killing as care, this essay discusses kindness as a way to approach the rich scholarship of multispecies care by framing it as resistance to acquiescing to the moral certainty of killing invasive species by negotiating cruelty and avowing ambiguity. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand, this piece outlines some of the ways to examine care and killing by analysing how and when kindness affects the work of killing for conservation.
Feb 23 2026
This post is a conversation between Irina Rafliana, Indrawan Prabaharyaka, and Casper Bruun Jensen on the challenges and possibilities of embryonic Indonesian STS.
Feb 16 2026
This post is the fourth in a four-part series on “Sex and Gender in Primate Worlds,” following up on a panel of the same name at the 4S 2025 convening in Seattle, Washington, held on September 6th, 2025. This post reflects on the conference paper, “Toward a Hybrid Primatology: Purity and Knowledge in the Anthropocene."
