The 2026 stsing e.V. conference “Before Ruins” invites submissions for paper presentations until December 15th, 2025 AoE (Anywhere on Earth time).
Before ruins is a state of the situated body, turned around from lingering in afterthoughts, attending to post-industrialism, post-humanism, post-ANT, after progress, after critique and other followings. Thus turned, we face a damaged and broken world. Infrastructures cracking, assemblages crumbling into ruins, disturbed connections, dried out or flooded landscapes.
Standing before ruins we must wonder what’s next, what to expect, to anticipate and predict, speculate the unforeseeable and surprising, what may be formed, flourish and come along. We see the catastrophes looming, and assemblages dissolving. Acting through capitalist ruins may evoke neurosis, hectic planning and seeking of solutions, authority, control and technical fixes, warfare, and domination. Catastrophic times may paralyse and generate neglect and ignorance. It is times of polarisation, hate, and perplexity.
Yet, standing before ruins you may also hold your breath. It is the moment of the potential, the virtual, the possible: What now? Go ahead? Break down? Gather up? Before the ruins is now. It is an occasion of solastalgia, to reach out to touch, it pulls ahead, enables to act, to notice, to think, to care, to hope, to attend, respond, and change what is dawning. To come together.
Standing before ruins requires action and offers a trope to make STS response-able, to acknowledge the other and our own situated contributions to the world, a world in ruins before us. It is time to laugh, to enjoy, to celebrate what we have, what we are. Together. While standing before the ruins pulls towards the upcoming, it also folds time and juxtaposes the imminent with what was before.
How was life before the ruins? How was renewable energy before fossil fuels? How did we use to live with floods? Before Ruins introduces a temporal vertigo, it encourages STS to pull what was before ruins into the moment of being before ruins. What is STS, not after progress, but before de-growth, not post-human but before multi-species? When we stand before ruins as STS scholars, what are we facing? What do we do? We must not solve or fix the coming of ends, but practice ways to endure, to shape conviviality and togetherness.
We invite paper contributions that explore and expand the theme Before Ruins through empirical, conceptual, artistic, and speculative approaches. The conference welcomes scholars, students, artists, activists, designers, and practitioners working within or alongside Science and Technology Studies (STS) to engage with the temporal, affective, and material conditions of being before ruins. Possible areas of engagement include (but are not limited to):
- Temporalities of crisis, endurance, and renewal
- Extractivism, post-industrial landscapes, and environmental ruins
- Knowledge practices that anticipate, slow down, or recompose collapse
- Health infrastructures, medical technologies, and practices of care
- Agricultural infrastructures, food systems, and agro-ecological transformations
- Multispecies entanglements in times of environmental degradation
- Infrastructures in decay, transition, or repair
- Data, digital and algorithmic infrastructures
- Ethical and political imaginaries of care, maintenance, repair and togetherness
- If you have any questions, feel free to reach out via e-mail: stsing2026@ruhr-uni-bochum.de.
stsing Working Groups
If you want to meet as an stsing working group during the conference, please apply for a slot via the form below.
Format
Paper submissions will include title, abstract up to 300 words, and author(s) details: name, affiliation, short bio.
Submissions should be in English.
Submit by December 15th via this form http://survey.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/index.php/833476
Notification of acceptance in January 2026.
Cases vs paper presentations
Note that these paper presentations complement the main feature of the event: engaging with cases (see the Call for case participation). Everyone who takes part in the conference is encouraged to join a case (as a participant). The paper presentations will happen on Friday 27 March, the day after the case interaction has been completed. We also decided to include paper presentations because they remain a vital and legitimate way to showcase and discuss your work in scholarly gatherings.