Our keynote lineup for the upcoming event in Bochum is now confirmed, and will provide a rich framing for the case work on Thursday and papers presented on Friday.
Opening keynotes
The opening keynote of Before Ruins will be delivered by Anne Pasek from Trent University. Following her address, Uli Paetzel, the director of the Emscher Cooperative Lippe will present on socio‑ecological transitions in the Ruhr region.
Panel
Continuing the first day of the conference, after the opening and a break, we host an interdisciplinary and creative panel on the matters of “Before Ruins.” Phoebe Sengers (department of Science & Technology Studies and of Information Science, Cornell University), meets Sandra Maß (International History at Ruhr University Bochum) and Tina Asmussen (Early Modern Mining History at Ruhr University Bochum, and head of the mining history research department at the German Mining Museum). Expect a multimodal happening.
Closing keynote by Endre Dányi: The vintage, the mouldy and the tarnished: Valuing STS cases in the aftermath
On the third day, after plenty of case-ing and discussions, Endre Dányi (Sociology of Globalization, University of the Bundeswehr Munich) will close off the conference with a reflection on the collective journey titled The vintage, the mouldy and the tarnished: Valuing STS cases in the aftermath.
STS as an interdisciplinary field has been centred around empirically rich and conceptually generative case studies. For some time, such cases seemed ageless: accounts of bicycles, scallops, photocopy machines, the Zimbabwe bush pump, the garden of Versailles, genetically modified mice, matsutake mushrooms – to name just a few – have served as reliable orientation points for STS scholars across the globe. What would happen to our accounts if we developed a sensitivity to the ways cases age? What STS-world would we inhabit in what Hannah Landecker calls ‘the aftermath’? This closing talk will engage with these questions with the help of specific cases at the Before Ruins conference.