Accepted papers
The following papers were accepted to be presented at the Before Ruins conference
- Olivia Frigo-Charles: Inherited Ruins and The Politics of Holding On
- Anna Clot-Garrell: From Future-Takings to Future-Makings: Rethinking Failure and Infrastructural Legacies in a Coal-Mining Region of the Catalan Pyrenees
- Christine Richter: Reading the signage infrastructure in a post-mining landscape: remembered, transitory, and vulnerable spaces
- Daniel Wolter and Jürgen Viet Anh Höpfel: Sensing Socialist Ruins Underground: Everyday Encounters and Ecologies of Perception in Bitterfeld-Wolfen
- Arran Ridley: Methods Before Ruins: Digital Research from the Global South in Times of Infrastructural Breakdown
- Justin Armstrong: Ambient Anthropology: towards a gooey practice
- Kim Kullman: Thoughtlessness: ruinous concepts, conceptual ruins
- Alexander Wentland: Haunted High-Tech: The Robotron Cafeteria and the Making of Ruins in Dresden’s Microchip Boom
- Frank Rochow: Destruction, Decay, Demolition: Three Modes of Ruination
- Young Su Park: Ruins of Crises: Historicity, Temporality and Landscape of Crises in Ethiopia and Kiribati
- Frauke Rohden: Searching for bias in and with topic modelling – an analysis of Swedish AI news
- Jeanne Féaux de la Croix: Ocean Energy Wrecks: community archiving technological ruins as a response to environmental justice issues
- Claire Waffel: Collapsing Impossible Future
- Peter Hermans: The Walled Garden and the Surround: socio-technic imaginaries of the Zeitenwende
- Julian Purrmann: Legal Personhood in a Ruinous Landscape: The Mar Menor and the struggle for regeneration.
- Önder Özengi: Knowledge as a Relation: Diverse Economies of Knowledge-Making in Art Production
- Thomas Berker: Thriving in the Ruins of Digital Interactivity: Bottom-Up Digital Infrastructuring and Analog Revivals
- Antti Kurko: The Haunting Presence of Waste in a Digitalized Society
- Marco Paladines: In the middle of tropical plants
- Dirk Scheer and Laura Müller: From Stress to Strategy: conceptualizing Urban Infrastructure Transformation under Climate Pressure
- Takashi Hikasa: From Ethical Principles to Policy Infrastructure:ELSI and the Governance of Automated Driving
- Ruth Schmidt: Prefigurative Play
- Jana Kerima Stolzer: Post-industrial wastelands in the Ruhr Valley and the narrative of a new environment. Storytelling for a new form of coexistence from the perspective of the new wild ones?
- Maxime Le Calvé: Modelling the Critical Zone: Neurosurgery and the Limits of the Digital Twin
- Selin Erdogan: Accomplices Before Ruins: Figures of Giving After the End of the Future
- Lora Koycheva: In Defense of Techno-optimism: Ruinous Hope for Humans, Robots, and the Environment Through Innovation and STS Critique
Working groups
In addition, the following working groups will meet
- "Capacious Relations" (CaRe) hosted by Jannis Steinke, Mitch Pfeiffer, Kristiane Fehrs and Melpomeni Antonakaki
- "Multiplying Data" hosted by Fabian Pittroff
Cases vs paper presentations
Note that these paper presentations complement the main feature of the event: engaging with the cases. Everyone who takes part in the conference is encouraged to join a case as an active participant. Paper presentations remain a vital and legitimate way to showcase and discuss your work in scholarly gatherings. The paper presentations will happen on Friday 27 March, the day after the case interaction has been completed.
The Before Ruins call for papers was
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.