Papers

Papers

Accepted papers

Paper presentations remain a vital and legitimate way to showcase and discuss work in scholarly gatherings, and complement the main feature of the conference, engaging with the cases. The following papers were accepted to be presented on Friday 27. in six panels.

Session 1 Session 2
Before Repair Architecture Time
Artful Conviviality Tinkering with Futures
Knowing and Being Post-industrial Hopes

The full paper abstracts, and the original call for papers can be found below.

Session 1

Session 1 has three parallel tracks.

Before Repair

Chaired by Katrin Amelang.

Artful Conviviality

Chaired by Claudia Göbel.

Knowing and Being

Chairing tbd.

Session 2

Session 2 has three parallel tracks.

Architecture Time

Chaired by Lina Franken.

Tinkering with Futures

Chaired by Veit Braun.

Post-Industrial Hopes

Chaired by Julie Mewes.

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

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Abstracts

Before Repair

Sensing Socialist Ruins Underground: Everyday Encounters and Ecologies of Perception in Bitterfeld-Wolfen

Daniel Wolter and Jürgen Viet Anh Höpfel

Bitterfeld-Wolfen is not just another late-industrial, post socialist town shaped by dense historical overlappings; it is an environmental ruin underground, technically contained from communities and ecosystems above. A paradigmatic Just Transition area, Bitterfeld-Wolfen embodies a palimpsest of historical industrialism, socio-cultural ruptures of the reunification, contemporary pressures of remediation and processes of structural change. These layers do not simply coexist: they entangle in everyday socio-spatial and embodied practices within local communities underlain by one of the world's largest groundwater contaminations. Drawing on medium-term ethnographic fieldwork, we show how geochemical instabilities in regionally contaminated aquifers lead to scientific and technical uncertainty, reflected in discontinued research projects, paradigm shifts, resignation, and hope. Combining STS, media studies and human geography, we understand underground contamination as situated knowledge on the surface perceived via technical remediation practices and residents’ affective, sensory engagements with their environment. Contamination is not merely measured; it is made — as a technoscientific object produced through sensors, monitorings, and maps; instrumented through pumps and protection walls; encountered as an everyday phenomenon through smells, obtrusive infrastructures, or stories and specters of past contamination. While scientific representations mirror the heterogeneous distribution of chemicals underground, residents above experience them as ghostly afterlives of socialist industrialism haunting the neighbourhood. We conceptualise Bitterfeld-Wolfen’s groundwater contamination as a sensor media milieu in which sciences, infrastructure, and the socio-spatial entwine; a tension between the becoming-environmental of media and the becoming-media of the environment and the spatial-affective conditions of everyday life. Following Andrea Ballestero, we show how contamination not only alters aquifers but also pollutes the ways in which people make sense of them.This perspective highlights how ruined environments unfold materially and affectively, and how sustainable futures may emerge when contamination is approached not only as a perpetual threat but as an iterative practice of remediation, negotiation, and community endurance.

Ruins of Crises: Historicity, Temporality and Landscape of Crises in Ethiopia and Kiribati

Young Su Park

Landscape of Ethiopia has been devastated by ruins of modernization experiments: colonial land exploitation, failed international development projects, and forced resettlement and forced villagization. This ethnographic history of ruins illuminates how historical memories of violent modernization efforts have affected the living environments and bodily practices of the socially marginalized people in the face of humanitarian and climate crises in Ethiopia. The inhumane tempo of the socialist revolution and national development left indelible scars on the geographies, bodies, and minds in the form of deforestation, reproductive behaviors, and historical trauma. This study suggests the psychological and political ramifications of intergenerational trauma and historical memories of ethnic violence, with implications for implementing a migrant-friendly healthcare project for internally displaced populations under a compounded crisis of conflicts, desertification, and climate change in Ethiopia. In Kiribati, environmental ruins of carbon extractivism and nuclear experiments, an ethnographic field study investigated health impacts of climate change, vulnerable groups, and climate resilience-building options in an outer island in Kiribati. The impact of climate crisis has become a lived experience and everyday reality for the community rather than an abstract perception of a distant future. People in Kiribati, the frontline of climate change, primarily experience climate change as 'loss'. This includes the loss of home, land, trees, fresh ground water, staple food, safe fishing niche, predictable seasons, and hope for the livelihood of future generations. I-Kiribati people had close ties with ocean, land, and living beings they belong to. The persistent colonial rationality of nuclear tests in Christmas Island provides a historical vantage point to understand current impact of climate crisis. It questions public health approaches based on the notions of climate risk perception and resilience. Instead of ‘migration with dignity,’ local perspectives provide the rationale for the whole-of-islands approach to climate-resilient health system strengthening in Kiribati.

The Haunting Presence of Waste in a Digitalized Society

Antti Kurko

Waste, as a sociospatial and material thing, constantly forces us to take it into account. As biological, cultural and societal beings, it is an integral part of human nature. Waste tends to stay visible even if it is constantly tried to take out of sight by hiding or getting rid of it. It haunts us, reminds itself by its disturbing existence and makes all attempts to live zero-waste life run into sand. Even digitalization does not provide us haven from unavoidable encounters with waste. When we move our lives more into the digital environments, waste follows us there like a shadow in forms of spam, AI slop, disorder, unneeded data, viruses, old screenshots and huge number of needless photos. In dominant approaches of data gathering and data economy, data has been understanded as valuable, eternal, and immaterial resource. But what if data would be observed through the questions of materiality, distraction, excess, uselessness and disorder? In the field of social sciences, waste has been used as a lens to explore society from different angles. What would the lens of digital waste reveal about datafied society and data-driven infrastructures? The condition of digital waste leans strongly into other materialities through infrastructural entanglements and thus it cannot be unattached from other forms of waste such as mining waste or e-waste. Digital waste actively avoids dichotomic separations of material/immaterial and physical/virtual, which underlines its nature as hybrid and ubiquitous object. Rather than viewing digital waste as purely material or immaterial phenomena, I suggest that it should be understood as a mixture of cultural elements, matter and meanings, human and non-human, and where its relation to society is as important as its relation to nature.

Ocean Energy Wrecks: community archiving technological ruins as a response to environmental justice issues

Jeanne Féaux de la Croix

As part of a new ‚blue’ resource frontier, ocean energy technologies are being heavily promoted. The push for new high-tech blue economies is producing many experimental sites of wave and tidal technology deployment at sea. Based on ethnographic research in Canada, this paper asks: how are oceans and coasts affected by new tidal energy projects? What environmental justice questions need to be answered? How could collaborative archiving of high-tech ‚wrecks‘ with community museums for instance, foster generative and response-able practices of futuring? The Canadian province of Nova Scotia claims the most powerful tides in the world, and has invested heavily in developing tidal turbine stations. Though many agree that the idea is promising, the decision-making process around investment, benefit-sharing and environmental impact has been fraught, resulting in several (literally) sunk or washed-up ocean energy machines. How do these wrecks affect the coasts they are left behind on? The task of this paper is to first, document the effects of these ruins on seabeds, wildlife, artisanal fishing, as well as political ramifications e.g. of future funding. What role do these wrecks play in sustainable energy stories, variously shared and disputed by island communities struggling for stable energy supplies, lobster fishing conflicts, First Nations land and sea stewards, and the push- and pull around decarbonizing Canada? What relation do these tidal energy wrecks bear to other wreckage, such as aquaculture debris, dead whales or salvage from historic ship-wrecks? Second, this transdisciplinary research asks how tidal energy wrecks are forgotten and remembered on the coasts concerned. What role could community archiving with a local museum and artists’ residence play in fostering the kinds of coastal resilience people on site strive for? More generally, what can we learn from contemporary wrecks - in historical perspective - as we live with ‚blue’ and other extractivist ruins?

Artful Conviviality

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?

Jana Kerima Stolzer

Anyone traveling through the Ruhr Valley by rail will pass innumerable mining ruins, disused railway tracks and industrial ruins that have not yet been adapted for a new purpose. These are the remains of an infrastructure that was created for industrialization and, above all, mining. These post-industrial landscapes are characterised by devastation and irreversible changes, and it is not uncommon for their soil to be saturated with heavy metals, which poses significant challenges for future use. Have these places already become “non-places” or even “the end of the landscape” (Andermann)? In the Ruhr Valley in particular, the decision to end mining has prompted a response to the changes in the landscape. Projects such as the Internationale Bauausstellung Emscherpark (1989-99) have created new narratives for the region, reconciling industrial nature and renaturation with the brutal exploitation of the region's resources (Eiringhaus) As landscapes are the social construction of nature and the environment (Greider and Garkovich), the question arises as to whether the term 'industrial nature' can be introduced as a new form of identification. Alternatively, must the living beings that inhabit these non-places convey their history? Summer lilacs, black locusts, and Japanese knotweed are intruders in the native flora, but they contribute to the “new ecological world order” (Hobbs) by remediating poisoned soils and paving the way for secondary vegetation. New alliances of organisms are forming on industrial wastelands as a result of human intervention. The absence of any species endemic to these regions prompts the conceptualisation of an alternative form of coexistence. Simultaneously, non-human protagonists on the industrial wasteland embody the history of industrialization, globalization, and colonization. The question is whether artistic projects have the capability of making these kinds of stories audible, and of establishing a fresh narrative for post-industrial regions, one which can address the concerns of those who live in these regions. Since 2010, projects along the Emscherkunstweg have sought to conceptualise this new nature. The research examines a number of artworks, including the project "Waiting for the River" by Observatorium and "Das Parkhotel Inside/Outside" by Andreas Strauss, and poses the question of whether flora and fauna can act as the protagonists in the creation of a new landscape narrative.

Accomplices Before Ruins: Figures of Giving After the End of the Future

Selin Erdogan

This paper departs from an affective present shaped by the erosion of narratives of progress - the after progress of a society that persistently describes itself as being in crisis. Within this temporal shift, established semantics of love such as redemption, wholeness or well-being lose their plausibility, insofar as their efficacy remains bound to temporal structures in which the future could still be semantically stabilised as a resolvable promise. From this point of departure, the paper asks how intimate interpersonal relations must be re-figured before ruins. The theoretical point of reference are figures of giving, as they contingently relate time and sociality and shape structures of semantic plausibility. In order to trace their transformation, the paper proceeds in three steps: (1) It reconstructs the affective present of before ruins through shifts in societal self-descriptions of progress and crisis. This present is explained by shifts in plausibilised semantics that generate contexts of meaning capable of producing resonance and continuity.   (2) Poetic interventions materialise this engagement on affective and corporeal levels and point to the significance of figures of giving for the relational organisation of intimacy. Exemplary semantic analyses of figures of giving such as sacrifice or care reveal losses of plausibility in their temporal dimension, insofar as reciprocity, deferral or transcendence lose their evidentiary force as orienting offers of meaning. (3) From this engagement emerges the semantics of complicit love as a relational practice that reconfigures time and giving: foregrounded here are the endurance of temporal uncertainty, mutual entanglement and shared vulnerability. Theoretically, this paper is oriented toward a systems-theoretical understanding of society that conceives semantic developments as recursively stabilised structures of plausibility and evidence, and extends semantic analysis in a poststructural sense to include its material and affective dimensions. Poetic writing, in the sense of écriture féminine, thus functions as modus cognitionis capable of granting access to those modes of social world-relations that resist conceptual fixation.

Collapsing Impossible Future

Claire Waffel

This contribution focuses on a site, whose future was told in ruins. Exploring the interplay of material and immaterial phenomena it asks how to envision possible and hopeful futures amidst growing environmental degradation. In sites that have been categorised as lost due to climate change, how can we explore subtle and not so subtle changes in order to reveal the future as responsive to the present moment. This contribution will focus on coastal habitats, which are likely to undergo radical transformations in the future. As the shoreline will increasingly move land-inwards, communities, multispecies habitats, settlements and histories will become threatened. In a dialogue between new materialist thought and artistic strategies, the paper presents different tools of perception, explores questions around the politics of representation and links between imaginaries and responsibility. It will investigate how images (still and moving) might contribute to deepening our awareness and knowledge of ecological relations and the existing connections between beings and their surroundings. Water in this contribution trickles through materialities, temporalities and ways of narrating the future in order to reveal permeabilities in thought and of materiality.

Knowledge as a Relation: Diverse Economies of Knowledge-Making in Art Production

Önder Özengi

The paper discusses the objectification and subjectification of knowledge and knowledge-making practices. Drawing on the case studies I conducted on an artwork by artist and activist Oliver Ressler on climate activists in Europe, I argue for the relationality of the diverse factors and agents of production, where the knowledge appears on the one hand as a thing, as data, information, or commodity, etc., in which it is alienated from the relations that produce it and are produced by it, and on the other hand, where the knowledge emerges as relations, where it connects production agents and factors each other through and by virtue of its production. By thinking with methodologies, tools, and concepts such as object-subject reversal, ANT, and feminist material-semiotics that STS scholars suggest, the paper analyzes explicitly the way in which artistic knowledge is produced, exchanged, distributed, and consumed in the production process, in relation to its material aspects. Therefore, the examination involves the production relations of knowledge-making where labor, capital, and means of production exist through, by way of, and with regard to each other and thus co-constitute one another. The paper also challenges the generally conceived figure of the artist as a self-contained and independent main agent in art production, as well as the concept of artistic labor, which encompasses the abstract, individualized, and immaterial creative potential of art production agents. I argue that artists are a partial person and their labor power is not constituted by one person’s activity, but through diverse relations of knowledge economies in which capitalist and non-capitalist aspects appear interdependently.

Knowing and Being

From Ethical Principles to Policy Infrastructure: ELSI and the Governance of Automated Driving

Takashi Hikasa

This paper reconceptualizes Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues (ELSI) in emerging technologies not as abstract normative principles, but as policy infrastructure that enables and stabilizes socio-technical transitions. Focusing on automated driving, the paper analyzes the international standard ISO 39003 (Guidance on safety ethical considerations for autonomous vehicles), published in 2023, as site where ethical reasoning is translated into governance mechanisms for implementation. Automated driving involves a heterogeneous set of stakeholders, including engineers, manufacturers, governments, legal experts, ethicists, and citizens. While ELSI frameworks are widely invoked in policy discourse, their practical integration into technology development and decision-making processes remains challenging. Differences in disciplinary languages, institutional responsibilities, and temporal horizons often make it unclear who should address ethical questions, at what stage, and through which arrangements. As a result, ethics risks being treated either as an external constraint or as an after-the-fact justification. Through an STS-informed analysis of ISO 39003, this paper examines how ethical concepts—such as human dignity, fairness, and responsibility—are operationalized through Driving Action Policies that connect philosophical principles to system design and operational practices. Rather than prescribing specific outcomes, the standard functions as a mediating framework that aligns global ethical discourses with local regulatory, industrial, and infrastructural contexts. In addition, the paper draws on the author’s involvement in establishing an interdisciplinary Automated Driving Ethics Guideline Study Group, which brings together 10 experts from industry, academia. This initiative illustrates both the difficulties of cross-sectoral collaboration and the conditions under which ELSI can function as a shared reference point. By framing ELSI as policy infrastructure, this paper contributes to STS discussions on governance before large-scale breakdowns occur. It argues that ELSI should be understood not as a brake on innovation, but as a socio-technical resource that enables coordination, anticipatory governance, and responsible innovation in emerging technologies.

Searching for bias in and with topic modelling – an analysis of Swedish AI news

Frauke Rohden

As large language models have become widely accessible, renewed public interest in artificial intelligence (AI) coincides with developments in digital research tools using natural language processing. However, as processing steps are delegated to algorithms, human decision-making can be obscured and black-boxed, creating challenges for a reflexive use of tools in social science contexts. It is vital to examine the processes and effects of increasingly delegating research tasks to digital tools. This paper presents my reflections on working with topic modelling to explore the media discussion about AI in Sweden. I used BERTopic to explore a collection of Swedish newspaper articles about AI published between 2014 and 2024. Being interested in AI bias and processes of marginalization, I pay particular attention to issues of visibility and absence of different themes in my analysis. I contrast the findings of the topic modelling process with a manual search for and qualitative reading of news articles that discuss AI bias. Inspired by John Law’s work on mess in social science research, I use topic modelling of Swedish AI news as a case to discuss how delegated decisions and layered representations blur an important distinction of that which is found to be absent and that which is made to be absent by the methods practice. Themes such as discussions about AI bias might be present in the dataset but not occur frequently enough for the topic model to pick up. The way that topic modelling thus makes marginal topics absent might not only limit attention to such topics but actively contribute to producing a narrower and less controversial image of what is discussed in Swedish AI news. This highlights the importance of investigating, questioning, and reflecting upon the agency of tools such as BERTopic and their role in social science research contexts.

Ambient Anthropology: towards a gooey practice

Justin Armstrong

In this work, I present a field guide to a liminal dreamworld where an academic discipline decades in the making begins to unwind and untether itself. With the ideas of composers John Cage and Brian Eno as my starting point, I suggest a practical mode for rethinking and redefining the ruining boundaries of anthropological practice. Cage’s 4’ 33” composition and Eno’s album Music for Airports serve as my ambient touchstones and departures as I propose a softening of the active view of anthropology, a blurring of its edges, and the formation of a permeable, sticky membrane, allowing for a beautifully decayed approach to cultural research. Along with this softening, comes new forms of radical cultural acceptance, democratic attunements, and a deep embrace of everything, anything, and nothing–a kind of non-representational (Thrift 2007) anthropology. I believe that we have already arrived at the tipping point, the halflife of anthropology wherein decay is certain and inevitable. The modes of being and seeing in the world have become thin and brittle, and decay has set in.    In practice, this project might take the form similar to generative music (a notion championed by Eno), or the site-specific readymade of Cage’s 4’ 33” (what would an ethnographic version of this composition look like?). I ask how we can allow decay to create feral subjects and objects within the practice. How can the work of the anthropologist move across these wobbly borders and broken lines of decaying epistemologies? How can we move toward a gooier understanding of culture as the anthropocene pulls us further into oblivion? I do not have definitive answers, but I want to propose a sort of toolkit for navigating and reworking the decay of an ontology of culture. In these new realms, ideas bleed and flow, they die and are reborn. From inevitable decay comes something perfectly misshapen and eminently productive.

Modelling the Critical Zone: Neurosurgery and the Limits of the Digital Twin

Maxime Le Calvé

Tractographic brain maps promise certainty: vivid bundles of coloured streamlines showing surgeons exactly where not to cut. Yet the neurosurgeons I have worked with for six years treat these images with measured suspicion (cf. Duffau 2014; Valdes et al. 2023; Le Calvé 2025). The maps are too precise, they say. Too assertive. They interfere with the embodied sense of how living tissue will shift and adapt under the knife. This paper asks what happens when algorithmic certainty meets surgical contingency. Localisation became neuroscience's dominant epistemic strategy by excluding what resisted formalisation (Star 1989). That exclusion now extends into AI-assisted planning tools, producing what Messeri and Crockett (2024) call "illusions of understanding." When models fail, surgeons absorb the blame—occupying what Elish (2019) terms the "moral crumple zone" of opaque algorithmic systems. But the surgeons are not simply refusing technology. They are practising something else: a mode of working I call "sketchy logic" (Le Calvé forthcoming). Sketchy logic names three entangled capacities—graphic iteration that remains open to revision, an epistemic stance that integrates doubt, and sustained boundary work between the model's promise and the gesture's demand. This extends what Pickering (2025) describes as acting with the world into the domain of surgical planning. At the Speculative Realities Lab (Charité/HU Berlin), we are building ethnographic experiments that enact sketchy logic: 3D drawing protocols and immersive brain navigators that foreground provisionality and risk. These experiments serve as methods for thinking surgical planning otherwise—and as test cases for transporting concepts from speculative medical anthropology into environmental humanities contexts. Before cognitive ruins, we need not better predictions but better ways of dwelling in the critical zone.

Architecture Time

The Walled Garden and the Surround: socio-technic imaginaries of the Zeitenwende

Peter Hermans

Against the background of the Zeitenwende in Germany, this lecture-performance traces the uses of the boomerang analogy in regard of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, 2013) and applies them to the context of the Zeitenwende to investigate the socio-technical imaginaries at stake in the present moment and how they can be apprehended as paths beyond the normative, linear use (Ahmed, 2019). How can the boomerang analogy (Césaire, 1950; Graham, 2010) to designate the dynamic in which technologies and their socio-political imaginaries first developed for use in the (colonial) periphery come to be applied in the center, be apprehended to think of the socio-technical imaginaries and affective infrastructures of the Zeitenwende? Beyond the industrial societal change, with industrial production shifting from cars to armament, drones and the shift in funding for dual-use research and development, this lecture-performance argues to think affective infrastructures mutually dependent with material infrastructures and the narratives to navigate and resist. In this perspective, the Zeitenwende is a sociotechnological imaginary for the logistics of mediating societal transformation. Amongst the dominating narratives of a war economy in support of Ukraine, an unexpected turn of post-industrial strukturwandel or an opportunistic industrial reconvergence of faltering car industry, there are many more paths to navigate. This lecture invites to see the mapped trajectories as well as the roads not (yet) throdden, detours and re-orientations possible from the infrastructures and skills developed. Where will all those garbaged drone propellors go? Inspired by current protests and historical workers' transformation initiatives, such as the Lucas Plan (1976) and the activist Schwerter zu Pflugschären, the lecture sees the contingency plan not as a tool of fatalistic world building but as a prefiguration of what kind of research, what kind of infrastructural pedagogies are needed now to extend solidarity in those futures.  

Haunted High-Tech: The Robotron Cafeteria and the Making of Ruins in Dresden’s Microchip Boom

Alexander Wentland

Progress needs clean timelines, but buildings remember. Focusing on Dresden’s Robotron cafeteria, I analyze how the afterlife of a socialist industrial site unsettles contemporary high-tech futures and makes “before ruins” a struggle over endurance, care, and erasure. The building is a leftover of the GDR computing industry and, simultaneously, a troublemaker for Dresden’s present-day high-tech narrative. It condenses the city’s struggle to narrate continuity while pursuing globalized chip-futures, revealing how “progress” is haunted by cancelled modernities and unprocessed histories. Empirically, the analysis draws on qualitative fieldwork and interviews with policy actors, planners, industry figures, and cultural practitioners. Conceptually, I bring conceptions of non-linear, dislocated temporality (Derrida, Fisher) into conversation with STS work on ruination and imperial/industrial debris (Stoler, Mah). I show how the Robotron cafeteria becomes a site where actors contest whether the socialist technological past should be treated as dead infrastructure, valuable heritage, or inconvenient noise. The paper advances three arguments. First, ruination appears as an administrative achievement: procedural delay, non-protection, and redevelopment logics operate as techniques for producing “natural” obsolescence. Second, cultural and civic actors counter this with practices of re-animation such as temporary uses, exhibitions, and storytelling, through which the building becomes an affective device for public reflection on Dresden’s politically charged relationship to its past(s) and how those are carried into the city’s imagination of a desirable future. Third, these struggles over material artifacts and architectural aesthetics hint at a temporal vertigo: high-tech futures are narrated as organic continuation, nostalgic reconstructions dream of pre-modern glory, while the persistence of “the pasts not taken” linger as unfulfilled promises. The Robotron cafeteria illuminates how high-tech renewal projects can depend on selective ruination - and how alternative modes of endurance are staged in the cracks.

From Stress to Strategy: conceptualizing Urban Infrastructure Transformation under Climate Pressure

Dirk Scheer and Laura Müller

Infrastructures play a central role in the sustainable development of cities as they provide “connectivity and key resources such as water or energy, which sustain critical functions for society” (OECD 2024: 12). Urban infrastructures are complex systems combining technological, social, political, economic and cultural factors. For instance, urban water supply relies on technological infrastructure but also serves key societal functions such as potable water provision, firefighting, health purposes, or aesthetic values in public spaces. Climate pressures on urban infrastructures like flooding or heat stress necessitate additional capacities for water retention, increased demand for cooling or in the worst case even lead to infrastructure damage or failure. But what are key challenges of climate pressure on urban infrastructures? Just to name a few: infrastructure implementation is resource- and time-consuming; it is path dependent with an already built infrastructure determining heavily future scope of action; redesign, retrofitting and new construction is open-heart surgery; public acceptance for long-term construction periods is challenging; embedding of new infrastructure meets space constraints; new issues such as criticality and safety need consideration; infrastructure climate pressure means both creeping and acute threats at the same time). Thus, addressing climate-related urban infrastructure challenges requires an interdisciplinary research perspective across disciplines like traffic planning, engineering, landscaping and planning, system science, social sciences and governance research. Within this paper, we elaborate a holistic view on urban infrastructures under climate pressure from a governance and transformation perspective. The key results (i) conceptualize urban infrastructure and climate pressure, (ii) identify enabling and limiting topic areas and specify their reference points to three identified conceptual approaches (i.e. long-term governance, multiple level perspective, change management), and (iii) assign transformation topic areas along an infrastructure transformation model. The focus on the complete transformation process of urban infrastructures allows for a better understanding and shaping of municipal governance to advance a climate resilient and climate neutral infrastructure transformation.

Destruction, Decay, Demolition: Three Modes of Ruination

Frank Rochow

“Before ruins” evokes the question about the state of the ruin before it becomes a ruin. This turns our attention to the process of ruination. Any object created by humans instantly starts to decay already at the moment when human will forces matter into a shape it would never acquire naturally. This counts for machines just as for art pieces or architecture. Maintenance and repairs are necessary measures to counter the effects of this process of ruination. It is not necessary to trace this process back to the entropic nature of the universe. Instead, usage, weathering, physical and chemical reactions and human activity may be named as main causes for eventual dysfunctionality. The different appearances of ruination processes can be subsumed under the three terms demolition, decay and destruction. This paper develops a matrix of ruination containing the main characteristics of these terms with their different effects of individuals and societies. Furthermore, it argues that the field of architectural conservation can help developing general societal approaches towards different modes of overall phenomena of ruination.

Tinkering with Futures

Prefigurative Play

Ruth Schmidt

Before the ruins – whether in light of their announcement or of living in their midst– the question of “And then?” painfully coincides with the diagnosis that we have lost a collective capacity for imagination. “I will hardly surprise you by naming the crisis of social imagination as the problem of our time,” as game developer Carina Erdmann puts it (Erdmann 2023). She proposes that we reflect on something she calls “prefigurative play.” Erdmann conceives of prefigurative play as a collective practice that draws on techniques of role-playing and collective world-building in order to generate shared social speculations in what she calls ‘sensuous simulations‘. Prefigurative play reaches toward what is to come, rehearsing certain scenarios without attempting to predict probable futures, but instead seeking to open up the possibility of making other futures collectively imaginable in the first place. “Even if we can theorize a form of commons, how would we emotionally ready ourselves for it? I think this is what [prefigurative play] can provide. It offers a possibility to test our abilities in that sense, to extend our social muscles in various forms” (ibd). My contribution takes Erdmann’s concept as starting point in order to reconsider the role of play in its entanglement with imagination and simulation. In what ways can prefigurative play open up other spaces of social imagination, enable other social imaginaries? How can it, as ‘sensuous simulations’, arrive at different kinds of prognoses than computer-based simulations? Does it produce knowledge? But also: on what (Enlightenment-emancipatory) understanding of play does it rest, what does it carry with it as unspoken inheritance? Even if prefigurative play won’t save us the ruins, it is nevertheless worth taking seriously – and enjoying in play. Erdmann, Carina 2023: „This is an invitation to conspire“, Šum. Journal for contemporary art criticism and theory, 21.

In the middle of tropical plants

Marco Paladines

From 2010, David Restrepo Morales offers a bonsai-workshop called The Good Times in Caldas, Colombia. In a musical release, you can hear Restrepo Morales’ voice in off stating that “good times are always there, they never left, they will never be to come. Even amidst darkness they stay there…”. This unexpected temporality of good times -constant presence, lack of past and future- is then complemented with a comparison to plants: “Good times are reconciliation, polar balance, like plants themselves, universal reconcilers. They gather the cosmos right in front of us, synthesize it, and transform it; they transform the force, even the force that the moon exerts […] and pulls them.” In trying to find out a guiding line for my field research in the Chocoan tropical forest these lines acquire another sense: to some extent, plants are always there, pre- and posthuman, yet extremely sensitive to (non)human action. Their presence in the forest is not only spatially-thick but also temporally. Their formidable web of relations includes other plants, soils, human and non-human animals, fungi, bacteria, viruses, and distant cosmical entities such as the moon and the sun. All of which are both conditions of possibility and potential threats. As synthesis-in-transformation on the Chocó region, and throughout the diverse obscurities of prehistorical and colonial times, the “plantationocene”, and the “capitalocene”, plants -like good times in Restropo Morales’ account- never left, and will never be to come, but have always been there, both fragile and resilient. My ethnographical research follows the notion that these situated agroecological transformations, based on practices of mutual-noticing, poetically acting-with, and multi-species remembering-imagining are able to inform political ecologies of renewal, care, and biosocial justice. I specially focus on the entangled life lines of Cacao, Bananas, Coca and both native and secondary tropical forest, within the agroecological association “Las Tangaras” in Gualea, Ecuador.  

Thriving in the Ruins of Digital Interactivity: Bottom-Up Digital Infrastructuring and Analog Revivals

Thomas Berker

The ruins examined in this paper are created by digital platform capitalism. More specifically, I interrogate how users might thrive within the ruins of digital interactivity, where participation and expression is no longer part of a project of liberation and empowerment but enforced as "engagement" either directly (e.g., in precarious forms of gig labor or through dark design patterns that exploit peer pressure) or indirectly via comprehensive collection of user activity data. Moving beyond nostalgia for pre-internet or early internet culture, I analyze two emergent technopolitical movements that actively engage digitalization’s potentials while being aware of its ruinous state. First, I document a strand of bottom-up infrastructuring initiatives that are oriented toward conviviality and post-growth critique. Terms like permacomputing, the fediverse, data cooperatives, selfhosting, data cooperatives, collapse informatics, and salvage computing describe overlapping and complementary grassroots initiatives at the nexus of technology, politics, and everyday life. Second, I explore analog-digital hybridization - a deliberate "analog revival" (e.g., vinyl records, dumb phones) not as heroic rejection but as strategic refusal of specific digital efficiencies and frictions combined with a re-interpreting of analog practices.   Through paired case studies - one from each movement- I argue that both approaches forge new pathways for agency amid platform capitalism’s ruins. The paper concludes by theorizing their synergies and tensions, positioning them as responses to the exhaustion of techno-utopianism and blueprints for resilient digital futures.  

Post-Industrial Hopes

From Future-Takings to Future-Makings: Rethinking Failure and Infrastructural Legacies in a Coal-Mining Region of the Catalan Pyrenees

Anna Clot-Garrell

Damaged landscapes left by abandoned industrial activities are proliferating, becoming key sites for empirical explorations of livability under conditions of ecosocial crisis. These terrains vividly exemplify the material legacies of extractivist modernity through their persistent and hazardous materialities, while also offering possibilities for experimenting with modes of living amidst ruination. This paper examines how imaginaries of failure attached to such broken landscapes shape everyday experiences and future possibilities, attending to ways of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016). Based on ethnographic research in the high Berguedà—once among Spain’s significant coal-producing regions—this paper traces a landscape shaped by more than a century of extraction. Infrastructures for mining and energy production spread across the valley, consolidating a promised future that has since unraveled. Today, excavated quarries, dumping sites, eroded pipelines, contaminated soil, and a rusting power station mark the landscape. Alongside these remnants, forests regenerate, and nonhuman life slowly reoccupies sites of exhaustion, producing shifting, at times uneasy, forms of coexistence and transformation. Building on insights from the field, the paper argues that such material remnants should not be understood solely as sites of rupture or loss, but also as fertile grounds for learning how to respond to the socioecological crisis—transforming failures embodied by fossil infrastructures into spaces for critical and societal engagement that unsettle simplistic binaries of success and failure (Halberstam, 2011; Mica et al., 2023; Tsing, 2015). These failures not only reveal scientific–technical fissures and territorial inequalities but also create room to resignify constrained “future-takings” into alternative forms of “future-making” grounded in enduring materialities. By showing how infrastructural ruination can stir collective agency to care for, dispute, and reinterpret industrial legacies, the paper approaches living before ruins as a condition demanding response-ability: cultivating capacities to notice, attend, and reimagine possibilities that neither forgive nor romanticize failure.

In Defense of Techno-optimism: Ruinous Hope for Humans, Robots, and the Environment Through Innovation and STS Critique

Lora Koycheva

Ruins characterize the contemporary moment - a time of multiple nested -cenes -  through the existential destruction of species and through biodiversity loss; through the foreclosing of communities of difference in broader political terms as globally we are observing a push for authoritarianism; and through the institutional destruction of the humanities and social sciences within organizational contexts, increasingly driven by ideological remits diminishing these fields broader contributions to society as impractical. And yet in turn, destruction in its creative, via Bataille or Schumpeter, variant is also celebrated: Innovation is being broadly agreed upon as the appropriate response to the dangers and challenges that such destruction brings with itself. These dynamics and phenomena operate via processes 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 configurations of people, things, species, and technologies. These spaces are not without their contradictions and paradoxes. For example, robots can be deployed for climate change mitigation but at the same time, the LLMs they can train on consume unjustifiable quantities of natural resources (and water in particular). The critique coming from both the environmental sciences and the environmental humanities has been unequivocal and resounding, yet to little, if any, effect. Against this backdrop, this paper adopts a devil´s advocate posture to explore what a defense of techno-optimism for the coming entanglements of humans, robots, and environments may entail, and what capacities – both practical, conceptual, and methodological – it affords STS. Through a consideration of already established debates in the context of ecotechnology, alliance technology and convivial technology, it explores what ruinous hope may mean in the present sociotechnical and geopolitical moment and for strenghtening the role of STS in innovation.

Reading the signage infrastructure in a post-mining landscape: remembered, transitory, and vulnerable spaces

Christine Richter

The obvious and to some visitors most spectacular current features of the post-mining landscape south of Leipzig (Germany) are its lakes and large solar panel fields. Rather unspectacular is its emerging infrastructure of signage: signs to regulate traffic and movement and signs to inform of the areas’ lost places and overthrown geological sediments. While many infrastructures are invisible and submerged (Star and Ruhleder, 1996), signage infrastructure is meant to be visible. It is the spatial order produced by signage infrastructure which becomes invisible and taken for granted. This is what we mostly deal with – in research or in daily life – when we read signage infrastructure: the interplay between the visible signs, on one hand, and the spatial orderings it produces, on the other. In other words, we read directions and locations, come to know dangerous places, to differentiate between permitted and non-permitted areas, learn about historical and cultural sights and so forth. As such signage orders our movement, structures space as well as our temporal readings of space. But it does more than that. Upon second sight, the signage infrastructure signifies a landscape that has been demolished and recomposed. Reading the signs during a “cyclogeography” in 2025 following the tradition of Debord’s “dérive” (Day, 2015), I developed a sense of a landscape of shifting grounds and remaining instabilities, a region of frequently mended paths, as a physical pendant to the bricolage of the life trajectories of many residents in the region. Based on photographs, interview excerpts, and notes from my field diary, I interpret the signage in the landscape as a patchwork of remembered, transitory, and vulnerable space. Paradoxically, the signage infrastructure in this post-mining landscape, which is meant to provide spatial order and navigational safety, also reinforces a sense of place characterized by loss and doubt.

Inherited Ruins and The Politics of Holding On

Olivia Frigo-Charles

This paper explores how residents in Llandyl (anonymised), a deindustrialised village in South Wales closely connected to the steelworks in Port Talbot, experience and interpret a succession of overlapping crises. Economic precarity, the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, environmental threats, and the persistent fear of industrial closure are not perceived as isolated events. Instead, they are folded into a longer trajectory of decline, collective injury, and structural abandonment. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, I show how contemporary crises are understood through a lens shaped by post-memory (Hirsch, 2008) and intergenerational transmission of trauma (Alexander et al., 2010; Walkerdine, 2010): stories of the miners’ strikes, industrial accidents, and the political ruptures of the 1980s continue to frame what is felt to be at stake today. Standing ‘before ruins’, residents navigate the present through historical sensibilities: anticipating loss, distrust, and future collapse, yet holding on to classed forms of endurance learned across generations. Within this landscape, forms of collective care, maintenance and togetherness become crucial. Informal support networks, community groups, neighbourly practices, and everyday acts of solidarity and humour operate as means for getting by. These practices stabilise social life when formal institutions recede. While such practices are often celebrated as resilience, the paper critically interrogates the political conditions under which they emerge. In Llandyl, care-driven forms of endurance can become entangled with neoliberal responsibilisation (Joseph, 2013), shifting the burden of survival onto already stretched communities (van Dyk & Haubner, 2021). The analysis asks where the tipping point lies: when care becomes exhaustion (Graefe, 2019) and when togetherness is no longer sufficient to withstand the ongoing production of ruins. Bibliography Alexander, J. C., Giesen, B., Smelser, N. J., Sztompka, P., & Eyerman, R. (2010). Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. University of California Press. Graefe, S. (2019). Resilienz im Krisenkapitalismus: Wider das Lob der Anpassungsfähigkeit (1st edn). transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839443392 Hirsch, M. (2008). The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today, 29(1), 103–128. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2007-019 Joseph, J. (2013). Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: A governmentality approach. Resilience, 1(1), 38–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.765741 van Dyk, S., & Haubner, T. (2021). Community-Kapitalismus. Hamburger Edition. Walkerdine, V. (2010). Communal Beingness and Affect: An Exploration of Trauma in an Ex-industrial Community. Body & Society, 16(1), 91–116. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X09354127

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The Before Ruins call for papers

The call for papers ran in late 2025, and was the following.

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.

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