Before Ruins foregrounds the specificity of cases. STS—and stsing e.V.—aims to foster collaborations between researchers, politicians, NGOs, archivists, museums, public servants, companies, practitioners, and other actors. The conference serves as a platform to engage with concrete matters of concern. It is designed to situate STS research explicitly within practical contexts, enabling participants to demonstrate the relevance of their research by putting it into action through specific cases rooted in the Ruhr Area. Rather than solely presenting abstract ideas in seminar rooms, detached from their contexts, participants will actively engage with real-world issues.
The concept of cases is central to the conference. Cases here refer to specific situations, problems, or sites that are rich in detail and complexity, such as abandoned industrial areas, ongoing remediation projects, contested infrastructure developments, or cybersecurity centres and SmartCity projects. Each case provides an opportunity for collective inquiry and learning from situated knowledge and local experts.
The approach to cases at the conference is flexible and varied. Participants can engage in suggested deep, site-specific explorations. Alternatively, they may propose their own empirical studies, linking diverse sites or issues through comparative or relational analyses—for example, examining industrial waste management practices across multiple locations or exploring community responses to environmental pollution.
The conference program will soon provide a call for contributions, inviting a wide range of engagements and studies.