Working groups

stsing e.V. seeks to strengthen the German STS community and increase its visibility. Many STS scholars are already organised in fluid or more stabilised groups such as “labs”, reading groups, or cross-institutional collaborations.

The format of the Working Group gives such groups more visibility and permeability to others while it also facilitates the creation of new connections between them. The format of the Working Group also initiates the creation of new groups and collaborations between members according to research interests, fields, methods, concepts, controversies, funding proposals, etc.

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• Plus, here is more information about our regional groups.

Access The Groups

Main Groups

Best Practices
During stsing's funding workshop in Kassel, a Code of Conduct was discussed as a central element of the new organisation. The group reflects the inclusivity of the process in advance. stsing e.V. generally strives for an open and inclusive way of working together, not least as a counterweight to the sometimes rigid structures in other academic institutions. This is about power relations. In 2020, the "code of conduct" group decided to tentatively rename itself as the "best practices" group. An online workshop on working ethics and research ethics took place in May 2022. We organised two other workshops in autumn 2022 during the general assembly and online and continued our engagement during a workshop at the STS-hub in Aachen concerning the entanglement of good working conditions and good research in March 2023. If you are interested in our work, we warmly invite you to write us a message via our mattermost channel or to our access point to join one of our next online meetings. All interested people are welcome to attend including those who have not attended any of the last meetings and regardless of member status.

Access point
• Markus Hoffmann (markus.hoffmann[at]tu-berlin.de), also for the Code of Conduct Drafting Initiative (CoCoDI)
Tech and Infrastructure
The Tech/IT/Infrastructure group assembles roughly 15 people and explores the various challenges and opportunities of digital communication and collaboration within the STS community. This includes mailing lists (internal and external, such as DESTS), the website and other tools that potentially facilitate collaboration. Our meetings are held using digital tools, live via e.g. jitsi or zoom and documented on etherpads, and prepared on Mattermost. We are strongly oriented towards Free Software and Open Access, and together with the consolidation of the organizational structure we want to build an infrastructure. This website and Mattermost are two examples of where we want to go.

Access points
• Stefan Laser (stefan.laser[at]ruhr-uni-bochum.de)
• Simon David Hirsbrunner (simon.hirsbrunner[at]uni-tuebingen.de)
STS-hub.de
Together with other German networks and associations in the field of Science and Technology Studies, this working group organizes a large STS event for March 2023, Aachen, called sts-hub.de. The idea of the event is to bring together all the various kinds of different German organizations, labs, networks and working groups that are somewhat (more or less closely) related to STS. Its working title is “Circulation”. Scholars involved in this group are: Stefan Böschen, Ingmar Lippert, Jan-Hendrik Passoth, Mareike Smolka, Jan-Felix Schrape, Cornelius Schubert, Jan-Peter Voß, Paula Helm, Stefan Laser, and  Lisa Wiedemann (alphabetical order) coordinated by Ingmar Lippert.

Access points
• Lisa Wiedemann (wiedemal[at]hsu-hh.de)
• Mareike Smolka (mareike.smolka[at]humtec.rwth-aachen.de)
Up to Date in STS: Early Career Reading Group
The working group "Up do Date in STS" is a forum for early career researchers (postdocs and docs) who are interested in reading recently published or yet unpublished cutting-edge STS books/book manuscripts and discussing them with the respective authors on a regular basis. Currently, we are a small group of postdocs working in different cities and fields. As such, we explicitly aim to keep track of monographs and edited volumes we consider key or even path-breaking contributions to STS beyond specific research communities. To do this, we collectively gather and decide upon literature suggestions in preparatory meetings ahead of the actual 'book club' sessions. The latter will take place at least once a term. We welcome everyone interested in joining our reading group to get in touch with us:

Access points
• Patrick Bieler: patrick.bieler [at] hu-berlin.de
• Ruzana Liburkina: liburkina [at] soz.uni-frankfurt.de
Marine STS
Our goals The anthropogenic pressure on coastal areas, rising seas, overfishing and the marine biodiversity loss impact not only marine life but society as well. We bring together specialists from the marine humanities with STS scholars to discuss STS methodologies within our respective research fields. In the long run, we aim to include natural scientists, technicians and engineers working on marine realms as well. As a working group within stsing e.V., we want to establish an open space where different epistemic cultures meet. For the creation of nature-society-based solutions considering trade-offs between, notably economic and ecological interests, we discuss how to combine STS-marine social sciences with critical sociologies of knowledge, or with practical ideas for the creation of nature-society-based solutions. A core strategic goal concerns the strengthening of marine social science on diverse academic and institutional levels in Germany and beyond.

Our doings Within stsing e.V. we hope to create inspiring entanglements between marine research communities which are mostly separated. We started in early summer 2022 with an online reading group and discussed “classical”, as well as contemporary papers at the intersection of marine social and cultural sciences and STS. In the upcoming winter term, we invite our members to discuss current projects and papers, and/or published papers they are working on. We invite senior STS scholars such as Stefan Helmreich or Caspar Bruun Jensen to discuss their fresh works on marine realms. Currently, we prepare a proposal for funds for networking, summer schools and workshops. Our work is situated in the current Ocean Decade (2021-2030), declared by the United Nations. We think that STS, still rather invisible within the Decade’s activities, can contribute more explicitly to those, and enhance STS’s translational approach within, through and beyond them.

Who we are Tanja Bogusz (Center for Sustainable Society Research, Hamburg University), Ramona Hägele (German Institute of Development and Sustainability / IDOS, Bonn) and Laura McAdam-Otto (Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, Goethe University Frankfurt), have founded the reading group in early summer 2022. Besides stsing e.V., we are members of the Strategy Group “Marine Social and Cultural Sciences” (co-speaker: Tanja Bogusz) at the German Consortium for Marine Sciences / KDM).

Access points
• Tanja Bogusz (tanja.bogusz[at]uni-hamburg.de) • Laura McAdam-Otto (otto[at]em.uni-frankfurt.de)
Elections Group
The elections group oversees and organizes the independent and accountable process leading to nomination and election of the stsing board members. The current stsing board was elected in 2021 for two years, following §12 of our Satzung statutes. It will be possible to nominate candidates for the next board until the General Assembly on May 5, 2023. If you want to nominate someone or yourself, please indicate so to elections@stsing.org.

Access points
• Laura Kocksch, Ingmar Lippert, and Julie Mewes (elections[at]stsing.org)

Dormant

Funding Proposals
The working group ‘funding proposals’ consists of four active members: Sandra Calkins (FU Berlin), Simon Egbert (TU Berlin), Kathrin Eitel (Goethe Universität Frankfurt) and Tanja Schneider (Universität St. Gallen). Our aim is to identify and apply for funding opportunities (including conference funding, network funding etc.) that support efforts to initiate and sustain the network. To date, we have received support from the EASST fund towards organising an inaugural conference for establishing a network. Currently, we are developing a proposal to be submitted towards the DFG-network funding scheme. We already successfully checked with DFG representatives, if our approach is suitable for this scheme. In the proposal, our aim is to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of STS research, which tends to be transverse to the otherwise usual mono-disciplinary oriented professional societies. Therefore, stsing will be presented as an option to implement a transdisciplinary scientific network, whose denominator is the common interest in the study of science, technology and society. We are still looking for collaborators. Please get in touch if you would like to join us!
Access points
• Simon Egbert (simon.egbert[at]uni-bielefeld.de)
• Kathrin Eitel (eitel[at]em.uni-frankfurt.de)
Funding Structures
Are the German research funding structures adequate to the needs of STS scholars, i.e. to interdisciplinary projects, or to projects being theoretical but still doing empirical studies? This WG is in contact with the DFG to initiate discussions of these and other issues. In February 2021 we sent a letter to the DFG on this matter and expect to have a meeting with the core Fachkollegien towards the end of 2021.

Access points
• Estrid Sørensen (estrid.sorensen[at]rub.de)

Archive

Formal Ways of Peer-Support
How do we practice STSING as a supportive environment?
Mapping of the STS Landscape in Germany
Info: The work of this group is not continued in the tech group. This group explores the width of STS research in Germany and has met multiple times digitally.
Aims:
- mapping both organizations and individuals
- preparing a form to contribute new profiles, and of a map and a filter function to show the data under certain criteria.
Where we are now:
We are looking for someone new to take this group in hand. We believe the topic and aims to be important for STSing but are not able to engage enough at the current point in time.
War Solidarity
stsing has created a working group to forge meaningful relations with scientists affected by war, to organise local support and facilitate secure research data infrastructures and access to university resources for affected researchers. In addition, we call for support to address academia’s own dependency on precarious resources. We invite everyone interested to participate in the group; stsing provides infrastructural support, and membership is not required. Please also check our statement.

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