Our name stands for Capacious Relations—a space where we work on scalable good relations and situated best practices. With this composite name, we seek to inherit the older iterations of this stsing working area (what used to be the Working Group ‘Best practices (incl Code of Conduct)’, Oct 2020-July 2024), but refract them via intersectional, queer-feminist and insurgent (materialist) questions, concepts and practices.
We maintain and extend the double focus that has characterized WG initiatives of past years, especially in relation to hashtag activisms, against a) precarious employment conditions and the consolidation of widespread academic job market insecurity, and b) against the abuses of power, discrimination and de facto exclusion in scientific work. We use our mattermost channel to critically monitor and actively organize in the struggles against a+b’s combined chronic effects on either individual biographies, or on the deepening inequalities facing academic minorities. We see the WG as identifying and problematizing the various degrees of exposure to harm and suffering at the intersections of power and authority in research cultures, in our vicinity and beyond. Members are active at regional and European advocacy and protest, which postulate non-extractivist (sustainable and fair to both people and the planet) research culture reforms.
Some of us first met and collaborated at another mattermost channel, called Accessibility and Awareness. Building on the experience from the 2024 inaugural conference of stsing, we continue to share and gather information and resources around practical questions, i.e., A&A; alternative conferencing; collectivity- and justice-oriented STS praxis. We also work toward addressing failures and shortcomings of previous policies, in ways that further build and scale good relations across the academy.
If you want to become member of this collaborative space, please contact our access point.

Access point
• Michelle Pfeifer (they/them) (michelle.pfeifer1[at]tu-dresden.de)

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
• Jan Dittrich (jan.dittrich[at]uni-siegen.de)

After the successful first iteration of the 2023 STS-Hub in Aachen ("Circulations"), this working group is organizing the second STS-Hub at HU Berlin, coming to you March 11-14, 2025. This is again a collaboration of stsing with other German networks and associations in the field of Science and Technology Studies. 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. The 2025 Hub's theme is “Diffracting the Critical”. Find more information here: https://sts-hub.de/25/
Scholars involved in this group are: Rossella Alba, Gretchen Bakke, Petra Beck, Milena Bister, Michaela Büsse, Ignacio Farías, Tülin Fidan, Anke Gründel, Desirée Hetzel, Sandra Jasper, Elisabeth Luggauer, Claudia Mareis, Brett Mommersteeg, Tahani Nadim, Martin Reinhart, Nona Schulte-Römer, and Robert Stock (alphabetical order).

Access points
• Ignacio Farías (fariasig[at]hu-berlin.de)
• Michaela Büsse (michaela.buesse[at]tu-dresden.de)

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]tum.de
• Yana Boeva: yana.boeva[at]sowi.uni-stuttgart.de
• Ruzana Liburkina: liburkina[at]soz.uni-frankfurt.de

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. Visit our homepage for more information.

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).
Program for the winter term 2024/25

Access points
• Tanja Bogusz (tanja.bogusz[at]uni-hamburg.de)
• Laura McAdam-Otto (otto[at]em.uni-frankfurt.de)

Welcome to the collaborative space of 4R, short for Replication, Relevance, Reflexivity, Reform. This space extends the discussions that emerged from the "epistemic leakages" panel in March 2024, convened by Alexander Schniedermann and Melina Antonakaki (at Leakage, the inaugural conference of stsing at TU Dresden), with the aim of networking and developing collaborations at the intersections of the four key STS themes that make up the name of our working group.

The WG currently comprises researchers and humanities scholars engaged in empirical and/or engaged research:
• on the replication crisis and/or other sites of 'epistemic activisms’;
• on the practices and challenges of 'self-correction' in specific fields of research, including tensions in detecting or investigating research misconduct;
• in relation to broader epistemic disputes in collaborative knowledge production;
• and, last but not least, in exploring how the scandalisation and standardisation of scientific reporting shift epistemic priorities and shape the who, the what and the why in knowledge governance. (This is not an exhaustive list)

In a nutshell our WG values reflect
• openness to different approaches across STS/science studies/Philosophy of science/innovation studies, potentially other;
• a mood for synergetic encounters across our foci and interests, without flattening differences or seeking to unite us all under one theory;
• an absolute commitment to voluntary, reciprocal, non-extractive, collegial participation. We consider this a safe space and encourage all its participants to communicate at the chat (and beyond) respectfully, appreciatively and constructively.
Everyone is welcome to join and pitch in the efforts. Anyone can find the channel by inserting "WG 4R" at the channel search in mattermost, which is the place where we interact.

Access points
• Alexander Schniedermann (alexander.schniedermann[at]gmail.com)
• Melina Antonakaki (melina.antonakaki[at]tum.de)

Together with other German networks and associations in the field of Science and Technology Studies, this working group organized a large STS event for March 2023, Aachen, called sts-hub.de. The idea of the event was 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. The title of the STS-Hub was “Circulations”. Scholars involved in this group were: 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.

(Now the CaRe-WG)
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.