Sociotechnical transformations participate in reshaping practices, institutions, networks, identities and environments, and in continually redefining the boundaries of what becomes thinkable, desirable and possible — alongside other social, political, economic and cultural dynamics. Generative artificial intelligence is reorganising work, education, knowledge production and relations of trust, while its material infrastructures intensify demands for energy, water and data. Ecological and energy transitions are reconfiguring territories, modes of production and multispecies relations; innovations in biomedicine and digital health are redefining bodies, care and responsibility; and data, mobility and security infrastructures are redistributing capacities to act across institutions and communities. These developments are entangled with shifting geopolitical orders, transforming diplomacy, warfare and peace negotiations. They are a combined result of – and contribute to reconfiguring – how collective problems are defined, how decisions are made and which alternatives can be imagined. At the same time, technoscientific change is increasingly presented as rapid, disruptive and inevitable; collectives seem constantly called upon to catch up with the next wave.

Under what conditions, through which assemblages and within which power relations can collectives shape sociotechnical trajectories? 

Surfing and navigating sociotechnical change should not be understood as mutually exclusive alternatives. Surfing may involve situated capacities to respond, adapt and improvise within processes already under way. Navigating refers to collective attempts to orient their directions, purposes and consequences, without implying full control. Collectives may move between, or simultaneously inhabit, these modes, while power asymmetries shape their unequal capacities to act and their vulnerabilities. 

This tension also concerns the STS community itself. Recent debates have highlighted the risk that STS may follow successive waves of innovation, adopting the vocabularies, categories and agendas of technoscientific actors. How can STS develop analytical tools and matters of concern that reveal relationships, scaling processes, politics and possibilities beyond those recognised in dominant technoscientific discourses?

The 11th STS Italia Conference invites contributions that explore these questions across the multiple sites in which sociotechnical trajectories are imagined, negotiated, contested and enacted: from environmental transitions to health, from education to work, from security to care, from human–machine relations to multispecies worlds, from the interoperability of data infrastructures to artificial intelligence development. 

The conference also invites reflection on the role and responsibilities of STS through dialogue with other research traditions and situated perspectives, including those from peripheral, marginalised and postcolonial contexts. How might these encounters reframe STS questions and practices, and expand collective capacities to imagine, negotiate and navigate more democratic, just and care-centred sociotechnical trajectories?