Technoscience for Good:

To address what might count as technoscience for good – and for whom – we need to question our methodologies and concepts, interrogate our epistemological and ethical frameworks, and redesign our technoscientific landscapes, institutions, infrastructures, and practices.

In recent decades, STS has emphasised the complex and at times conflicting entanglement of the various social, ethical, and political aspects involved in the making of technoscience in more-than-human worlds and naturecultures. Furthermore, as a field we have become increasingly willing to critique the intersectional harms that technoscientific developments can create for marginalised social groups as well as society at large. STS scholars are starting to confront questions of what ‘good’ certain socio-technical developments are serving, who gets to define what counts as ‘good’, for whom technoscientific developments might be ‘good’ (or not), how actors and institutions have historically worked towards defining and achieving the ‘good’, and how such a goal might be collectively accomplished, upheld, and contested.

To address the issue of what ‘good’ technoscience can or should be, we need to break down old and emerging boundaries as well as open up new cross-disciplinary and trans-cultural debates. Adjacent academic fields and disciplines, for example, have undergone a similar shift towards thinking about the relationship between ethics, care, epistemology, and materiality. Philosophers of science and technology have started to engage with questions of epistemic (in)justice as well as care and repair; historians have examined how technoscientific actors have sought to achieve overtly social and political goals; and designers and developers are increasingly acknowledging the sociomaterial impacts of their practices and their consequences for fairness, equality, diversity, and justice.

STS Italia seeks to provide space for a renewed engagement across disciplines in order to rethink the enactment of ‘good’ technoscience.