1st Swiss–Belgian STS Summer School – Thickening the World: Modes of Inquiry, Experimentation, and Arts of Noticing, Lausanne, 25–27 August 2026
STS-CH, the STS Lab at the University of Lausanne, and the Spiral Lab at the University of Liège are delighted to announce the first Swiss-Belgian STS Summer School. This event will bring together early-career researchers in Science and Technology Studies (STS) for three days of intensive exchange, collaborative learning, and writing support.
Caught between dystopian futures, looming threats of collapse, and the mirage of quick technological fixes, our present moment is marked by socioecological urgency. Attempts to manage these crises often lead to reductive gestures. In public health, “environmental exposures” reduce living environments to a handful of measurable chemical substances. In digital governance, ethical concerns are reduced to a handful of statistical fairness metrics. Such simplifications produce what Isabelle Stengers and Didier Debaise describe as a “thinning of the world”, the backdrop against which we need to ground different scientific practices.
Yet how can STS research rise to this task ? How can we write and account in ways that do not betray the abundance of what we encounter ? In ways that counter dispair by showing how diverse worlds endure, intersect, and recompose themselves ? This summer school will examine how our research practices can contribute to opening up possibilities, making the world 'thicker' — more complex, meaningful and interconnected — and consider how to account for this 'thickness' in our writing.
Invited speakers
- Stine Willum Adrian (Arctic University of Norway)
- Marion Schulze (University of Basel)
- Alexis Zimmer (University of Liège)
Inscription
Please submit the following documents by 1 April 2026 via the online platform:
A summary of your research or PhD project, including fieldwork, methodology, and problematization (500-750 words).
Veranstaltungsort
Kosten
