See you in Stockholm!

Johnson, Jim [Latour, Bruno]. (1988) “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35, no. 3: 298–310. https://doi.org/10.2307/800624.

Barad, K. (1998) "Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality". Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 10: 2 87-128.

Suchman, L. (2023). The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI. Big Data & Society, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231206794

Optional Reading

Suchman, L. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Chapter 13 and 15

Callon, Michel, and John Law. “Agency and the Hybrid Collectif.” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 2 (1995): 481–507.

Winner, Langdon (1980) Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus 109(1):121-136 

Haraway, Donna. 1987. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Australian Feminist Studies 2 (4): 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.1987.9961538.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1990. “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions.” The Sociological Review 38 (1 Supplement): 26–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1990.tb03347.x.

18:00 Dinner at Pelikan, Blekingegatan 40 https://pelikan.se/ (covered by WASP-HS)

Please email email graduate.school@wasp-hs.org with your choice of meal.

Points: 3 HP

When/where: 20-22 May, 2026 (3 days, lunch-to-lunch), in at Södertörn University in Stockholm

Teachers: Francis Lee and Ericka Johnson

Participant limit: 30

Examination: Implosion presentation day three (Please prepare this ahead of time, using your research as viewed through the readings). 

Interested? Send an email to francis@francislee.org or ericka.johnson@liu.se or describing what you are studying and how far along you are.

Register for the course here:  https://wasp-hs.org/16021-2/

13.00-14:00: Session 1: Presentation round and a brief history of STS (Ericka & Francis)

14.15-15:00: Session 2: Ethnographies of digital systems (Francis)

15:00-15:30 Coffee & discussion

15:30-17:00 Session 3: Lecture and discussion, AI artefacts have politics (Ericka)

18:00 Dinner at Pelikan

Thu, 21 May, 2026

8:30-10:30 Session 4: Card catalogue exercis and lecture, Infrastructures and Classification (Francis & Ericka)

10:30-13:00 Session 5: Study visit, including free lunch at the study visit

13:00-13:30 Reflection on the study visit

13:30-15:00 Session 6a: Black box exercise and lecture, The making of realities (Ericka & Francis)

15:00-15:30 Coffee

15:30-17:00 Session 7: Relational agency (Francis & Ericka)

Free evening (in case you haven’t finished your implosion…)

Fri, 22 May, 2026

8:30-12:00 Session 8 (Examination): Present your implosion for the group

Angwin, Julia, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner. 2016. “Machine Bias: There’s Software Used across the Country to Predict Future Criminals. And It’s Biased against Blacks.” ProPublica. 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing.

Lee, Francis. “The Practices and Politics of Machine Learning: A Field Guide for Analyzing Artificial Intelligence.” AI & SOCIETY 40, no. 8 (2025): 6135–48. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02430-7.

Sumpter, David. “Impossibly Unbiased.” In Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives, 59–70. London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018. 

Vinge, S & Fjaestad, M (2025) Introduction: From Algocracy to democracy in Algorithmic Rule Akademikerförbundet SSR

2. Look over the whole schedule, and send us an email if anything is unclear.

3. Download the readings. The readings are available in the dropbox. See link to the right. The password is "STS2026".

4. Start reading! The course is based on your readings.

5. Make a presentation of yourself and add it to the right.

6. Choose your preferences for the dinner on day 1, and email graduate.school@wasp-hs.org (at the latest on 15 May)

7. Show up in Stockholm and explore with us! 

Cockburn, Cynthia. “The Material of Male Power.” Feminist Review, no. 9 (1981): 41–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/1394914.

Crawford, Kate. Atlas of Ai: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Chapters 1, 3, & 4. 

Kronblad, C (2025) Algorithmic injustice - Gothenburg’s miscoded school placement algorithm in Algorithmic Rule Akademikerförbundet SSR

Optional Reading

Hicks, Mar (2019) Hacking the CIS-tem. Transgender Citizens and the Early Digital State. IEEE Anals of the History of Computing https://marhicks.com/writing.html 

Benjamin, R. 2019 Coded Exposure, Chapter 3 in Race After Technology Polity (part 1, pgs. 97-113). 

Collins, Harry M., and Trevor Pinch, eds. “A New Window on the Universe: The Non-Detection of Gravitational Radiation.” In The Golem: What You Should Know About Science, 2nd ed., 91–108. Canto Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107295612.010.

Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru (2018). “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81:1-15.

Optional Reading

D’Ignazio & Klein 2019 What gets counted counts’ Chapter 4 in Data Feminism. MIT Press. Tillgängligt här: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4660/Data-Feminism

This exercise has been inspired by Dumit, J (2018) Writing the Implosion Cultural Anthropology 29(2) 344-362 http://doingsts.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/dumit-implosion.pdf)

Step 1: Identify an object you want to implode – a very concrete one – from your research project.

Step 2: Implode it: Ask questions about “how is the world in ‘it’ and how is ‘it’ in the world” (see Dumit (2018) 351-4 for inspiration, if you want). Think through questions about different dimensions of its entanglement – labour, professional, epistemological, material, technological, contextual, political, economic, textual, biological, historical, educational,  mythological, symbolic… (if you want to read more on implosion, see*)

Step 3: Map your answers – literally. Make a visual diagram that you can show to the class when you present this (feel free to use paper and coloured pens, or presentation software, or take inspiration from this article: Crawford, K. and V. Joler (2018) Anatomy of an AI system, (https://anatomyof.ai)

Step 4: Think about the areas you have mapped. Then think about the spaces between them. Reflect in writing and for the class discussion on how (methodologically) you would be able to say something about the spaces that are now blank. What is missing from your study, and how would you address it?

Step 5: Present it during the last session of the course.

* on implosion: see: Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™. Feminism and Technoscience (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p.12.

You can find me here:

- https://francislee.org

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Intro + apartheid chapter

Lee, F., Hajisharig, S., Johnson, E. (2005). The ontological politics of synthetic data: Normalities, outliers, and intersectional hallucinations. Big Data & Society. 12(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251318289 

D’Ignazio & Klein 2019 The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves’ Chapter 6 in Data Feminism. Tillgängligt här: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4660/Data-Feminism

Optional Reading

M’chark, Amade, Shramm, K. and Skinner, D. (2013) Topologies of Race: Doing territory, population and identity in Europe. ST& HV 39(4):468-487

The password is "STS2026". 

Difficulties? Email francis@francislee.org.

Latour, Bruno. “The ‘Pédofil’ of Boa Vista.” Common Knowledge 4, no. 1 (1995): 144–87.

Goodwin, Charles. 1994. Professional Vision. American Anthropologist 96(3):606-633

You can find me here: https://www.gu.se/en/about/find-staff/julianorman

More about my research:

- https://fahimsikder.com

More about me here:

https://www.kth.se/profile/mccarren

My research interests lie in STS, AI, and autonomous mobility, with a particular focus on the testing and evaluation of autonomous systems. My project, Testing Autonomy in Motion, examines how end users and beta testers actively assess and shape the perceived capabilities of autonomous vehicles in real traffic environments. The central focus is on how autonomy itself is produced and defined in situated interaction, and how this situated construction of autonomy configures the social acceptance of autonomous systems in practice.

For this course, I expect to deepen my theoretical and methodological engagement with STS approaches to AI, and to critically explore how entanglements between human and non-human actors can be studied in empirical settings such as mobility and infrastructure.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruijun-shi

You can find more about my work here: https://sveakiesewetter.com/

My project is currently having a title of "Smuggling Power: Fattening Agency in Human-AI Collaborative Design Practices" but as I am just a year in I am not sure if I will stick with that title or go in another direction entirely. Currently, I am working to articulate research on 4 different cases two of which come from my studio practice (www.studioalight.com): (1) "Vattenjagen" a MTHD approach and exhibition piece that creates an experience of communicating, collaborating with a lake (Vombsjön and Bolmen thusfar) and (2) "You've Been Rugged" (the locust of my implosion). Then also, the two non-studio AI + Interaction Design + Feminist perspectives cases are (3) The Genie Action Chatbot for an internal gender inclusion project (GENIE) here at Chalmers and (4) a case with Grok AI and auditing the legal agreements and mapping consent across the platform. Plus some others projects/cases that are brewing...

In case you need an icebreaker, I love tennis and cinema, and my favourite book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Looking forward to meeting everyone!

Contactinfo: https://ratio.se/medarbetare/georgios-sideras

4S

Nordic STS Journal

Science Technology Human Values

Societies for the Social Studies of Science

Social Studies Science

Catalyst

NORA

Body + Society

https://tapuya.org/

STS weekly

S+TS

BioSocieties

Valuation Studies

BD+S

AI and Society