stsing: Doing STS In, Through And Beyond the German Academic System

Abstract

The recently constituted association stsing offers scholars a new platform to “do” STS in and through Germany (therefore the wording stsing). Specific about this platform is its creative and open understanding of collaboration on the one hand and critical reflection of national, international, institutional, and intergenerational challenges of STS research on the other. Germany’s specific funding and institutional structure is of central importance to stsing. At the same time, stsing is responding to the internationally integrated practices of STS. It addresses the frictions between local bureaucracies and hierarchies as well as global doings and (self-)understandings of STS. We briefly unfold the (hi)story of stsing: a process of negotiating imaginaries, institutional settings, conflicts and mutual recognition. The challenge is to open spaces and account for the heterogeneous people and disciplines engaged with the ideas, methodologies and politics of STS. stsing experiments with configuring infrastructures and organisational policies to support transnationally and interdisciplinarily oriented STS research practice. This experimentation works across generations and encounters troubles between and within generations of STS.