Doing STS Now: Of Hackers and Angels in Technoscience

The following editorial is a collaborative endeavor undertaken by Early Career Researchers (ECRs) located in different nations and academic institutions spanning Australia, India, Singapore, and the USA. We were four of the twenty-six participants who met in Singapore in June 2024 for the four-day “STS School” sponsored by Science, Technology, & Human Values. The organizers invited us to compose the School's closing plenary, where we spoke on new concepts encountered, perspectives challenged and affirmed, and inspiration for developing future STS projects.

Drawing together our plenary reflections in conversation with the editors of ST&HV, we want to collectively reflect on the following question: How can we practice STS now, to foster the more just worlds that we want inside and outside the academy? We seek to address this question because STS has long been invested in studying interlinked ontological and epistemic practices (e.g., Barad 2007; Knorr Cetina 1999) and their role in knowledge production (e.g., Haraway 1991; Harding 1986; Visvanathan 2007). Drawing upon these legacies, we shift from focusing on practices in and through technoscientific phenomena, to using “practices” as a lens to analyze and advocate for STS as a form of critique.

In what follows, we offer “hacking” and “inverting the angel trick” as two modes of critique that can establish the relation of STS to its objects and subjects, as well as to other disciplines in novel and more rigorous ways. Drawing upon recent scholarship that stretches hacking beyond digital subversive practices, we first discuss hacking's potential to disintegrate things, sort out how they work, and then ultimately repurpose and redesign them for alternative possibilities (Knox 2021). The latter mode of STS as critique builds on Nassim Parvin and Anne Pollock's (2020) notion of “angel trick” that refers to the assumptions of technoscientific interventions that uphold certain values over others, while at the same time refusing accountability for their downstream consequences. We turn inward to assess angel tricks by academic institutions that instill technocratic values in academic practice. We reflect on how these two critical modes of doing STS can encourage scholars to reflect on their positionality and political, social, and ethical values in technoscience and academic institutions.