Deadline for proposals: Friday 3 April, 2026

The planetary reach of contemporary technoscience—from novel computational systems to everyday energy infrastructures—and the ubiquity of crisis logics—climate, pandemic, extinction, or other—relentlessly obscure the traces of where knowledge is made, by whom, and to what ends. Even as Science and Technology Studies (STS) has long confronted the global inequities of knowledge production and practice, this ongoing obscuring makes the ‘where’ of science and technology more timely and critical than ever. AusSTS 2026 asks: when such technoscientific feats and challenges demand our attention, in what ways do the whereabouts of knowledge production matter? How should we reckon with shifting relations between different locales? And what critical resources can STS mobilise in and for the present moment, from this sea of islands (Hau’ofa 1994) specifically?

We invoke the antipodean as a relational provocation and critical departure. Imagined in reference to a presumed center, the antipodes are perpetually defined against metropolitan poles of theory-making and hegemony. Challenging these binaries, AusSTS 2026 invites us to question how such positionalities operate across multiple routes/roots and across nested scales, and how they might be thought and practiced otherwise while unsettling the very categories that contain them. For example, following Teresia Teaiwa (2014), we might critically appraise and recompose our intellectual genealogies, thinking about the thinking that is rooted, but by no means stuck, ‘here’. Etymologically, the antipodean connotes opposite (anti) feet (podus), inviting us to consider both standpoint (Harding 2004) and turangawaewae. Against the nationalist and acquisitive impulses that animated imperial antipodean imaginaries, might we retool the term as a resource for thinking difference otherwise?

Interruptions are an abiding concern in STS, materialising variously as infrastructural failures, lively disturbances, activist interventions, and noise within signal (AusSTS 2025). Taken as an epistemic stance, interruption does not stand outside to critique or observe, nor does it seek to overthrow or abandon. Instead, interruptions break the tide and flow, inserting other rhythms, movements, and noises into ongoing conversations and dominant frameworks. Interruption charts new routes to reflect on where we have been and envision where we might navigate. Interruption also makes audible what has been rendered inaudible, revealing the situatedness of that which has claimed or naturalized universality. Indigenous, postcolonial/decolonial, crip, queer, and feminist STS has made visible the generative potential and political necessity of strategic interruptions, which refuse analytic distance to insist instead on implicatedness. Contra Silicon Valley fantasies of technological disruption, such accounts recentre justice and responsibility, and draw attention to those relations that science and technology reproduce.

Bringing together the anti and the inter (and perhaps also the intra (Barad 2007)), AusSTS 2026 encourages voices and perspectives emerging from and in conversation with Australasia, Oceania, and neighbours, questioning how STS might enact its own antipodean interruptions. We invite submissions from scholars and practitioners working in and across these places as sites of theoretical production, empirical exploration, and experimentation. 

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Potential interpretations and readings

We invite generous readings of the theme. Possible interpretations include, but are not limited to:

• Narrative interruptions: How are continuities and discordances, the dual fantasies of uninterrupted progress and innovative disruption, invoked in relation to new technologies, through ‘rupture talk’ (Hecht 2002), hype, promissory rhetoric and more.
• Antipodean methods: What might ‘antipodean interruptions’ look like methodologically and theoretically? What kinds of errancy and animacy are designated as interruptions, and which kinds of waywardness are valued as such? 
• Settler colonial legacies: How do settler-colonial infrastructures shape technoscience across and beyond ‘the antipodes’? How do different communities mobilize or experiment with technoscience that may unsettle the settler-colonial present?
• Antipodean ontologies: What positional orientations configure shared worlds, and what might be gained from turning upside-down and inside-out? What happens in STS when antipodean Indigenous epistemologies, more-than-human relationalities, feminist, queer and decolonial projects, and oceanic mobilities are foregrounded rather than footnoted? 
• Lively disturbances: How do human and more-than-human bodily vitalities interrupt, and what interruptions are they subject to in turn? What kinds of interruption are materialised through ruination, maintenance, repair, and decay?  
• Antipodean ways of knowing and their lineages: Which intellectual predecessors, local and antipodal, might Australasian STS scholars enter into conversation with? Can antipodal thinking orient us differently to imaginaries of placelessness (e.g. the cloud) and pervasiveness (e.g. toxicity)? ‍
• Interrupting sites and subjects: How do sites of knowledge-making and experiment control for, harness, or bracket out interruption? What technoscientific labours are devoted to managing or mitigating interruption? What bodily, environmental, and industrial rhythms contour antipodean field sites?

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We invite scholars, writers, artists, and activists from any career stage to contribute to AusSTS 2026. We welcome applications that broadly engage with STS, and encourage applicants to engage with the conference theme where possible. Past conferences have represented scholars from across the social sciences, media and cultural studies, art and design, history and philosophy, and more. Generous, open and creative interpretations of the theme are welcomed. 

We aim to make this event as affordable and accessible as possible. We expect to be able to waive registration costs for a limited number of applicants, with priority given to Māori, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Pacific, and other Indigenous students and ECRs.

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Making and Doing

We invite scholars to play with the materiality of communication, the aesthetics of feedback and the epistemic politics of form. This session encourages speculative, participatory and/or aesthetic engagements with the signals and noises in and of our STS studies. 

Presenters in this session will be offered a display space in which they may coordinate an interactive exhibit, poster, or schedule a small event inviting engagement with a presentation of STS knowledge making as practice and in practice.

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Submitting your proposal 

Please submit a proposal to participate via one of the following formats:

1. Submit an abstract (200 words max) for a 10 minute presentation or provocation. Sessions will consist of 4–5 presentations followed by discussion.
2. Submit an abstract (200 words max) for a longer piece of written work to be workshopped with AusSTS attendees. These works can include draft articles or other manuscripts, more speculative proposals of research, and other creative or non-traditional forms of translation and output. Final submissions should be in a written format, between 2,000 and 3,000 words, and ready to be circulated amongst all attendees by 12 October 2026. Conference attendees will be allocated to each workshop session to contribute feedback, and are expected to engage with the written work in advance.
3. Submit a proposal for a ‘Making and Doing STS knowledge’ session (further details below)
4. Submit an EOI to host an AusSTS meet-up. Meet-ups are less formal social gatherings or meetings of like-minded scholars. Conference organisers will connect meet-up hosts and attendees during the registration process. Hosts are requested to submit a 200 word description of their meet-up.

Proposals should be submitted through this form. 

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For any questions, email AusSTS2026@vuw.ac.nz

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Works cited

AusSTS (2025). Signals and Noises Call for Proposals. https://aussts.org/aussts-2025-cfp/

Barad, Karen. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hau'Ofa, E. (2017). Our sea of islands. In Peoples of the Pacific (pp. 429-442). Routledge.

Harding, S. G. (Ed.). (2004). The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies. London, New York: Routledge.

Hecht, G. (2002). Rupture-talk in the nuclear age: conjugating colonial power in Africa. Social Studies of Science, 32(5-6), 691-727.

Teaiwa, T. (2014). The ancestors we get to choose: White influences I won’t deny. In Theorizing native studies (Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, eds), 43-55.