We are happy to announce the Conference Booklet of AusSTS 2026 (here). Please check this living document for the session time, rooms, and other key information..
Please refer to the Conference Booklet for other details such as transportation.
We are excited to share that three plenary sessions have been prepared for the conference.
Sarah Edwards (Maiangi Taiao Bioeconomy Research Institute), Mardi Reardon-Smith (Monash University), and Christine Winter (Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka University of Otago), chaired by Cathy Breed (Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington)
As environmental and climate crises intensify, researchers across disciplines are turning their attention to the nature of human relationships with the nonhuman. More-than-human approaches promise to challenge human exceptionalism, offer new methods and conceptual tools for understanding the world beyond cartesian dualisms and expand attention beyond the individual into the relational. Yet their capacity for genuine political critique remains contested. Can more-than-human approaches grapple with questions of power, place, justice, and colonial history, or do they risk dissolving the very categories that make that critique possible? This panel brings together scholars working at the intersection of human and nonhuman lives to sit with these tensions. Drawing on diverse disciplinary perspectives and empirical contexts, the panel will explore what it means to do politically engaged more-than-human work, and how situating that work in specific places, histories, and colonial contexts transforms the frameworks we use and the questions we ask.
Nālani Wilson-Hokowhitu (Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington), Talei Mangioni (University of Sydney), and Karly Burch (Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland)
Our Sea of Islands by Epeli Hau’ofa (1994) has long been a source of theorising, exchange, and resistance. Although major geopolitical powers attempt to impose themselves on the oceans and islands of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa/Te Moana Nui a Hiva/Moananuiākea through territorial enclosures, military pacts, resource extraction, and occupation, the ocean’s ancestral, intellectual and creative vitality suggests alternative futures in the making. In reflections shaped by Pacific Studies and STS traditions, plenarists consider the various wave-forms—oceanic, radio, nuclear, shock—that materialise in their research to ask what kind of critical thought and practice 'waves' might make visible. In so doing, they open up the question of how the political taxonomies and nomenclatures of the region might be questioned, expanded, or thought otherwise.
Donna Cormack (Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland/Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka University of Otago), Benjamin Hegarty (UNSW Sydney), and Chia-Ling Wu (National Taiwan University), chaired by Celia Roberts (Australia National University)
Human bodies have long been a site of contention where debates around health, wellbeing, society, Indigenous rights, autonomy, environmental impacts, and politics play out. Science is repeatedly (mis)used to support framings of human bodies and their biological processes and attempt to naturalise these on binary terms. The plenary speakers will share their thoughts on observation, ethics, and communication in the process of undertaking STS research. Panellists will be in conversation about training the STS lens through recent work on viruses, reproductive labour pain, and Indigenous data sovereignty. Informed by research from Aotearoa, Australia and Asia, the panellists will explore the ethics and politics of training a specifically ‘Australasian’ STS lens.
Registration for AusSTS 2026 is now closed.
All field trips will take place on Tuesday 10 November, 5:30–7:30pm. Please let your point person know if you cannot make it on the day.
Airline discounts are available for delegates travelling from Australia to Wellington, thanks to the support of Business Events Wellington. Please note that these airfare discounts apply only to return travel originating in Australia.
Air New Zeland
Qantas
Wellington offers a variety of accommodation options, and we warmly encourage you to explore the options that best suit your preferences and tastes. We have arranged discounted rates at a selection of hotels close to the conference venue.
Quest Apartments (Atrium & The Terrace)
Novotel Wellington
Trinity Hotel
We advise all international participants to check whether they will need to apply for an entry visa to travel to New Zealand.
If you require a visa invitation letter, please write to us as soon as possible so that we can assist you. Please refer to the Immigration New Zealand’s Visa Tool (more information).
Thanks to Te Pūnaha Matatini, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at VUW, and Science, Technology & Human Values for sponsoring this event
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.
We invite generous readings of the theme. Possible interpretations include, but are not limited to:
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.
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.
Please submit a proposal to participate via one of the following formats:
For any questions, email AusSTS2026@vuw.ac.nz
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.
