What is the method of STS? Can applied theater and art inspire how we do STS? This workshop investigates these questions by engaging participants in performance-based activities designed as STS think-modes. The situations, dubbed the Science Humanities and Arts Knowledge Exercises (SHAKE) mix the format of games and of performance combining elements like rules and time-constraints, with the open-endedness of performance to stimulate and situate thinking in STS through play. Participants are invited to five ‘gameformances’, exploring five topics, viscerally and with a sense of humour: 1. embodying concepts, 2. classificatory practices and care, 3. technological scripting, 4. privacy, 5. responsibility as a response-ability.
- Ideobics: an exercise routine matching concepts and movements in a set of ten mind-body exercises
- Facing identity: developing an intimate relationship with a token of a particular kind
- Virtuous (and Vicious!) Designs: collaboratively re-designing things following invented “virtuise” and “vicen” verbs - e.g. “fairorise” a virus: make a virus facilitate fairness
- Sharing Secrets: exploring privacy through sharing secrets with each other.
- Response-able Walk: investigates how responsibility emerges as an ability to respond to others and to structure.
Through these excercises, the workshop explores how play and performance can contribute to STS research, teaching and action.
Sophia Efstathiou is a Senior Researcher in the Programme for Applied Ethics, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Efstathiou works in history and philosophy of science, ethics of technology, human-animal studies and art-based approaches to philosophy and responsible research and innovation. She is the PI of the Norwegian Research Council project MEATigation: Towards sustainable meat-use in Norwegian food practices for climate mitigation (2020-24) - a collaboration across the Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts and Norwegian business and cultural actors aiming to explore and transform Norwegian food practices towards reducing meat use. Efstathiou is also leading part of the HORIZON2020 project ISEED: Inclusive Science and European Democracies (2021-24) which looks to citizen science to learn how to engage people in knowledge-based democratic deliberation in Europe. Efstathiou holds a Master of Physics in Mathematics and Physics (Warwick 2000), an MA in Philosophy (2006) and a PhD in Philosophy and Science Studies both from the University of California, San Diego (2009). Her research has received EU, RCN, NSF, Max Planck and White funding.
This spring, Efstathiou is a visiting researcher at the TIK Centre. Here, she works on meat alternatives, food waste, microbes and alternatives to goal-setting to address food security and climate challenges.