Welcome to the 20th anniversary of the Swedish STS Conference that will be held at the Niagara building in Malmö, 10-12 juni 2026, and is hosted by Malmö University in collaboration with Lund University.
The Swedish STS Conference is an open, widely advertised, biennial conference, organised since 2006. It is an interdisciplinary meeting place for researchers interested in issues related to technology and science in society as approached from social science and humanities perspectives, and while it gathers researchers at all levels of their careers, it is planned and coordinated to particularly appeal to doctoral students and early career researchers, with special sessions and events catering to the concerns of junior colleagues.
Conference theme
The theme of the Swedish STS Conference 2026 is Cross-Pollinations, Contamination, Collaboration. With this theme, we aim to engage contributions to current situations in the world – as climate change, intelligent warfare, artificial intelligence, emerging infectious diseases and migration considerations. Different cultures, bodies, or technologies are part of a never-ending cross-pollination process, across seemingly unconnected theoretical domains, genres, and discursive communities. However, contamination always lures in the background, becoming a metaphor for interdependence, porosity, but also a space for discussion on conditions of (dis)ability and accessibility. Contamination also, in this context, becomes a way to decenter the human and interact with the world in more accountable and imaginative ways. A strength of the STS field that will be explored during the conference is its focus on the failures and successes, as well as following technological and scientific advances in all its different phases: inception, everyday use and death/demolition/extinction.
Collaborations characterise deeply how researchers in the field work. Interdisciplinarity is an everyday practice, including working across the “two cultures of science”. This division of science between natural and technical sciences versus social and humanities was identified by C.P. Snow already in 1959 as seriously hampering society’s ability to solve the world’s problems. For the field this carries the risk and the promise of cross-pollinations and contaminations with emerging new ways of doing science, innovative methods and models for engagement. As we face urgent challenges, the ability to reach out and interact across disciplines, and across the academia – society divide is a potential ground for building capacity for positive change. Thus, collaborations outside and inside Academia will be explored. We invite researchers to interrogate the values that underpin different modes of collaboration—what counts as legitimate knowledge, who gets to participate, and how boundaries are policed or transgressed. Further, contamination alludes to the imagined purity of science, at the same time as we know it is authentically implicated in what could be labelled contaminated practices. Having said this, without cross-pollination, contamination, collaboration with the wider society and various strategic stakeholders and communities, science risks losing its relevance and legitimacy.
We want presentations that open “Cross-Pollinations, Contamination and Collaboration” as keywords in science and technology. What forms of “Cross-Pollinations” can we see today? How are the developing in the future? How can we tackle “Contamination”? How are “Collaborations” forged, sustained and also broken down and abandoned?