Call for Abstracts: “Holding the Disparate Together” - STS-CH Conference 2025

Dear colleagues,

Please find below the call for abstracts for the open panel, “Holding the Disparate Together: Exploring the Connective Tissue of Built Environments,” to be held at the STS-CH Conference in Zürich from 10 to 12 September 2025. The conference theme is Holding Things Together? Change, Continuity, Critique.

The submission deadline is 9 May 2025.

Holding the Disparate Together: Exploring the Connective Tissue of Built Environments

Starting with Karen Barad’s observation that one can "think the ‘holding together’ of the disparate itself” (2014), this panel reflects on how heterogeneous components and entities contain and retain a type of cohesiveness, adhesiveness, or persistence over time. It particularly invites scholars of architectural practices and built environments to explore how disparate knowledges, techniques, senses, materials, and actors come and hold together in the production and maintenance of architecture. Considering that built environments and structures are the result of many technical, ecological, and social components, it allows us to comprehend architectural productions as the processual outcome of ongoing material and urban transformations, relationship-building, and socio-political controversies that depend on a multitude of actors (Latour and Yaneva 2008, Till 2009, Yaneva 2012, Ingold 2013, Elinoff 2021). This panel welcomes diverse contributions and case study discussions that convey a concrete sense of lived and imagined architecture. Inviting contributions from a diverse range of fields, such as anthropology, STS, architecture, history, sociology, urban geography, media studies, environmental humanities, and others, we intend to collectively explore questions such as:
• How can one hold the "disparate” together without compromising on heterogeneity and difference?
• What constitutes the "disparate”?
• What holds built environments and spaces together, and what or whom can they hold in return?
• What spaces can hold and foster community building?
• What care work, maintenance, collectives, and labor produce and maintain built spaces?
• And vice versa, what collectives, materials, and relations can be held by built spaces?

Conference website: https://sts-ch.org/sts-ch-2025/
Abstract submission (max. 300 words) here:
https://express.converia.de/frontend/index.php?folder_id=10436&page_id=

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about the submission or the panel. I am looking forward to your contributions and to engaging discussions.

Warm regards,
Laurin Baumgardt