[Air-L] 4S Toronto 2026 Panel #236: Communities of Critique (Deadline: April 30)

[Sayan Bhattacharjee]

Hello all,

We are really looking forward to 4S Toronto this year.

Where does critique live now? From corporate ethics boards to AI fairness
teams, the institutional homes of critique in practice have multiplied. We
invite you to submit an abstract to our 4S Toronto panel and join a
conversation that pushes STS into new territory.


*Panel Abstract:*


Nearly two decades after Latour (2004) asked whether critique had "run out
of steam," it has found new institutional homes: from corporate ethics
boards to AI fairness teams. How might we transform our investigations by
treating critique itself as an object of analysis (Boltanski & Thévenot
1999)? How does critique circulate through organizations? What effect does
this critique have in the world (or not)? How do we trace the arc from
external critique to its transformation and materialization into novel
technologies (Bhattacharjee and Ribes, 2025)?


This panel examines the conditions under which actors acquire critical
capacity and the novel networks that need to be assembled when navigating
organizational terrains of critique. We invite contributions examining
critique symmetrically, as an empirical phenomenon in the world and
methodological challenge for our investigations. How can we compare the
distinct purchase of different models of criticality across settings? We
welcome contributions from across disciplines addressing (but not limited
to):

   - Theoretical frameworks for analyzing communities of critique, their
   affordances and limitations
   - The novel networks organizations assemble to engage or manage critique
   - Where practitioners draw lines between evaluation and criticism
   - How critique functions as fuel for organizational change or not
   - How complicity relates to critical practice
   - Comparative studies of criticality's purchase in different
   institutional settings

----------------------------------------------------------
For any questions, please reach out to me at sayanbe at uw.edu. We are also
open to online participation if you cannot make it in person. You can find
the submission link here
<https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_toronto.php>.

Thanks,

*Sayan Bhattacharjee*
PhD Candidate
Human Centered Design and Engineering
University of Washington
Pronouns: he/him
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l-aoir.org/attachments/20260427/e2541e9e/attachment.htm>