[Air-L] Call for Abstract (4S 2026): Technopolitics of Knowledge Mobilization in Datafied Societies

[Lucas Wong]

Dear AoIR Community,

We are organizing an open panel at the 4S 2026 (7-10 Oct in Toronto) titled “Technopolitics of Knowledge Mobilization in Datafied Societies.” The panel explores how platforms, data infrastructures, and AI reshape knowledge mobilization, public scholarship, and academic labour across different institutional and geopolitical contexts. Detailed panel description is included below. Interested participants are invited to submit a 250-word abstract through the official submission page:
https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php. The submission link will be open until the end of April.

We warmly welcome submissions from scholars working across STS, platform studies, critical data studies, and related fields.

All the best,
Lucas L. H. Wong
Hiu-Fung Chung
Julie Yujie Chen

Panel Abstract
In the wake of debates over public values of universities, knowledge mobilization has become an institutional imperative worldwide. It is codified through cross-sectoral partnerships, entrepreneurial and incubation initiatives, and professionalized regimes of evaluation that emphasize accessible and assessable public impacts, key performance indicators (KPIs), and codes of professional conduct. Within these arrangements, digital platforms and automated technologies are often positioned as the crux of innovative public engagement in datafied societies, where data—its massive collection and expansive use—constitutes a dominant mode of societal ordering and politico-economic governance (Fourcade & Healy, 2024; Halpern & Mitchell, 2023). In the context of knowledge mobilization, data-driven systems reconfigure how knowledge is produced, circulated, and valued, introducing infrastructures of classification and metricization that define what counts as “good” public pedagogy.

This open panel invites deeper dialogue between STS, platform studies, critical data studies, and open science to rethink the technopolitics of knowledge mobilization and to unsettle contemporary university-society relations. In dialogue with STS’s long-standing interest in the ordering effects of knowledge practices (Law & Mol, 2002; Jasanoff, 2004), the panel treats knowledge mobilization and public pedagogy as sites where governance, expertise, and publics are co-produced and contested rather than pre-given. In particular, we invite panelists to examine how pedagogical practices are ruled through and negotiated across multiple governing regimes, including universities, state power, and platform regulation across contexts, around the following questions:

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How do algorithms, data infrastructures, and artificial intelligence (AI) reconfigure authority, credibility, expertise, and boundaries in public-facing scholarship?
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What forms of improvisation, negotiation, repair, or refusal emerge as scholars navigate multiple ruling regimes?
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How do data-driven platforms and universities reconfigure digital academic labour?
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How do these dynamics unfold across diverse geopolitical and institutional contexts?


Extra Details
In this open panel, we invite scholars to collectively investigate “unruly pedagogies” as a heuristic for examining the technopolitics of knowledge mobilization in datafied societies across diverse sociocultural and political contexts. Informed by feminist and postcolonial STS, we conceptualize pedagogy as a necessarily contested political project that defines, confronts, and challenges technoscientific, professional, and algorithmic rules governing how scholarly knowledge should travel, appear, and perform (Haraway 1988; Harding 2008). Pedagogical practices become unruly not because they escape power, but because they inhabit frictions between institutional mandates, platform governance, and situated commitments to publics and critique.

Unruly pedagogies matter because they relocate questions of credibility and authority into data infrastructures of evaluation and visibility. STS scholarship demonstrates that expertise is socially accomplished through boundary work and civic epistemologies rather than intrinsic authority (Gieryn 1983; Jasanoff 2005), and that infrastructures and classifications shape what becomes visible and actionable as knowledge (Star and Ruhleder 1996; Bowker and Star 1999). Open science research similarly emphasizes that “openness” is a sociotechnical and political project whose infrastructures, norms, and participation are unevenly distributed (Fecher and Friesike 2014; Levin and Leonelli 2017). Critical data and platform studies extend these insights by showing how platformization, datafication, and content moderation reformat authority across professional domains such as childcare, health, and education (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018; Gillespie 2018; Ruckenstein and Schüll 2017; Mascheroni 2020).

Bringing these fields into conversation, the panel particularly welcomes empirically grounded contributions from diverse geographical and socio-historical contexts that examine, but are not limited to:

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Sociotechnical systems, infrastructures, and public engagement
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AI innovation, data infrastructures, and epistemic authority in knowledge mobilization
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Dynamics between institutional governance, platform regulation, and academic freedom
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Academic labor and digital platforms
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Comparative and de-Westernizing perspectives on public intellectualism