[acc-cca-l] CFP: 4S 2026 Panel - Fields of techno-scientific power: Journalism, platforms, and the reconfiguration of autonomy

[Aloa Alota]

[△EXTERNAL]


Dear Colleagues,
I would like to invite paper submissions to Panel 15 at the 2026 meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), which will take place in Toronto from October 7-10, 2026. The deadline for submission is April 30, 2026.
Details and submission information appear below:

Call for Papers – 4S 2026 Conference (Toronto)
Panel 15: Fields of technoscientific power: Journalism, platforms, and the reconfiguration of autonomy.
The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) will hold its 2026 annual conference in Toronto from October 7-10, 2026. I am convening an open panel and warmly invite submissions from scholars working at the intersections of journalism studies, science and technology studies (STS), media sociology, and platform studies.
Deadline for submissions:  April 30, 2026
Papers can be submitted through the conference website: https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php
Contemporary journalism is increasingly entangled with platforms, data infrastructures, algorithmic systems, and concentrated ownership structures that reshape how knowledge is produced, validated, and circulated. This panel approaches journalism not merely as a cultural profession or a democratic institution, but as a technoscientific knowledge field whose relative autonomy is historically contingent, relational, and technologically mediated. Drawing on field-analytic approaches and STS scholarship on power, infrastructure, and expertise, the panel examines how technoscientific power operates through ownership, platforms, metrics, and data-driven systems to reorganize journalistic authority. Rather than treating autonomy as a normative ideal under threat, contributors analyze autonomy as a field-relative achievement shaped by struggles over capital, legitimacy, and control across intersecting fields of journalism, technology, and science. We invite papers that empirically and theoretically investigate journalism as a site where technoscientific futures are actively negotiated: through platform governance, algorithmic editorial systems, metrics and analytics, AI-assisted reporting, infrastructural dependencies, and shifting ownership regimes. Contributions may focus on news organizations, platform-media relations, journalistic labour, epistemic practices, or comparative and historical cases. By situating journalism within broader configurations of technoscientific power, the panel seeks to advance STS conversations on knowledge production, authority, and infrastructure, while offering journalism as a diagnostic case for understanding how autonomy is reconfigured under contemporary conditions of platformization and datafication.
Convenor:
Aloa Alota, PhD (He/him)
Email: aalota at uwo.ca

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.ucalgary.ca/pipermail/acc-cca-l/attachments/20260316/8e4f8be3/attachment.html>