Call for Abstracts: Open Panel at 4S 2025 Seattle

We are excited to invite abstract submissions for “Data, Care and Learning in Datafied Worlds”, a panel at the 4S conference in Seattle, September 2025. The deadline for abstract submissions is 31 January 2025. Please see below for more information and get in touch with any questions. 

Short Abstract 

How do data, care, and learning shape each other? Bringing together empirical work and theoretical considerations across disciplines and contexts, this panel aims to think broadly about the practices that make up the dynamic data-care-learning nexus and the important questions they raise for STS. 

Long Abstract 

In an era of digital transformation, how do data, care and learning practices mutually define each other?  

As socially-situated and theory-laden phenomena, data practices are subject to operations of scaling and manipulation, underpinned by systems of logic and value, and co-produced with cultural, political, and socioeconomic realities. Data are a principal medium through which we come to learn, care, and know about our worlds.  

Feminist STS has established the critical importance of care for sustaining our worlds, directing attention toward who cares, about what, and how. Continuing to critically theorize and empirically investigate care opens up questions of maintenance, vulnerability and interdependence. Tracing data practices with care in mind is likely to extend some of these insights and contest others. 

Learning is theorised differently across fields from STS and Innovation Studies to Psychology and Education. Fundamental questions about the nature of learning underpin assumptions about knowledge, expertise, and pedagogy. What we care to learn about and how we learn to care have implications for our understanding of data practices since those practices both shape what can be learned and must themselves be learned. 

Organised by the DARE team, this panel seeks to build on and contribute to these literatures by bringing together work across data technologies, contexts of use, intellectual fields, and communities of practice to examine the data-care-learning nexus. 

Submissions might offer insights into, for example: 

• What data, care, and learning come to mean through their mutual entanglement 
• Where processes of learning and caring are located in data practices 
• Distinguishing between caring, learning, and knowing in relation to data practices 
• How data are cared for, and how data enable or constrain care 
• What and how we learn through data practices 
• How the nexus of data, care and learning are theorised across different sites, and with different publics 

Submissions should be made via the 4S website: https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php