Hub member Maya Hay will co-convene this Open Panel for the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) conference, to be held in Toronto (and hybrid), October 7-10, 2026. They are currently seeking abstracts for PANEL 51: More-than-human Politics: Diplomacies, Translations, Mediations.

ABSTRACTS DUE: April 30, 2026 (https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php)

CONVENORS: ganaele langlois (York University); Maya Hey (KTH Royal Technical Institute); Hélène Mialet (York University)

PANEL DESCRIPTION: Reclaiming our technoscientific futures in the Anthropocene depends on crafting sustaining relations with living ecosystems, including humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans. More-than-human politics require another type of diplomacy: one where humans engage with alien kins (Morizot 2020)—be they plants, microbes, animals, elemental beings such as glaciers, mountains, and rivers. These alien kin are familiar because of humans’ radical interdependence on them, but they’re also radically different with their own temporalities, spatialities, communication, and agencies.

       More-than-human entities challenge social and political boundaries: their temporality can span thousands of years or microseconds; they shape specific locations but can also, like microbes and mushrooms, proliferate everywhere. They’re often the first witnesses and victims of environmental degradation. Yet, some adapt and eke out a living, even being deemed invasive as they insert themselves into damaged ecologies.  This panel asks: what kind of engagements—mediated or not—exist or are emerging with more-than-humans at this particular juncture of techno-optimism and elitist regimes of extractivism and denial? While technocratic solutionism pushes for a renewed universal ordering of the planet, more-than-human politics embrace biodiversity while seeking solidarities across worlds and alien kin.

KEYWORDS: Environmental/Multispecies Studies; Decolonial and Postcolonial STS; Feminist STS