The room where it happens: inclusion, exclusion and power in STS research and practice

Convenors: Katharine Howell and Craig Jones (Lancaster University) 

No-one really knows how the game is played

The art of the trade

How the sausage gets made

We just assume that it happens

But no-one else is in

The room where it happens

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton

Interviews, conferences, cabinet meetings, political summits. Meetings, as the physical (and increasingly, virtual) bringing together of people in one room, play a central part both in the practice of doing STS research and in the things we research. Who is in the room where it happens and who is absent? Who speaks, who is silent? Who listens, who and what is heard? What are the power dynamics of meetings, and what are the implications of these for research, policy and practice? How do these relate to intersectional structures of oppression and privilege acting both within and beyond the room? How do the interactions in our research practice disrupt and reinforce these dynamics? Who do we as researchers include and exclude? Are absence and exclusion the same thing? And how is what happens in the room reported outside it? Who is written into and out of journalism, research, history?

In this panel, we invite participants to explore the politics of meetings through asymmetries and structures of power including, but not limited to: coloniality, race, class, gender, (dis)ability, sexuality, and religion. Our aim is to facilitate discussion around how our work is implicitly and explicitly imbued with a multitude of power relations. We welcome submissions both of standard paper presentations and less conventional formats.