Two years have passed since the COVID-19 pandemic hit us. Several waves of rapidly increasing numbers of infections rolled over us, and the current wave (at least in Germany) just doesn’t seem to subside. During the last two years, studying and teaching was mostly mediated by our computer screens. At one point the digital fatigue demanded us to make cuts in our digital activities and so, the Kitchen STS blog went silent. However, this doesn’t mean that we haven’t been gathering, chatting and discussing what’s going on in STS – quite the contrary!
We started the winter term 2020/2021 with the Introduction chapter (Law & Mol: “Words to think with: An Introduction”) and the first article (Chernysheva et al.: Translating a title: On other terms”) of the Special Issue with the theme “On Other Terms” in The Sociological Review (Volume 68 Issue 2, March 2020).
Linking the question on what “non-English linguistic repertoire” STS can engage with, our next session turned to Indigenous STS. For this, we read Jessica Kolopenuk’s “Miskâsowin: Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society” (2020) who spontaneously even joined our session.
In our last session of the term, we talked about “The Whiteness of AI” by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal (2020), which highlighted how machines can be racialised.
For the summer term 2021, we continued our discussions in critical STS and what better way to do this with the newly published book by Max Liboiron on “Pollution is Collonialism” (2021).
In the second session, we had the opportunity to discuss with Susan L. Erikson her works on the use of mobile phones for contact tracing during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa (2018), and a contemporary study on contact tracing of COVID-19 (2020).
The last session was dedicated to one of our more general discussions, plans, our own projects and upcoming events.
The last term, winter 2021/2022, started off with a lecture by David Ribes on “Sedimentary Legacy for Research Infrastructures: From Natural to Socioecological”. It introduced our broader theme on “infrastructures and STS”.
More coincidentially, we planned our second session of this term when Katharina Graf gave a talk about her new project “Cyborg Cook. Domestic Cooking in the Digital Age“, which obviously the Kitchen STS group had to attend!
In the third session we read a great piece by Antti Silvast and Mikko J. Virtanen on “An assemblage of framings and tamings: multi-sited analysis of infrastructures as a methodology” (2019) which concluded our thematic focus.
It is rare but this term we met for a fourth session in which we did a nice round of introductions, discussed projects, and talked about the future of the Kitchen STS.
Looking back on these last three semesters, a lot was going on: New people joined the Kitchen, scholars were invited, gave talks, and we read amazing articles! The many projects, interests, and resources that people bring to the Kitchen always surprise us and we will continue to keep the Kitchen as lively as possible.
Looking ahead on the semesters to come, we can say that there are wonderful events going to happen! Knowing that many Kitcheners have left Frankfurt, we will keep our digital meeting space. However, we also hope that we can gather in our Kitchen again and share cookies, drink tea, and create a hybrid Kitchen space. Maybe we all become Cyborg Cooks?
