Datum
24. Juni – 26. Juni 2026
Panel at XVI ESOCITE Conference (Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de Ciencia y Tecnología)
Panel “Embodying the Immeasurable: Material Prospections on Pain, Illness, and Suffering in Crisis”
Part of the track “Methodologies Anchored in Design, Prototypes, and Material Creation” at the XVI ESOCITE Conference (Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de Ciencia y Tecnología)
June 24 to 26, 2026
Bogotá, Colombia
In times of global crises—pandemics, conflicts, environmental disasters—pain, illness, and suffering traverse bodies, senses, and materialities. This panel invites exploration of how the human is constituted under these extreme conditions and how the (in)material, together with Futures Design, can offer tools to envision and project possible environments and scenarios that shape the experience of suffering (Fry, 2009).
We welcome submissions addressing these issues from diverse theories of subjectivity and epistemological approaches: embodied cognition (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991); phenomenological and medical anthropology approaches (Rouse, 2009; Kleinman, 1997, 2020; Biehl, 2005); the existential dimension and bodily vulnerability (Cosmelli, 2025); as well as the interaction between technology, materiality, and invisible worlds, showing how environments and objects shape experiences that transcend the tangible (Espírito Santo, 2020,2021,2025) and critical analyses of power relations and ontologies of the human (Povinelli, 2021).
The STS community is invited to contribute papers that creatively and rigorously connect experiences, theories, and projections—such as applied projects, media-based work, theoretical papers, and literature reviews—that contribute to critical thinking in Futures Design, integrating experiences, theories, and materialities to generate new horizons in relation to pain, illness, and suffering.