Call for Abstracts:

Open panels at 4S 2026 Toronto
The Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)
Conference Theme: TechnoPower – Technoscientific Futures
October 7-10, 2026
Toronto, Canada [and online]
https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php

Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2026

4S 2026 TORONTO

The 50th Anniversary for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S): calls for presentations, panels, and adjacent gatherings that engage our theme of TechnoPower. Science, technology, and innovation are not neutral; as STS scholars, we understand them as socially, culturally, and economically constructed and deeply entangled with a specific form of technoscientific power. The theme emphasizes that money and wealth are increasingly shaping our technoscientific futures, raising urgent analytical and normative questions about how to reclaim power from “tech” billionaires and oligarchs. At this critical juncture, our task is not only to critique and demystify technoscience but also transform how others perceive and engage with technoscience. From the reinforcement of harmful value(s) systems to the assetization of knowledge and the erosion of ecological and social justice, a specifically technoscientific capitalism has embedded market logics and elite control into our knowledge institutions, innovation choices, and into technological change itself. Yet, as we also know so well, technoscience is always contested, and STS offers plural and grounded alternatives to understanding and reframing technoscience, from citizen science to community engagement in innovation to Indigenous knowledge. A key challenge now is to accelerate our interventions into public, policy, and political debate by using our empirical, analytical, and normative tools to shift technoscientific futures away from the dictates of a wealthy few towards a technoscience that fosters collective wellbeing, justice, and sustainability. This conference is hybrid.

OPEN PANELS

Over 250 Open Panel proposals have been accepted for the 2026 Toronto meeting. The purpose of Open Panels is to stimulate new networks around topics of interest to the STS community. Open Panels have been proposed by scholars working on nearly every continent and relating to just about every major STS theme.

You may now submit individual papers to these Open Panels. Using the abstract submission platform, select the Open Panel you are submitting to. Your paper will then be reviewed by the Open Panel organizer(s) to decide whether it fits the panel theme.

At the time of submission, you will also be asked to nominate two alternative Open Panels for your paper. In the event that your paper is not included in your first preference, it will be considered by the alternative Open Panel(s) indicated in your submission.

The Conference will primarily be in person, but there is also a hybrid option to enable online participation for those who can’t make it to Toronto.

A walk-through video of the submission system is available here.

Download the accepted Open Panels as a PDF file by clicking here, or download the accepted panels as an Excel file by clicking here.

[Here are some of the panels that relate, or may relate, to presence:]

98 The Agency and Politics of LLM-Based Chatbots
Takuya Maeda, Western University; Charles Luke Stark, Western University

LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT and those from Character.AI are not intelligent, yet people are increasingly forming social and emotional connections with these technologies, treating these systems as friends, therapists, fortune-tellers, and romantic partners. This trend goes beyond simple anthropomorphism—users are also projecting a sense of human interiority onto these chatbots. While the so-called “Eliza effect” demonstrates AI’s incidental relational potential, today’s chatbots are intentionally designed with compelling personalities to elicit such projection. This design strategy boosts engagement and profits for firms like OpenAI, but presents various potential problems: emotional engagement may influence how users interpret chatbot responses, lead them to share sensitive information that companies may extract, and even compete with authentic human connections.

Our proposed open panels will support multidisciplinary inquiry into the agentic status, personality design, and implied politics of LLM-based chatbots. We seek scholarship which interrogates the history, political economy, and anthropology of how and why personality design and “animation” has become so prominent in generative AI-based chatbots, in terms of corporate objectives, media narratives, political-economic circumstances, and user expectations. We also seek proposals for how to regulate humanlike AI in ways that empower communities and account for distributed agencies.

Potential paper topics include:

• Labor practices shaping AI personas
• Communities implementing agentic AI
• How and why people substitute AI for human relationships
• Social, cultural, economic, and political contexts of AI personification

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245 Techno-Magical Futures & Histories
Leona Nikolić, Concordia University (Montreal CANADA

There has been an effort by Silicon Valley to position AI technologies as omniscient, godlike entities with supernatural capabilities. In late 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that his company’s primary mission was to create “magic intelligence in the sky” (Murgia, 2023, para. 8). Big Tech giant Google introduced overtly magical and astrological branding for its recent AI products: Genie, Gemini, and Project Astra (Hassabis, 2024; Marini, 2024). Scholars have made analogies between AI and magic or divination (Boxer, 2020; Larsson & Viktorelius, 2024; Marenko, 2019), examined magical discourse in the tech industry (Campolo & Crawford, 2020; Zhan, 2025), and explored historical relations between magic and technoscience (Hörl, 2018; Josephson-Storm, 2017; Natale, 2021).

This intersection between magic and computation is not new; we can recall software ‘wizards’ of the 1990s, background computer programmes known as ‘daemons,’ and the mystically named Oracle coding software, for example. Moreover, there is a longstanding theoretical discourse on the relationship between magic and technology (Daston & Park, 1998; Dreyfus, 1965; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947; Latour, 1988; Lévi-Strauss, 1962; Simondon, 1958; Stengers, 2000; Weber, 1920; Wiener, 1964).

This panel invites researchers to consider these recent and historical interdependencies, especially in the face of contemporary techno-oligarchies. How does ‘techno-magical’ discourse shape sociotechnical imaginaries and material practices of AI? What is the relationship between technologies and the myths that they uphold? Which kinds of futures does technomagical discourse produce and how do these futures maintain or disrupt hegemonic societal order, social cohesion, and collective realities? Which theoretical perspectives can help us understand the relationship between magic, technoscience, and technopower? And how can such research contribute to policy discussions and regulatory approaches regarding questions about transparency and accountability in algorithmic decision-making?

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[And others…]

2. Ghostly Technologies: AI, Chatbots, and the Ethereal Illusion of Care
Tankut Atuk, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

26 Does Generative AI Flip the Script? A Look at Power and Use in Everyday Sociotechnical Practice
Gabriel Alcaras, Sciences Po; Donato Ricci, Sciences Po

90 Imaginaries of AI in Collaboration: Expertise and Authority in AI-Mediated Scientific Practice
Yubeen Kwon, Seoul National University

123 As If: Speculative Performances of AI Futures
Grayson Richards

132 Careful Boundaries of AI Art: The Negotiation of Creativity, Agency, Authorship and Value under Algorithmic Opacity
Hanna Sipos, University of Basel

198 Fictopoeisis: Fiction as Research for Sociotechnical Futures
Rachel Horst, The University of British Columbia