What might we learn by studying science and technology through the lens of stuckness? Stuckness is a ubiquitous experience in the everyday work of science and technology. Scientists are constantly frustrated with unexpected obstacles to their research plans (Messeri & Vertesi, 2015). Technologists who aspire to change the world often end up reproducing current structures of power (Rider, 2022). In popular discourse, scientific and technological practice has been associated with progress as steady betterment. As Leo Marx (2010) notes in tracing the emergence of the word “technology” in English, scientific and mechanical innovations became synonymous with social progress in the 19th century. And yet, getting stuck is a quotidian experience among experts in these fields, from experiments that fail to grant applications that are rejected.
In this series, we propose to examine the production of scientific knowledge and technological projects by attending to experiences of stuckness. Originally an open panel at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting in 2025, we asked scholars to explore the ways that scientific and technological experts grapple with inertia, stagnation, and obstacles to their work. We propose that such an approach is particularly useful in drawing out structural conditions that shape the work of experts. It also helps illuminate how they construct meaning out of moments of becoming stuck and proceed toward subsequent action.
In thinking about western ideals of progress, Ursula Le Guin muses that “sidetrips and reversals are precisely what minds stuck in forward gear most need” (1983). “Spiral Shell” by xander.dacyon is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Our attention to stuckness builds on scholarship that has helpfully considered how thwarted expectations and material constraints influence social processes. If Anna Tsing’s (2005) concept of friction explores how seemingly smooth processes like globalization unfold through competing interests and unexpected encounters, stuckness brings attention to specific moments when such disruptions and collisions take place. As scholars of infrastructure like Susan Leigh Star (1999) note that breakdowns make the oft-invisible workings of infrastructure visible, stuckness encourages engagement with the subjective experience of such disruptions as well as the broader material realities that shape them. More specifically, this series uses this lens to study the production of science and technology in at least two ways.
First, moments of stuckness are productive to look at for what they make visible: broader conditions that usually remain relatively invisible or taken for granted and yet play a critical role in producing the instances of getting stuck. Consider, for example, the structures of power that underpin the work of scientists and technologists. As Meenakshi Mani’s post illustrates, the everyday work of relatively well-paid tech professionals—whether in Big Tech or in more specific domains like EdTech—are by no means without frustration. As actors within an organization and a social network, these seemingly powerful workers constantly navigate hierarchies and make compromises. Stuckness, then, can help illuminate structural forces and material conditions that constrain the range of possibilities involved in technology building. By tracing stories of tech workers from India and the U.S., Mani suggests that in the shared experience of stuckness, there are perhaps alliances to be conceived across seemingly disparate types of tech work and tech workers.
Moments of impasse can also shed light on narratives that shape people’s expectations about how the world ought to work. In his essay on scientific forestry in South Korea, Sumin Myung shows how contemporary scientists have come to feel stuck about their work for an unlikely reason: scientific forestry’s history of successfully replenishing the country’s extensive mountain forests since the 1970s after decades of devastation under Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and postcolonial industrial development. For Myung’s interlocutors, this “success” of earlier forest regeneration programs has ironically unsettled what missions and directions their field ought to pursue going forward. His post points to how stuckness can be understood as a symptom of the narratives that our interlocutors presume in their scientific and technological endeavors, such as the narrative of earlier loss and subsequent success.
While stuckness can thus make visible the broader conditions that produce such experiences, the second approach to stuckness that this series proposes is to trace what emerges in its wake: affects, ethics, and practices through which people respond to senses of impasse. Stuckness can be a deeply corporeal experience, and as Rinku Ashok Kumar’s post explores by shifting attention to lay-experts in India, such bodily feelings can inspire efforts to restore physical well-being. When migration to a new geographic or cultural context removes people from familiar practices of eating, they often experience chronic illness—or what one interlocutor referenced as “chronic (st)illness”—in their gut. Here, “gut feeling” is more than a metaphor. By tracing how people understand these corporeal experiences, she highlights how a complex interplay between physical health and social, cultural, and medical factors shapes their attempt to get their gut moving.
The question of what emerges in the wake of getting stuck can also be a generative opening for scholarly reflexivity, as Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry suggest in their piece on recent controversies around the use of AI assistants in classrooms in the United Kingdom. The authors situate this recent debate within a longer history in which new technology has repeatedly promised to revolutionize education and failed to materialize that claim. The current moment is not the first time when claims of technologically driven progress got stuck. By dwelling on this muddy history rather than focusing solely on the latest technology and its limits, Oliver and Henry offer a novel reading of the contemporary controversy around AI. This case highlights how stuckness can be a resource for scholars hoping to understand the enduring appeals and pitfalls of technological projects.
In Ursula Le Guin’s (1983) famous essay on California, she describes westernized ideas of utopia as stuck in notions of forward movement and progress. Progress, then, can be entangled with stuckness, not solely its opposite. The pieces in this series showcase what we can learn by centering the concept of stuckness in our empirical observations and theoretical engagements with science and technology. We invite others to build on these essays and explore how stuckness can resonate with scholarly concepts and empirical fieldsites, providing points of departure for research and critique.
This post was edited with the help of Contributing Editor Junnan Mu.
References
Le Guin, U. (1983). A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be. The Yale Review.
Messeri, L., & Vertesi, J. (2015). The Greatest Missions Never Flown: Anticipatory Discourse and the “Projectory” in Technological Communities. Technology and Culture, 56(1), 54-85.
Rider, K. (2022). Building ideal workplaces: Labor, affect, and identity in tech for good projects. International Journal of Communication, (16), 5005–5022.
Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377-391.
Tsing, A. (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press.
Marx, L. (2010). Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. Technology and Culture, 51(3), 561-577.
