Category: Beyond the Academy

Strategies and Tools for Knowledge Generation in Art-Science

Emmanuel Anguiano-Hernández September 14, 2026
Este contenido está disponible también en español.
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To what extent do measurements from an electroencephalography headset provide evidence of the aesthetic contemplation state of the person wearing it? In the 2015 neuroaesthetic research project Action Potential, the art and science Interspecifics collective monitors the brain electrical activity of a group of visitors to an exhibition about Octavio Paz, the famous Mexican poet,   and uses these measurements as material for sound composition. What is discovered in this experiment is not exactly a scientific result, since the EEG readings neither validate nor refute any hypothesis about aesthetic experience, but it is also not art in a conventional sense, as it depends entirely on clinical measurement protocols. This ambiguity is the point because by submitting aesthetic encounter to empirical instrumentation, Interspecifics lays bare the assumptions that usually keep the two domains apart with science requiring falsifiable propositions and art resisting reduction to data. What emerges at their contact surface is a productive friction instead of a synthesis, a mode of inquiry that measures and composes without limiting expression, taking us to reconsider what counts as knowledge and what counts as form. (read more...)

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Charting the (Dis)course of Nature Restoration: The EU Nature Restoration Law in the Public Sphere in Czechia

Abhigya July 20, 2026
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The EU Nature Restoration Legislation was finally adopted in 2024, after going through the rounds of the EU parliament since 2022. The passing of the law marks a key moment in the EU’s pursuit of the European Green Deal, adopted in 2019. The European Green Deal is the EU’s growth strategy aimed at putting EU on the path to a green transition, with the ultimate goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2050. The ambitious Nature Restoration Legislation is expected to provide legal instruments to facilitate the restoration of declining ecosystems across the European Union. It supports some of the key goals of the biodiversity pillar of the Green Deal (the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030), akin to how the European Climate Law (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119) sets legally binding climate neutrality targets for the member states. Some of the measures outlined in the regulation include supporting sustainable agriculture, greening cities and towns, protecting pollinators, and restoring wetlands and rivers. (read more...)

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Transnational Translations: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Platforms and Labor

Malcolm Katrak, Anushree Gupta, Debopriya Shome February 18, 2026
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This article is the third in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network. Read the introduction to the series here, and the second post in the series here. As the landscape of technology-mediated work has evolved rapidly over the years, spanning across diverse geographical contexts, a wide range of academic disciplines, knowledges, and expertise have become relevant for engaging with the technopolitics surrounding it. The multidimensional and dynamic expansion of digital platforms into yet newer industries and sectors, through the use of novel technological and institutional forms, has made interdisciplinary approaches for the critical study of technology and society indispensable for grounding technological innovation in contextual realities. Moreover, intricately entangled global supply chains in the age of hyper-financialized technocapitalism restage labor politics as industry and work are restructured.  (read more...)

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Writing About/With Platform Unions: The Role of Culture, Politics, and History

Ambika Tandon, Debopriya Shome, Kaveri Medappa January 28, 2026
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This article is the second in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network. Read the introduction to the series here. This post offers a worm’s-eye view of the tensions and opportunities shaping platform labour organising in contemporary India. Platform work has exposed larger numbers of workers, especially younger workers with little memory or experience of organizing, to mobilize against capital and to do so using innovative means and campaigns (Wadikar, 2025). Building upon literature on platform workers’ mobilization in India (Ray and John, 2025), we highlight how efforts to organize emerge within regionally specific terrains of culture, politics and histories of labour mobilization. Through three vignettes, we bring the everyday together with the cultural, political histories and contexts of three metropolitan Indian cities – Bengaluru, Delhi and Kolkata, cities in which we have lived and engaged in research and activism with platform workers. Spanning between 2019 and 2025, these vignettes reflect the political landscape in India. They shed light on the capital–state nexus that limits the power of workers, unionization efforts built on foundations of loyalty and often exclusionary hypermasculine politics. What are the tensions and contradictions that we confronted while doing research with ‘gig’ worker unions? How do we navigate making certain aspects of unionizing visible while muting others? How can we be less extractive and more useful to the workers we write about? (read more...)

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Series Introduction: The Politics of Writing About Platform Workers’ Organizing

Isha Bhallamudi, Anushree Gupta November 4, 2025
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We are a group of scholars and researchers who work with gig and platform worker unions in India in various capacities. We form the India chapter of the Labor Tech Research Network collective, and have been meeting regularly from across the globe to share cross-sectoral organizing strategies, track the political landscape around gig & platform unions, and discuss research and reflections from our place-based engagements. Our work sits at the critical intersection of scholarship and activism. It involves amplifying workers’ voices, supporting unionisation efforts, and supporting workers in their struggles to lead more dignified and just working lives. Our discussions have inspired us to put together this blog series on the politics of writing about platform workers’ organizing. (read more...)

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Trade versus Academic Press: Part 2 of Publishing in Academia

Savannah Mandel October 22, 2024
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Publishing is confusing and complicated. There are often barriers to understanding it fully. And the process is very rarely fully transparent. So, I’m sharing my experiences of the publishing process, and talk about why I, as a PhD student in STS, chose to go with a trade publisher over an academic one when my book went to auction. This is Part 2 of a series on publishing in academia. In Part 1 of this series I describe how I got my agent, and discuss whether or not academics need agents. (read more...)

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Do Academics Need Agents?: Part 1 of Publishing in Academia

Savannah Mandel October 15, 2024
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Publishing is confusing and complicated. There are often barriers to understanding it fully. And the process is very rarely fully transparent. So, I’m sharing my experiences of the publishing process, how I got my agent, and discuss whether or not academics need agents. “Do Academics Need Agents?” is Part 1 of a series on publishing in academia. In Part 2 of this series, I talk about why I, as a PhD student in STS, chose to go with a trade publisher over an academic one when my book went to auction. (read more...)

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AI as a Feminist Issue

Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes September 5, 2023
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By choosing to look at the funding from the American Government on this field, I aim to tell a different story about AI. A quick search for the word “librarian” on Google reveals images upon images of women holding books amongst big shelves, attending to patrons, reading stories for children, or stocking book shelves. Librarian is one of those professions that, like many others, such as nurse and secretary, have been associated with the female world.  If this text is about AI, you might be asking why I’m writing about libraries and librarians–but as scholars Safyia Noble (2018) in her Algorithms of Oppression and Monica Westin (2023) more recently have shown, what most people in Western countries usually understand as the internet, and what fuels the data collection of digital information that feeds generative artificial intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT, was first started in the 1970s by groups of librarians (read more...)

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