CFP: Democracy on the Edge: Science, Technology and Political Promise in Central and Eastern Europe, Panel at EASST 2026

 We invite submissions to the combined-format open panel:

Democracy on the Edge: Science, Technology and Political Promise in Central and Eastern Europe

EASST 2026 – Combined Format Open Panel (CB212), September 8-11, 2026, Kraków

Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has long lived “on the edge” of empires, political cultures, economic systems, and ways of knowing. Today it again occupies a liminal position within global sociotechnical transformations—from energy transitions to digitalisation. Through a panel discussion and two paper-based workshops, Democracy on the Edge invites researchers from and beyond CEE to examine forms of life, value, and sociotechnical imaginaries at the edge.

Here, the edge functions both as metaphor and method: a site of instability, friction, and creativity with which to interrogate implicit norms of sociotechnical progress. The sessions draw on STS scholarship linking political cultures and institutions with science and technology (Sheila Jasanoff on co-production; Yaron Ezrahi on democracy and imagination; Kaushik Sunder Rajan and Adriana Petryna on citizenship), while engaging concepts deeply rooted in CEE experience—imitation, precarity, performance, and development.

We invite empirical (historical and contemporary) and theoretical contributions that reflect on transitions, the role of computing in CEE pasts and futures, and the (often failed or suspended) promises shaping regional imaginaries. Central themes include, but are not limited to:

1989 ↔ 2025: cyclical transitions, generational imaginaries, constitutional moments

Infrastructure: political, scientific, and technological layering over time

Geography and identity: borders, peripheries, rescaled belongings

Materialities of transition: from energy grids to neural networks

Temporal edges: anticipation, delay, suspension

The panel is open to scholars at all career stages. While grounded in Central and Eastern Europe, we encourage contributions that place CEE in comparative or global perspective, especially with other regions that share elements of the ‘democracy on the edge’ identity in today’s rapidly transforming techno-political realities, from Taiwan to India to the United States. 

Please note that, in order to make the paper-based workshops successful, accepted contributors are expected to share a draft of their paper with panel participants in advance of the conference. 

Abstracts due February 28, 2026. Panel details and submission link:https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easst2026/p/18260

We look forward to your submissions and to collectively exploring what it means to study democracy, science, and technology from the edge—without assuming the centre knows best.

Best regards,

Panel organizers:

Tadeusz Józef Rudek (Jagiellonian University)

Margarita Boenig-Liptsin (ETH Zürich)

Aleksandra Wagner (Jagiellonian University)

Sebastian Pfotenhauer (Technical University of Munich)

Anna Lytvynova (ETH Zürich)

Oliwia Mandrela (Jagiellonian University)

Alexander Wentland (Technical University of Munich)

Monika Wulz (Leuphana University)