Prototyping an Academic Network: People, Places and Connections. Three Years of the Spanish Network for Science and Technology Studies

How would an academic association look that doesn’t have the characteristics of a “typical association”? Which members would form the association? Which places would be its sites of action? These are a few questions that, at least partially, describe the developing process of the Spanish Network for Science and Technology Studies (Red eSCTS) since its launch in 2010. The very name of a “network ” (instead of association) points to a first main goal: to explore a new modality of academic relation. Indeed, the main goal of the network is to promote a stable and fluid network of collaboration and dialogue between STS researchers in Spain and abroad. This is accompanied by a more ambitious idea of providing a space that will allow the collective imagining of new ways of collaborating and researching in an academic and research environment in turmoil. A second aim has to do with the openness and composition of the network. Some of us wonder whether the network could be composed not only of academics, but be open to other social actors. Some of us have started to play with the idea, thinking how we could broaden the academic dialogue to include new social actors. In that sense, we like to consider this process as an experiment of prototyping a modality of academic formal association. But, before setting this argument we want to offer some reflections on the process of development of the Spanish Network for Science and Technology Studies (Red eSCTS). For that, in the next sections, we will explicitly refer to the “connections”, “places ” and “people ” that shape the network. Connections. The network grew out from the very fragmented situation of STS studies in Spain, located either within departments of Philosophy or Social Psychology or pursued by single individuals. To the best of our knowledge, there are only two masters programmes that explicitly provide a specific training in the field, namely th