Prototyping an Academic Network: people, places and connections. Three years of the Spanish Network fo 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 the Master in Science, Technology and Society (organized by the University of Salamanca and the University of Oviedo) and the Postgraduate course in STS (organized by the STS department at the Philosophy Institute at CSIC), and they stand as the exceptions to the norm. Within this context in 2011, a year after the launch of the network, there was a shared feeling among many participants that the Spanish STS network (Red eSCTS) stood at a crucial point. It was a crucial moment for several reasons, some related to the internal development of the network and others related to the overall situation of academic research and science policy in Spain. The context for the network inception was also crucial because of the dramatic changes in the scientific and academic environment in Spain, which have been recently characterized by massive cuts on public funds to public research, by the drastic reduction (or altogether elimination) of doctoral and postdoctoral grants, the interruption of turnover in public jobs and salary cuts to public employees. The network expanded rapidly to include more than 140 members (last checked in February 2013) and has spread across different institutions, fields and research groups in Spain and abroad. At the same time, the network has consolidated its day-to-day activities thanks to digital technologies (an active Google-groups space, a Facebook page and a not so buzzy blog). We had an intense debate during the second meeting of the network about the kind of digital infrastructure that the network should use. Some participants strongly argued for abandoning the afore-mentioned technologies and advocated in favor of using free