Timothy Neale

A round lecture room with three rows of seats. The audience are turned towards a speaker at the front of the room on right hand side of the image.

The Melbourne Node of AusSTS is holding a symposium today on AFTERMATH. Beginning with a plenary keynote by Prof. Hannah Landecker (UCLA) on "Not Liquid but Emulsified Modernity." Landecker asks us to attend to "the anthropogenic gelation of the present."

Expendable Workers: Food Delivery and Technopolitics in China - Angela Ke Li, 2026 Through a case study of Meituan Waimai, China's dominant food delivery platform, this article examines how algorithmic management is entangled with labor p...

New OnlineFirst (OA) article: "Expendable Workers: Food Delivery and Technopolitics in China" by Angela Ke Li #technopolitics #migrantlabor #algorithmicmanagement #designlogic #fooddelivery journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

AusSTS | AusSTS 2026 Submit to AusSTS 2026: Antipodean Interruptions, 9-11 Nov at Victoria University of Wellington. Deadline: 3 April 2026. All career stages welcome.

Call for Proposals - AusSTS 2026, Antipodean Interruptions - Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa aussts.org/aussts2026 It's going to be so good!

Breaking: Anthropologist Reads Fire Book, Has To Tell You About It Guest post by Timothy Neale

Wrote a post for Hamish Clarke's excellent fire blog: hclarke.substack.com/p/breaking-a... I discuss Jordan Thomas's recent ethnographic book "When It All Burns" about his time as a wildland firefighter + the big question of who’s going to be sweating it out on the fireline in our future climate?

The invisible work that goes into 'near real-time' bushfire mapping As the devastating fires in Victoria spread earlier this month, people at home could see how they were moving across the state — not just in videos on the news and social media, but on an interactive ...

Nice to see the technical (and technopolitical) dimensions of wildfire (bushfire) mapping getting a public airing. Attention to these issues take me to the broader point that our epistemologies reveal the kind of "problem" we think that wildfires are. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...

I'm co-chairing the Society for Social Studies of Science @4sweb.bsky.social Conference in Toronto, Oct 2026. #STS #scipol #innovation

Theme: "TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures".

Open panel submissions portal is open! ls!

Deadline: 2nd February 2026

www.4sonline.org/about_the_co...

There's another possible heat wave coming late next week - though weather prediction this far out is akin to crystal ball gazing (yes, I am someone who teaches about the social role of magic and oracles). Photo above from the Ravenswood fire on Djaara Country.

A smoke plume rises from a section of forest. Int he foreground is a brown grassy field and the sky above is blue and partly cloudy.

Back from leave but still (kind of) amidst some fire fieldwork here in Victoria. The last week has been devastating for people and Country in so many parts of the state + its great to finally see some good fortune with the weather moderating.

Woo! Breaking news from @aussts.bsky.social! See you in November in Te Whanganui-a-Tara! 🥝🥝🥝

Dear STS-niks, you wonderful assemblage of contingent and unfolding practices, we hope that you are imminently intra-acting with some holiday snacks and beverages (if not soon). FYI, as per, the ST&HV office will be closed from 20 Dec 2025, returning to regular operating hours after 19 Jan 2026.

could be a geographical trend in the rejections?

My open panel idea got rejected from EASST 2026 😅😅 The double-blind system of peer review strikes again...

One day to go before applications close!

I mostly want people to start coming back to the office more so I can try and create elaborate high five routines with them

As we prepare to dispatch our beloved/behated manuscripts for review ahead of End-of-Year-Holidays-jamboree, may we all understand that as we ourselves switch on the sweet relief of "out-of-office," so too do all the people we might hope would review that manuscript (*insert Spiderman meme*)

They're still going! Please people, take pity on @afleisch-anthro.bsky.social

CASTAC is great! Think about contributing!

The Racial Spectacular: Pandemic Governance Through Dashboards and State Biosecurity - Shiloh Krupar, Nadine Ehlers, 2024 Data visualizations related to COVID-19 operate as forms of spectacle essential to the racialized governance of the pandemic. Guy Debord theorized spectacle as ...

See also: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Seeing an emerging stream of #dashboard STS and ethnography 🖥️🔢📊

2025: the late liberal consensus is broken. the global knowledge infrastructure of climate change has ground to a political standstill. my colleagues are endlessly replying all to a listserv asking to subscribe that they're already part of it.

New OnlineFirst article: "Agencements and Qualculations: Fukushima, Knowledge-Making, and Radiation Contamination" by Louise Elstow #radiation #knowledgeproduction #qualculation #agencement #Fukushima journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

New OnlineFirst (OA) article: "From Attention to Attunement: Data-Driven Efficiency and Embodied Care in the Intensive Care Unit" by Chiara Carboni @chiarboni.bsky.social, Rik Wehrens, Romke van der Veen + Antoinette de Bont #machinelearning #nursing #attention journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

SSN Seminar 'Platform Collectives as crisis infrastructures' with A Gupta Join this hybrid SSN seminar "Thank you ‘Someone’: Platform Collectives as crisis infrastructures in the Southern city"

Come along to this @deakinssn.bsky.social seminar on 'Platform Collectives as crisis infrastructures' with Anusheree Gupta. Mon Nov 17, 2:00pm AEDT online and in person! #STS #platforms
www.eventbrite.com.au/e/ssn-semina...

AFTERMATH: AUSSTS MELBOURNE SUMMER SYMPOSIUM 2026 The Melbourne Node of AusSTS is holding a 1-day summer symposium for scholars to present and discuss works in progress. We welcome applications that broadly engage with Science and Technology Studies ...

Melbourne-ite STS-ers, the local AusSTS node are doing a wee Summer Symposium on AFTERMATH - Mon 23 February 2026. If you are interested in coming along then please submit an abstract by 25 Nov 2025 ⏰https://forms.gle/9kwgnpDiE2HP61sF7?_imcp=1

What timing! The "planetary health diet" has just been updated: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Scaling-up Ancestral Knowledges: Indigenous Climate Initiatives’ Boundary Work in Amazonia - Sylvia Cifuentes, 2025 Scholars and activists highlight the importance of Indigenous knowledges (IK) in maintaining higher proportions of forest cover and carbon storage in Amazonian ...

New OnlineFirst article: "Scaling-up Ancestral Knowledges: Indigenous Climate Initiatives’ Boundary Work in Amazonia" by Sylvia Cifuentes #postcolonial #decolonial #boundarywork #climatepolitics #Indigenousknowledge #Indigenoustechnologies #Amazonia
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

"Amid shifting settings of scientific governance, political contestation, climate destruction, genocide, and widening social and economic inequalities, what can we reach for in our conceptual toolkit to help us chart these waters and take on the urgent questions of our time?"

We have chosen three concept - boundary objects, sociotechnical imaginaries, participation - as a kind of “vibe check” (but could equally have chosen others, e.g., care, biopolitics, etc.) as prompts to begin thinking through where we are conceptually as a field at this time.

In this editorial, we've taken the opportunity of being 3 years in - amidst the "flow or tide" of submissions - to ask how the field's energies are being distributed, + reflect on the concepts and theories that are so central to new STS work that they almost form a canon or infrastructure...

It was a pleasure work with @martinsavransky.bsky.social on this for @sthv.bsky.social. It closes with a call for STS "as an art of complicity," daring "to participate in the heterogeneous composition of unruly habits of thought and modes of planetary habitation." Read it!