WTMC Summer School 2026

The city has long been a key epistemic site for social and cultural theory: a place from which multiple modernities have been theorised, powerful conceptual vocabularies coined, and research methodologies invented. In Science and Technology Studies (STS), however, the city has rarely been treated as a central site for exploring and conceptualising the articulation of science, technology, and society. This is particularly urgent today, as cities are becoming major drivers, critical zones and experimental platforms of planetary transformation.

This summer school explores how STS could and should respond to the city in the midst of digital transformation, concerns over technical democracy, and ecological polycrisis. Which conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges does the city-in-peril pose to STS? Importantly, this also confronts a political question: coexistence is not always a matter of shared uncertainty that can be resolved through collective inquiry. It often demands diplomatic experiments in situations marked by ontological uncommons, raising questions on how to live together in disagreement that concerns not only evidence, but realities—different ways of living, valuing, and inhabiting urban worlds.

These are some of the questions this summer school addresses. We take the city as method—a site and a device for conceptual and methodological innovation—and ask where this method can take STS today, including how well the responses we develop in urban contexts can travel into other areas of STS research. Through a series of lectures, reading seminars, and skills workshops, we explore a double response: ecologising urban STS and experimenting with multimodal methods.

Ecologising STS

STS has productively analysed urban artefacts and infrastructures, expert knowledge, and public controversies. Yet the city also demands sustained attention to material and environmental transformations that point to limits of coexistence, asymmetries of exposure, and onto-political conflicts over what the city is and ought to be. Ecologising urban STS is not (only) taking seriously our environmental predicament, but (primarily) a conceptual retooling. It demands environing technoscience – shifting emphasis away from how technoscience works and toward how it exceeds and overflows: how it misfires, is misunderstood, becomes something else, intersects cosmologies, and generates critical thresholds and points of no return.

This is not “science in action”—how science, technology, and innovation are put to work in practice—but a lateral engagement with the unexpected and unforeseen entanglements through which technoscience reconfigures urban worlds, and vice versa. Conceptual starting points such as actor-network theory and Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical proposal will guide our exploration, taking us into current forms of elemental and more-than-digital urbanism in European cities and beyond.

Multimodal Engagement

Treating the city as method entails learning from urbanism, design, and planning—fields that know the city analytically and projectively: flood-risk maps, heat dashboards, air-quality sensors, building standards, zoning plans, renderings, mock-ups, digital twins, and pilot projects are material–semiotic artefacts that make some futures actionable while foreclosing others. They do not simply represent the city; they actively compose it.

For STS, in general, this underscores the need to engage the media, devices and formats through which overflows and onto-political conflicts are sensed, measured, negotiated, and made public in our practices of knowledge production. This is a crucial move: First, it enriches inquiry: multimodal fieldwork helps trace how infrastructures, atmospheres, and publics co-produce problems and responses. Second, it enables collaboration: shared “working objects” can function as interfaces across epistemic cultures and as sites of negotiation.

The City as Method: Ecologisation and Multimodality brings these threads together. It is an invitation to rethink what STS can do with, in, and through cities—conceptually, methodologically, and ethically—at a time when urban worlds are both engines of crisis and sites of experimentation for living otherwise; and we explore what this may mean for other empirical domains in STS, taking seriously the onto-politics of technoscience. Together with our anchor teacher Ignacio Farías and several guest speakers (confirmed speakers include Moniek Driesse and Jens Lachmund), we will explore these questions. In doing so, we will make use of a variety of formats, such as lectures, in-depth discussion in small groups, as well as a skills trajectory in which you have the chance to experiment with the development and appreciation of multi-modal approaches in a hands-on manner and in relation to your own PhD project.

About the anchor teacher:

Ignacio Farías is Professor of Urban Anthropology, Director of the Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies and Host of the Lab of Multimodal Anthropology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research interests focus on current ecological and infrastructural transformations of cities and the associated epistemo-political challenges to the democratization of city-making. His most recent work explores the politics of environmental disruptions, from tsunamis over heat to noise, as well as urban ethnography as a mode of city making performed with others (designers, initiatives, concerned groups, policy makers) and by other means (moving from textual to material productions).