A few years ago, I realised that there was a fantastic network in the Netherlands bringing together all young scholars in science and technology studies. Imagine a graduate college across all the universities and institutes of a country. When the National NL conference was announced, I had no idea that it was also the 40th anniversary of this venerable institution. Teun Zuiderent-Jerak and Sally Wyatt confirmed it during the introduction: the WTMC (the Dutch acronym for the Netherlands Research School for Science, Technology & Modern Culture) is a generous and capacious organisation. It also has a growing influence: four university rectors in the Netherlands are alumni of the school.
The first panel session of the “Health and care in times of AI” track was fabulous — as was the rest of the day. Renate Baumgartner was presenting here her ongoing work on an AI tool designed to support COPD patients in their daily self-care and symptom management, elaborating on its development, the participatory design process, and preliminary feedback from both clinicians and patients.
The plenary session zeroed in on the political mission that many STS scholars feel compelled to accept, and it probed the methods — and occasionally the reluctance — to “unstuck” STS so it can operate as a genuine force for social transformation in moments of crisis. The brilliant presentation by Indian scholar Annapurna Mamidipuri on craft as a form of knowledge provided a vivid, concrete case of how responsibilities toward the “Global South” can be engaged with in practical ways. My neighbor in the audience, a professor from Radboud, shared a brief oral history of STS in the Netherlands and the practice of embedding social science within scientific institutions. He recalled how, in the 1970s, scientists who shifted toward critical studies of their own fields were often retained and integrated into their home institutions to provide an ethical grounding for research. His own career is woven into that institutional history. Much of his current work examines the issue of errors in scientific publications and the institutional responses that follow.
This plenary session, and the unusually high quality of the papers, were refreshing and invigorating. The Netherlands has certainly one of the most lively and diverse communities in Europe.