Special Issue Introduction: Embarking on adventures

One of the central objectives of STS Encounters is to support the broad variety of STS research and communities, both in Denmark and abroad. Indeed, we see the field of STS as a delightfully heterogeneous assortment of different approaches, concepts and cases, which in their sheer diversity makes being a researcher and student of STS something like an adventure. While you may know where to begin, say with familiar theories or working alongside treasured colleagues, it is quite difficult to predict where STS will take you, and rightly so! Embarking on such adventurous journeys with and alongside STS exposes us to different research topics, approaches and concepts, but also to different articulations, positions and genres. In short, different ways of being and doing STS. Or different ways of being in STS and being an STS researcher. This special issue is a celebration of the uncertain yet thrilling adventures of being and doing STS, staged as a collection of five recent professorial inaugural lectures. In some ways, publishing such lec-tures has become something of a minor tradition. Over the years, STS Encounters has published inaugural lectures by, in order of publication, Torben Elgaard Jensen (2013), Klaus Hoeyer (2014), Signe Vikkelsø (2016), Brit Ross Winthereik (2018), and Mette Nordahl Svendsen (2018). Often to great fanfare (or so we tell ourselves...).In the spirit of adventure, we believe that inaugural lectures are not only interesting but also highly relevant for the STS community in several ways. First, they are usually written for and delivered in spoken form and thus carry a relaxed and informal tone. Eschewing the disciplined rigor and largely pre-defined structures that neatly follow the beaten path of more traditional research publications, inaugural lectures offer a more intimate, personal, and often playful narrative of and engagement with the complexities and complications of doing research. They foreground the personal trajectories and idiosyncrasies of living in and with STS that are often manifestly absent in the classical article or book chapter. Second, they often provide historical accounts. They exhibit a process of becoming and becoming-with. They shed light on the various contin-gencies, material, practical, conceptual as well as social, institutional, political, cultural aspects that have played parts in the speakers’ journey to their present place and position. They are accounts and about being accountable. The telling of such stories, although they are never full accounts, invites us to think about circumstances and what makes up and pieces together the becoming of a professor in STS. Which is, of course, never just an individual achievement. It takes a village, as it were.Third, such lectures also often express programmatic declarations and ambitions that point towards possible and/or desirable futures, as much for the researchers themselves as the field of STS. In so doing, they also take stock of the field and present a version of the STS as it is experienced by the speaker. A version that the reader may think with and relate to, and that perhaps opens up to new ways of thinking, doing and relating to STS. Caught between the past, present, and future of being in and with STS offers a stimulating temporal playground from which to experience the field anew, or to revisit long-standing issues or interests from a different perspective. We might even suggest that the very diversity of the lectures published in this issue evince the profound and professional enjoyment of embarking on the adventures of STS. Thus, we invite you along for the ride and we hope that reading and thinking with this collection will provide, if nothing else, a glimpse of a field both anchored in strong traditions and generous communities yet always staying in motion, charting new trajectories and drafting new practices of creative, critical, and caring forms of research for the future