Modes of political problematisations in environmental STS: quantitative and qualitative patterns in the implication and explication of normative premises in conference contributions

STS is strong in analysing the practices and promises of science and technology, showing their normative and political situatedness, implications and consequences. Recently, STS has started to turn to empirical studies of social scientific methods (Law/Ruppert 2013) and of STS's own methods (Lippert/Douglas-Jones 2019). This paper pushes the emerging reflexive scrutiny of STS's own knowledge production by focusing on the implicit and explicit normative and political textual positioning of and in contributions to STS conferences, specifically abstracts and titles of conference papers. We recognise that textual work necessarily cannot make all political and normative implications explicit. Authors partially make choices of what to explicate but their writing is also shaped by writing conventions, emerging genres and canons, within (or beyond) STS (Hyland 2004; Biagioli 2006).