Sociotechnical Change: Tracing Flows, Languages, and Stakes Across Diverse Cases| Creating a Language of and for Sociotechnical Change: Interdisciplinary Sites, Stakes, and Senses of Transformation—Introduction

Abstract

The study of sociotechnical change—differences achieved through human-nonhuman relations—is a core concern of many disciplines and communities. Even a desire to prevent change needs an understanding of which differences are more or less likely, achievable, or lasting. Whether as sites (places) or agents (instruments) of change, sociotechnical systems offer a rich set of aspirations, forces, dynamics, and outcomes for seeing how relationships between people and materials create, resist, interpret, endure, or ignore differences. Nurtured through the interdisciplinary research group Media as SocioTechnical Systems, this article and the forum that it anchors examines “sociotechnical change” from a variety of historical, disciplinary, methodological, and normative perspectives, offering short accounts of change intended to be complementary, generative, provocative, and playful.