Ulrike Felt's acceptance statement.
I am deeply honored and genuinely moved to receive the John Desmond Bernal Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science. 4S and EASST have been my intellectual homes for four decades now. Looking back, my path from a PhD in high-energy physics into STS was anything but straightforward. But it was always driven by a fascination with the world-making forces assembling around science and technology – and by STS, allowing me to shift perspectives and see things differently. Nothing along this path was ever an individual achievement. What I value most are the many people, across disciplines, institutions, and cultural environments, who accompanied me along the way, offering insights, challenging me, sharing their doubts, and making thinking together both demanding and profoundly joyful. For me, STS at its best is driven not only by critique, but also by curiosity, generosity, participatory thinking, and a readiness to engage difficult and consequential questions together. One of the greatest privileges of my career has been helping to nurture such forms of collective intellectual life, institutionally and personally, while continuously learning from younger generations whose questions and courage keep renewing our field. In today’s world, I believe STS matters more than ever. Not because it provides simple answers, but because it helps us remain attentive to entanglements and inequalities, to power relations, to the kinds of (sometimes troubling) futures being built, and to the fragilities of the democratic structures and practices that are so essential to shaping our worlds. I therefore accept this prize with great gratitude – and warmly thank the 4S Bernal Committee and 4S for this recognition – but also as a reminder of the collective responsibility we share as scholars, teachers, and members of institutions to contribute to more reflective and careful engagements with science and technology in the uneven and friction-filled worlds we inhabit.
For more information see: John Desmond Bernal Award
