Cover photo for the conference catalogue Drift. Sink. Emerge. Repeat. Diffracting the Critical through Multimodal Submersions

To care for multimodal works in STS is to recognize their fragility—not in the sense of weakness, but in their resistant potential to the dominant infrastructures of academic legitimacy, that favors textual permanence, skepticism, and a refusal to be swept away. Multimodal scholarship, in its collaborative, multimedia-based, and inventive dimensions, does not thrive on detachment. It calls instead for submersion—for an entangled, situated, and processual way of engaging with knowledges and materialities. And yet, in its diffractive nature, multimodal works remain vulnerable, as they unsettle the text-based infrastructures that have long functioned as stronghold of conventional scholarship. Text, stored in journals and books or circulating across repositories, is safeguarded against loss and doubt, while multimodal forms—video, sound, installation, interactive media—often risk erasure, misunderstanding, and exclusion. Caring for the multimodal, at STS HUB 2025 and elsewhere, means the challenge of curating and hosting these contributions as part of a living and evolving project.

To address this challenge, we initiated an experimental publication process in a radical open access format, drawing on the research practices of one of the working group members. Caring for multimodal work means ensuring that it counts—that it is accounted for, cited, and made available in ways that sustain its impact beyond the event of its presentation. Publishing these works in a catalogue is not an attempt to capture their full multimodal complexity, but rather a recognition that their closest available format of valuation is that of the artwork. The exhibition catalogue serves this purpose: not as a mere record, but as a way of extending the life and accessibility of these works into the networks of scholarship, giving them a citability that allows for their repetition, for their REPEAT in cycles of knowledge-making.