Venturing Outside the Comfort Zone: The 20th Anniversary of STS Italia, a Project Born Out of Detachment, Torque, and Diaspora

Although none of us members of the STS Italia Steering Board is new to spokesperson challenges, it's difficult describing the mixture of anxiety and excitement that accompanies the writing of a piece for Tecnoscienza celebrating the 20 th anniversary of the Italian Association of Science and Technology Studies.Anxiety is rooted in the awareness that any attempt at reconstructing the history of STS Italia since its inception would inevitably do wrong to many.If any, such an enterprise should be a collective one, and cannot be only consigned to a presidential address.On the other hand, excitement spreads from the possibility to share our vision of what STS Italia has meant for us over these twenty years, and how we see its future.In highlighting some aspects, we do not intend to make others invisible, but rather invite the whole community to connect the dots in a sort of serious game.We see these dots as emerging networks: constellations of possibility, waiting to connect.For these points to become actual networks, they must form arcs: links that spark communication, enable collaboration, and share ideas.With every new connection a node can sustain, attraction grows, trust deepens, and relationships strengthen.As any serious game, this is meant to strengthen a sense of belonging, while at the same time leaving space for including the underrepresented, the unexpected, the unnoticed.And it is intended to provide a space for reflexivity while inducing amusement.If we had to portray what STS Italia has been for us (and -we dare to say -a few others) over these twenty years in one sentence, we would say it is a project born out of detachment, torque, diaspora.The Association was founded in 2005, when the project of raising a community that could study science and technology from a social and humanistic perspective was an act of detachment from the institutionalization of disciplines in force in Italy.It might be worth recalling that while the 2010 reform of higher education probably exacerbated the situation, such discipline-based scaffold -and in particular the sharp distinction between Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) -in Italy goes back to the Fascist regime and its 1923 educational reform.A disciplinary (and disciplining!)system that has represented a sort of "torque" and continues to constitute one of the reasons of the delays of the Italian research system vis--vis international debates.In this institutional landscape, STS Italia has constituted for many in Italy and beyond an opportunity to connect through SSH sensitivities to those debates that in these last decades have spanned from nanotechnologies to blockchains, from biotechnologies to machine Venturing Outside the Comfort Zone: The 20 th Anniversary of STS Italia, a Project Born Out of Detachment, Torque, and Diaspora