As a critical analytic, “legibility” considers the ongoing work of translation, classification, and inscription through which socio-technical worlds are made readable to institutions, algorithms, states, and markets. Often overlooked as a condition that enables governance, legibility unsettles dominant narratives of transparency and accountability by foregrounding what is rendered visible, what is obscured, and at what cost. Informed by histories of colonialism, militarism, and racialisation, technoscientific projects generate uneven conditions of legibility, where some lives, bodies, and environments are made knowable and others are rendered illegible, ungovernable, or expandable. Legibility is therefore intimately entangled with extraction, surveillance, classification, and control—raising questions about whose worlds are made readable, whose resist or refuse legibility, and what counts as knowledge in the first place. At the same time, legibility is not simply an imposition or a violence: it may also involve strategic visibility, counter-inscription, or refusal. Legibility invites us to rethink epistemology (what can be known, and by whom), materiality documents, data, bodies as inscribed objects), and responsibility (accountability, transparency, opacity as protection), opening alternative perspectives on technoscience. At a time of cascading algorithmic governance, legal transformation, and datafication, egibility offers STS a critical vocabulary to think with.
For the inaugural 2027 Sydney STS Symposium, we invite interdisciplinary contributions across fields, including:
Scientific and technical practices: measurement, classification, standardisation,
inscription as epistemic/experimental practice
Labour, materiality, and temporality: the in/visible labour of documentation, recordkeeping,
bureaucratic inscription, legibility as ongoing process
Media, data, and digital legibility: datafication, algorithmic classification, platform
transparency, surveillance, content moderation
Bodies and legibility: medical inscription, bodily documentation, identity papers,
gendered and racialised legibility
(Settler-)colonial and postcolonial legibility: census-making, indigenous data
sovereignty, strategic opacity and refusal
Law governance and jurisdiction: legal inscription, evidentiary standards, regulatory
legibility, rights and recognition
Ecological and more-than-human legibility: multispecies relations, soil
remediation, restoration ecology
Please send an abstract (200 words) for a 15-minute presentation and a brief bio (100 words) to Lisa O’Sullivan (lisa.osullivan@sydney.edu.au) by 30 August 2026.
