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, legibility 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.
