Candida Sanchez Burmester co-organizes symposium “Escaping the (nano)bubble.”

The symposium takes place in Paris on November 8-10, and investigates the role of replications in scientific controversies.

The conference is sponsored by the ERC-synergy project NanoBubbles and will take place at the Université Paris Cité. The event is centered around two topics: replications and nanoparticles accessing the cell cytosol. This interdisciplinary symposium combines talks by scientists working in nanobiology with talks by researchers who have studied replications from a historical, sociological, anthropological, or philosophical perspective. Our aim is to provide a space for informal exchange where researchers from different disciplines can learn from each other’s work and experiences. On the project’s website, you can find a more detailed description and program of the event and sign up for registration.

Replication is a classic topic of STS research from the 1970s and 1980s. However, STS insights into replication are not well known in other fields despite growing concerns about a ‘reproducibility crisis’ in science, while STS scholars (with some exceptions) have been slow to address the reproducibility crisis, fraud, denialism, and other 21st  century issues related to replication. We would therefore like to invite STS researchers to the symposium to share their classic and recent findings on replication with nanobio-scientists, who are facing various difficulties in replicating experiments on nanoparticles accessing the cytosol. This conference could also be an opportunity for STS researchers to engage in recent debates on reproducibility and scientific misconduct, institutionalized replication projects, and replication efforts in a technoscientific field.

Feel free to share this invitation in your networks, including Master students. There is also the option to present posters related to at least one of the topics of the conference.

The conference is organized by Maha Said, Zoé Toure and Candida Sánchez Burmester. Maha Said is a molecular biologist involved in the project’s replication efforts, Zoé Toure is the project manager and takes care of the logistics of the event, and Candida Sánchez Burmester is an STS researcher and member of MUSTS using ethnographic and historical methods.