Anwesha Chakraborty and Alice Fubini co-chair a panel at the STS Italia conference in Bologna

At the 2023 edition of the STS Italia conference entitled "Interesting Worlds to come. Science & Technology Studies facing more-than-human challenges", the research Fellow Anwesha Chakraborty and the PhD student Alice Fubini will co-chair the panel "Unpacking the Entanglements of Governance with Technoscience: Is it an 'Interesting' Challenge in Addressing Good Governance?". A key purpose of this panel is to explore different aspects of the entanglements between technoscience and governance, considering that the quest for better governance requires not only more than human solutions, but also more human cooperation at different levels, as technologies could foster alliances between different human actors to address the crucial problems of today and the near future.

Among the paper givers, there will be two other members of the BIT-ACT project - the research fellow Fernanda Odilla and the country expert Germán Bidegain. They will present their ongoing research on the role of civil society action in improving transparency and curbing corruption in political financing, entitled "Innovative, but Feeble: Civil Society's Action and its Consequences for Political Financing in Uruguay".

Also the researcher Anwesha Chakraborty will present the paper "How Civil Society Organisations Can 'Afford' to Discuss Corruption: An Analysis of Three Indian Digital Initiatives". The paper aims to show how design-end affordances can be a useful analytical tool for understanding the role of civil society in fighting corruption.

Finally, Alice Fubini will present a paper entitled "Grassroots Technologies and Good Governance: Dynamics of Diffusion from Below of Digital Whistleblowing Platforms in the Anti-Corruption Arena". The findings suggest that the spread of whistleblowing platforms—and the subsequent promotion of anti-corruption practices—depends on the existence of an “infrastructure” that is both technological and social.

The Conference will be held in Bologna, Italy on June 28th-30th 2023 and is organized by the Italian Society of Science and Technology Studies, in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy and Communication and the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna.