In 2022, Tadeusz Rudek and Katarzyna Rabiej-Sienicka launched the Capturing Invisible Lab Seminar Series as a space for intellectual exchange, critical reflection, and conversations with scholars working at the intersection of sociology and Science, Technology and Society studies. Four years later, we are delighted to celebrate the 4th anniversary of our meetings.
Over the past years, the seminars have become a meeting place for researchers interested in the visible and invisible forces shaping contemporary sociotechnical worlds: infrastructures, imaginaries, conflicts, futures, risks, institutions, markets, and forms of knowledge that often remain hidden, even though they operate right before our eyes. In short, we study what quietly organizes our lives.
In the 2025/2026 academic year, we continued this mission by bringing together an exceptional group of scholars whose work shows how societies imagine, design, contest, govern, and seek to inhabit and practise technological futures. This year’s programme took us through design, bureaucracy, longevity biotechnologies, risk communication during war, postindustrial transformations, food systems, space infrastructures, the relations between data and law, and the future of the Baltic Sea.
We opened the series on 23 October 2025 with a talk by Sara del Nido Budish from Harvard University, titled “Staying Wide Awake: Design, Systems Thinking, and Conflict as a Site for Learning”. The seminar invited us to think about conflict not only as a problem to be solved, but also as a space for learning, institutional reflection, and collective redesign.
On 13 November 2025, we hosted Nayum Eom from Harvard University, who presented “The State’s Moral Stamp of Approval: Bureaucratic Moral Brokerage in the Eldercare Tech Market”. The seminar explored how bureaucratic institutions not only regulate markets, but also participate in constructing their moral legitimacy.
On 27 November 2025, Oliwia Mandrela from Jagiellonian University presented “Extending Life, Reshaping Society: A Systematic Literature Review of Longevity Biotechnology’s Social Aspects”. Her seminar showed that longevity biotechnologies are not only a biomedical field, but also a social and political project that raises important questions about inequality, ageing, expectations, and the future of human life.
On 4 December 2025, Kyrylo Beskorovainyi from Harvard University and The Kunsht joined us with the question: “How might we communicate risk during wars and social crises?”. The seminar addressed one of the most urgent questions of our time: how to communicate uncertainty, danger, and responsibility when social trust is fragile and public life is marked by crisis.
The spring semester began with Marlise Schneider from Technische Universität München, who on 22 January 2026 presented “‘Let’s bury the term Rust Belt and call it the Silicon Heartland’: how innovation ‘others’ by (re)imagining presents, constructing futures, and disregarding pasts of postindustrial places”. Her seminar examined how innovation narratives construct certain places as backward, transitional, or ready for the future — and what we lose when the past is too easily overwritten by promises of technological renewal.
On 12 March 2026, Pedro Trus from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń presented “Invisible Incumbents: Regime Power and Corporate Absence in Polish Protein Dependency”. The seminar focused on hidden forms of power in food systems and on actors whose influence often remains structurally present, yet publicly invisible.
On 26 March 2026, we hosted Nina Klimburg-Witjes from the University of Vienna, who presented “Towards a Topography of Earth–Space Relations: European Dis/Integration and Future Visions in the New Space Age”. The seminar invited us to rethink outer space not as a distant frontier, but as a deeply terrestrial political, infrastructural, and imaginative project.
On 23 April 2026, Anna Szołucha from Jagiellonian University presented “Life in the SpaceX Simulation: Exploring the Contemporary Company Town at Starbase”. Her talk explored how corporate space projects transform not only technological futures, but also everyday life, labour, territory, and community.
On 7 May 2026, Kebene Wodajo from Oxford University and the University of St. Gallen joined us with the talk “Of Datalegality and Invisibilised Worlds”. The seminar addressed the entanglements of data, law, visibility, and justice, asking how data regimes make some worlds legible while rendering others invisible.
The series concluded on 21 May 2026 with a talk by Tadeusz Rudek from Jagiellonian University, “Sea Society(ies): Constructing the Future of the Baltic Sea — Global, EU, National or Local? Assemblages of Futures Across Scales”. The talk reflected on how to study different visions of the Baltic Sea: how they emerge, travel, collide, and stabilize across global, European, national, and local scales.
Together, this year’s seminars demonstrate the continuing ambition of Capturing Invisible Lab: to create a space in which we can carefully examine how futures are imagined, how technologies gain legitimacy, how risks are communicated, how institutions shape markets, and how invisible worlds become socially and politically significant.
The 2025/2026 seminar year is also a bridge toward something special. Together with Oliwia Mandrela, we are already working on an exceptional anniversary programme for 2026/2027, when the Capturing Invisible Lab Seminar Series will celebrate its 5th anniversary.
Five years of meetings, conversations, debates, experiments, and exchanges with cutting-edge scholarship at the intersection of science, technology, and society — this is a milestone we are truly looking forward to. We warmly invite everyone interested in STS, sociotechnical futures, imaginaries, innovation, infrastructures, risk, and the politics of knowledge to join us in the upcoming seminars.
Let us continue capturing the invisible — together!