In Touch

How does science shape the society I live in? 

In a time when scientific knowledge is increasingly politicised and contested, this track asks what it takes to maintain the connection between evidence and public life through openness, dialogue, and collective responsibility. 

Trust between science and society is built in small, patient ways: in classrooms, in communities, in conversations that take time. It's also something we choose to care for, especially now, when knowledge is contested and attention is fragmented. In 2026, the question isn't whether science matters in public life. It's how we keep the connection between evidence and society open, plural, and alive. 

This event track examines where science touches collective decision-making: the digital systems that mediate what we see, believe, and do; the movements pushing for transparency and accountability; and the emerging models that put public participation at the centre. It’s also a space to ask: whose voices are heard in science debate, and how do we create room for the ones that aren’t? 

If your work explores how research enters public life and influences how we live together, this is your event track. 

Topics may fit this track if they touch on, among others: 

• Scientific evidence in policy-making - local, national, international
• Trust, misinformation, and conspiracy thinking
• Ethics, regulation, and governance of new technologies
• Inequality, power structures, or public participation (citizen science)
• Crisis communication (e.g. pandemics, climate)
• The role of science in democracy and diplomacy 

How does science shape the infrastructure I rely on every day? 

In Touch here means recognising the hidden layers of science already woven into daily life. Every time you flick a switch, open an app, or trust a bridge to hold, you’re relying on the research you’ll never see. This event track makes that visible. 

You tapped a screen this morning, and food appeared at your door. You swiped your card to make a payment, and money moved out of your account. You crossed your city using infrastructure designed before you were born, powered by energy systems that will outlast you. Convenience has a backstory, and most of it is invisible. 

This track is about the science behind the systems we rely on every day without thinking about them: the platforms, grids, supply chains, algorithms, and materials. It asks how these systems are built, who they serve, what they cost, and how they shape the way we think and decide. It also looks at the path from the lab to our lives and how research becomes the infrastructure of tomorrow, through technology transfer, standardisation, and the slow, collaborative work of turning knowledge into something that holds.   

If your work makes the invisible visible, this is your event track.  

Topics may fit this track if they touch on, among others: 

• Innovation in energy, mobility, materials or supply chains
• Digital infrastructures, platforms, algorithms or AI systems
• The path from research to use
• Technologies and infrastructures that enable scientific research
• How artificial systems affect our thinking and decision-making 

How does science change my job and my education? 

While other event tracks ask how science shapes the world, this one asks how it shapes the people and technology doing the shaping. In Touch begins here: with the daily reality of those who learn, teach, and build inside systems that science is actively transforming. 

AI writes job applications, automates assessments, and is reshaping entire industries. At the same time, we’re still inside those industries, figuring out what this means for daily work. But alongside the disruption, something else is emerging: new tools for learning, more flexible career paths, and a growing conversation about what good work actually looks like. 

Meanwhile, the research system producing all this change is reckoning with its own structures. From inclusive classrooms to startup culture, from open-science movements to funding politics, this is where science touches careers, institutions, and livelihoods. 

If your work explores how scientific knowledge (re)shapes the world of work and education, this is your event track. 

Topics may fit this track if they touch on, among others: 

• Technology in our workplaces and places of learning
• Precarity, pressure or inequalities in science
• Science careers, entrepreneurship, or funding opportunities
• STEM education or inspiring future scientists
• “Behind the scenes” of science
• Personal perspectives from researchers 

How does science affect my health and my inner life? 

No event track is more literally In Touch than this one. The science of bodies and minds is where research doesn’t just inform; it intervenes. 

Your smartwatch tracks your heart rate. Your phone counts your steps. Somewhere, a biobank holds biological samples from millions of people whose data may, or may not, one day save your life. Health has become information, and information has become a new kind of intimacy. But in that intimacy lies possibility: more personal medicine, better understanding of our own biology, and new ways of caring for ourselves and each other.  

This event track is about the science that touches us at our most personal point: our bodies, our minds, and our sense of self. It asks how we understand our own biology, how medicine is changing through data and personalisation, and why (despite all the breakthroughs) therapy waitlists are longer than ever. It also makes room for the emotional and social dimensions of health, and for the perspectives of those whose experience has reshaped and expanded how medical research is done. 

If your work helps people understand their bodies, their minds, or how to care for them, this is your event track.  

Topics may fit this track if they touch on, among others:  

• Breakthroughs in medicine and health
• Diversity and inclusion in medical research
• Mental health or neuroscience
• How our bodies work on an anatomical, systems, cellular, or molecular level
• Patient perspectives, care practices or everyday well-being of the individual
• Health data or wearable health-tracking tools 

How does science connect me to the planet? 

Here, In Touch means something elemental: the soil we walk on, the air we breathe, the water we share. This event track invites us to feel that connection as a lived, reciprocal relationship with a planet that sustains us. 

We know more about the climate than any generation before, and we’re learning every day how to act on that knowledge. Ecosystems are shifting beneath our feet. Species are disappearing faster than we can name them, and scientists, communities, and activists are figuring out how to protect them. Somewhere between grief and action lies a relationship science can help us understand and strengthen: the one between us and the living world we depend on. 

This event track is about our entanglement with the ecosystems we’re part of, the species we share this planet with, and the agency and imagination that come with environmental knowledge. It also includes the material and systemic dimensions of that relationship: energy transitions, food systems, circular economies - the physical infrastructure through which environmental change becomes personal and actionable. 

If your work explores our relationship with the natural world, from the soil to the stars, this is your event track.  

Topics may fit this track if they touch on, among others: 

• Climate change or its impact on communities
• Ecology, biodiversity, or evolution
• Human–nature relationships
• Indigenous or non-Western ecological knowledge

How does science explore what we don’t know yet, and why does that matter? 

In the context of In Touch, this track holds a particular kind of intimacy: the relationship between a researcher and a question that may never be answered. The doubt, the wonder, the willingness to spend years in uncertainty. That’s as personal as science gets. 

Not everything worth knowing has found its application. Some of the most transformative breakthroughs in history—from quantum mechanics to CRISPR— began as bold questions whose impact no one could foresee. Fundamental research is the long game: slow, uncertain, often unglamorous, and absolutely essential. 

This event track is for science that doesn’t fit neatly into a societal touchpoint, because its point of contact hasn’t arrived yet. It’s also a space to ask what science is, and why the freedom to explore the unknown deserves protection. 

If your work lives at the edge of what we know, or asks why we pursue knowledge at all, this is your event track. 

Topics may fit this track if they touch on, among others: 

• Fundamental research and the long horizons of discovery
• The origins of life, matter, and the universe
• Curiosity-driven science and the value of knowledge without immediate application
• Philosophy, epistemology, and what it means to know
• Dark matter, cosmology, and the 95% we can't yet explain
• Who gets to wonder: access to fundamental inquiry across borders and backgrounds 

How do I experience, see, and make sense of science? 

This is the event track where In Touch becomes more literal in a different sense: the textures, rhythms, and images through which science is not just understood but felt. 

Before you understood climate change, you felt it: in a heatwave that wouldn’t break, in a photograph of a bleached reef. Before you grasped how your brain works, you watched a documentary that made it visceral. The first encounter with science is rarely a paper or a statistic. It’s a sound, an image, a story that gets under your skin—like a TikTok reaching more people than a journal article ever could. 

This event track is for events where the experience of science is the touchpoint. It explores how we perceive, interpret, and communicate complexity. It asks what happens when research leaves paper and enters the realm of experience: when sound, image, movement, and story become ways of knowing. It looks at the media systems that shape our attention, the technologies that alter perception, and the creative practices that help us see differently. 

If your work lives at the intersection of science, sensory experience, narrative, or media, this is your event track. 

Topics may fit this track if they touch on, among others: 

• Science communication, storytelling and public engagement
• Collaborations between artists, designers and scientists
• Visualisation, sound and the sensory experience of science
• Media platforms, attention economies and viral knowledge
• Speculative design and imaginative futures
• AI-generated content and the question of authenticity
• Emotion, wonder and the feel of scientific discovery