Workshop: Scaling in the Biosciences

by | Jul 6, 2026 | Workshop

Call for Papers

Call for Papers deadline: 3 August 2026 | First workshop (online): early September | Second workshop (in-person): early December 

What does the biological bring to scale, and scale to the biological?

We are seeking contributions to a workshop exploring the topic of scaling in the biosciences with a view to developing papers for a potential Special Issue in the journal BioSocieties.

From single DNA nucleotides and gene loci to the growth and collapse of populations and the global spread of species, biology has, in one sense, shown a mastery of scaling. In another sense, however, the biological is radically non-scalable (Tsing, 2012). Life consistently resists human efforts to “scale up” or “scale down” its complex processes. Biological parameters rarely scale linearly, there are mismatches between different scales of life, and scaling is rarely reducible to quantifiable and additive processes (Tsing, 2012; Landecker, 2016); Liboiron and Lepawsky, 2022). This reality confronts biologists and bioengineers at every turn—whether they are seeking to downscale the physical processes of cells to build organ-on-a-chip models, construct massive industrial bioprocessing facilities, or model metabolic processes across the diverse ways that different species utilize energy. The scales in question for biology are vast and vastly different, and at the same time constantly brought together.

Nevertheless, scale has become a key imperative of research and bioindustry. Across the contemporary biosciences, appeals to “scale” and “scaling up” are everywhere, often mobilized in service of “growing the bioeconomy.” Across policy documents, laboratory benches, venture capital pitches, and public discourses, a crowded and confused rhetoric of scale has emerged. Scale is simultaneously invoked as a technological milestone (e.g., the literage of a bioreactor), an economic imperative (achieving market parity), a societal ambition (democratizing biomanufacturing), and a geopolitical project (national bio-sovereignty). From this perspective, its logics appear messy, overlapping, and frequently contradictory. By interrogating these contradictions, we aim to move past the hype of “scaling up” to explore the critical frameworks needed to understand how scaling actually happens—and frequently fails—at the intersection of life, capital, and governance today.

Contributions

This workshop and subsequent Special Issue will take this complexity and multiplicity as its starting point. We seek contributions from Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars, anthropologists, geographers, and allied disciplines that explore scale not as a neutral, self-evident metric of linear growth or a pre-existing ladder of dimensions. Rather, we seek to interrogate scaling as a contested, material, relational, and ideological process across the biological sciences. We will build upon and extend existing STS accounts of scale—as actively produced, performed, and stabilized through sociotechnical networks, material objects, and institutional practices.

We invite empirical, theoretical, and methodological papers that address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

Materialities, processes, and theories of “scaling” life

  • How do we ‘do’ scale in relation to the biological world?
  • What can STS learn about scaling from biosciences and vice versa?
  • What kinds of relationalities and materialities induce, inhibit, or disrupt the capacity for scale-ability within biological engineering and the biological sciences?
  • How do bio-scientists and bioengineers navigate tensions, complexities, and mismatches of moving across different scales?
  • What alternatives to received notions and logics of scale—and those currently dominant in the STS literature—become visible when we look closely at the biosciences?

Acceleration, affect, immobility

  • How do the rapid timelines of venture capital and digital bio-automation mesh with the slower rhythms of biological growth, regulatory oversight, and infrastructural development? How are scale and acceleration connected in the biosciences?
  • Are there affective dimensions to scaling? What does it feel like “to scale”—or to fail to scale—for scientists, entrepreneurs, and lab workers?
  • How does foregrounding multispecies entanglements challenge rigid, linear design-led modes of approaching scalable systems?
  • Whose situated labour needs to be slowed down or held still (immobile) to enable global mobility and scalability of biological data and materials

Political economies, ideologies and governance of scale

  • Why is the imperative to “scale up” seductive to funders, policymakers, and venture capitalists, and how does this desire format scientific priorities?
  • How do ideologies and promises of scale function as modes of governance, and how do architectures of regulation evolve to govern by and for scale?
  • What are the impacts of biological ‘scaling up’ on communities and environments? And how is the “devaluation”—the stripping of local, situated context from biological materials or data— that is necessary to render them as interchangeable, “scalable” commodities resisted locally?

Process

We intend to submit a proposal for a Special Issue on scale to the journal BioSocieties. The deadline for this is 1 October 2026. If our proposal is accepted, manuscripts will be submitted for peer review by 1 April 2027. This timeline drives our proposed approach.

We request prospective authors submit a 1000-word abstract outlining their topic, approach, methods and contribution to us by 3 August 2026. We will notify acceptance by 17 August, and successful applicants will be invited to an online meeting in early September 2026 to meet each other, introduce papers to the wider group, receive feedback, and help us shape the BioSocieties proposal.

If our proposal is successful, we will hold an in-person workshop in Edinburgh in early December 2026 to present and discuss papers as we work towards the April deadline. If unsuccessful, we remain committed to an in-person workshop, though the date may change. We are unfortunately unable to support costs of travel to Edinburgh. However, if your work speaks to this topic but you are unable to travel to Edinburgh, please contact Reuben Message and Sophie Stone to discuss alternative forms of involvement.

Please submit abstracts to: Reuben Message (rmessage@ed.ac.uk) and Sophie Stone (sophie.stone@ed.ac.uk).

This initiative is being organised by Reuben Message, Sophie Stone, Rob Smith, Jane Calvert and Marie-Louise Wöhrle and is supported by the UKRI funded programme Engineered Genetic Control Systems for Advanced Therapeutics (BB/Y008545/1).

 

Selected References

  • Davies, G., Frow, E. & Leonelli, S. (2013) Bigger, faster, better? Rhetorics and practices of large-scale research in contemporary bioscience. BioSocieties, 8, 386-396.
  • Evans, C.L. (2023) Against Scale. Available at: https://www.growbyginkgo.com/2023/05/01/against-scale/
  • Laurent, B. & Violle, A. (2025) Scaling Up or Deep Scaling? Problematizing the Scalability Imperative in Technological Innovation. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 50, 419-446.
  • Landecker, H. (2016) Antibiotic resistance and the biology of history. Body & Society, 22(4): 19–52.
  • Lenton, T.M., Dutreuil, S. and Latour, B. (2020) ‘Life on Earth is hard to spot’, The Anthropocene Review, 7(3), pp. 248–272.
  • Liboiron, M., and Lepawsky, J. (2022). Discard studies : wasting, systems, and power. The MIT Press.
  • Meckin, R. (2024) Self-similarity and synthetic biology: a possible fractal anticipation. Journal of Responsible Innovation, 11, 0.
  • Parthasarathy, S. (2025) Beware the drive to scale technology. Science, 389, eaeb3069.
  • Pfotenhauer, S. et al. (2022) The politics of scaling. Soc Stud Sci, 52, 3-34.
  • Strathern, M. (1995) The Relation: Issues in complexity and scale. Prickly Pear Press, Cambridge.
  • Tsing, A.L. (2012) On Nonscalability. Common Knowledge, 18, 505-524.