We are happy to announce that our RTG member, Sophia Leipert, won the Short Story, Flash Fiction, and Poetry Competition at EASST2026, „More than now: exploring resilient futures“. With her Text ‘Fifty or Sixty Metres Into the Depth ’, she convinced the jury in the short story category. Her text will be published in an upcoming issue of the EASST Review and in the October issue of the Kraków magazine JUTRO.

Written in response to the conference theme, the story builds on ethnographic fieldwork in ports and asks what it might mean to imagine a future of automation from the perspective of the bodies that have to live through it. It follows Peter, an STS crane operator whose eighteen years of looking down from sixty metres above the quay come to an end when his body can no longer keep up, tracing what happens when the port’s promise of smoother, more resilient futures meets the ordinary realities of ageing, failing machines, improvised repairs and the labour of keeping things going.

A link to the text will be published here in November.