Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) is a dynamic landscape of research. Its diverse pathways criss-cross disciplines and academic territories, relating to each other through a series of connected interests and commitments. Addressing and rethinking subjectivity has been one of its central focus and earliest contributions, particularity when confronting Science with a capital S (the bastion of objectivity, the foundation of fact) and the purportedly asubjective materiality of technological artefacts. Subjectivity has been called upon to explore the role of the (gendered) subjects of science, the formation of their objects and their objectivity, and to show how marginalised and ‘otherised’ subjectivities have historically been excluded from the allegedly disinterested achievements of genuine science. These are well-known endeavours, still ongoing and grounding much of contemporary work. However, at the heart of this special issue is a particular matter of care: the sociopolitical significance of studying scientific and technological processes and the ways in which these entangle with the worlds and lives of humans and other beings. In other words, the view that STS interventions not only study but also act within technoscientific universes. This approach entails partiality and accountability and a subtle engagement with critique, within a careful relationship where the terrains in which we become are intermingled in our interventions. This perspective also marks the way in which we enact and connect with subjectivity in this issue – a term with many entries and dimensions, a multifaceted and sometimes overused word that still holds promise for dialogue, for thinking and for living.

The contributions gathered here pay attention to how nature-cultural worlds of science and technology affect or even transform subjectivities through ways of existing and thinking, forms of embodiment, experiencing and relating. We draw attention both to how subjectivities are remade in specific technoscientific settings and meanings, and to how different subjectivities re-tool technologies in different ways. We use the word re-tool carefully but intentionally to emphasise the re-making of a usable tool; one that has become inseparable from living assemblages and often has a life of its own. Such processual changes and shifts in subjectivities within technoscientific worlds happen all around us: in the lives of misrepresented forms of being – such as domesticated food crops and the human relations with them approached in Ruth Mendum's contribution; in marginalised labours – as the ones involved in forms of transnational surrogate mothering rendered possible by new reproductive technologies studied by Kalindi Vora; in silenced experiences – like technologically mediated hearing illuminated by Alexa Schriempf's approach to communicability; in the affective atmospheres and regimes of ‘anticipation’ of the future generated at the conjuncture of contemporary technoscience and everyday life, exposed by Vincanne Adams, Michelle Murphy and Adele Clarke's contribution; through the marketing of haptic technology and the seduction of knowledge-as-touch, as highlighted by María Puig de la Bellacasa; as well as in divisions of labour – who does what – as Wenda Bauchspies shows in her examination of the production of rice and everyday life in West Africa.

All these contributions are diagnosing how possibilities are opening and closing for liveable worlds. They address what is happening here and now while trying to make and explore alternative connections and relations. We also invite rethinking the very grounds in which we speak from: how much is the speculative impulse for the ‘possible’ expressed in the very title of our issue a feature of the technoscientific spirit of our time? (Adams, Murphy and Clarke; Puig de la Bellacasa); which effects remain under-explored when technologies are transferred and embedded in different bodies? (Vora; Schriempf; Bauchspies); and what residual categories of subjectivity are yet to be addressed? (Mendum; Schriempf; Bauchspies). The issues’ finale is a ‘patchwork’, a collection of short statements by G. Bowker, S. Harding, A.M. Mol, B. Subramaniam and S.L. Star, addressing and exploring subjectivity and FSTS. In addition this issue includes four book reviews of recent scholarship at the boundary of FSTS and subjectivity. We want to heartedly thank all the contributors: the book reviewers, the anonymous peer reviewers, the authors, and the Subjectivity editorial board for their participation in helping us to interlace ideas and to rediscover the many different horizons opened by feminist engagements with subjectivity, science and technology.