Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2 (2016), 1-2 DOI:10.17351/ests2016.95 Copyright © 2016 (Daniel Lee Kleinman). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at estsjournal.org. Ongoing Engagement of Science, Technology and Society DANIEL LEE KLEINMAN, EDITOR 1 KATIE VANN, MANAGING EDITOR 2 Editorial As we write this, public higher education in the United States continues to be battered. Governors from a number of US states have attacked the value of the kinds of education those of us in areas like science and technology studies offer our students, and a number of political leaders have questioned the virtue of professorial tenure and thereby academic freedom. At the same time, we live in a complex world filled with injustice, where phenomena beg to be diagnosed and addressed. In this context, ESTS can be a vital voice, addressing issues of broad societal relevance in ways that are accessible to a wide readership and allowing scholars to realize the value of academic freedom by pushing the boundaries of theory and method and sometimes making unpopular arguments. Our newest articles deliver on the promise of ESTS and begin to indicate the outlines of a horizon before us. In “Finding Political Opportunities,” Anna Lamprou and David Hess explore the constraints that civil society organizations face when they seek to have political influence in the EU nanotechnology policy realm, and Lamprou and Hess identify strategies for opening political opportunity structures. Theodoros Kyriakides provides an analysis of a Cyprian patient organization and the tactics it used to make a particular illness—Thalassaemia—“visible” to government officials and the public. A third paper published in our current set, David Mercer’s “The WHO EMF Project,” investigates the ways in which a crucial global institution—the World Health Organization—has worked to “harmonize” science-related safety standards across national boundaries. Finally, in our “Debates/ Interactions” section we have a provocative set of pieces by Brian Martin, Max Liboiron, and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, each of whom considers how STS scholars navigate the complicated terrain they traverse when becoming actively engaged in controversies, and how they might do so with positive impact. Of course, what distinguishes STS as an interdisciplinary societal project are the conceptual and methodological tools it brings to bear on the description and analysis of complex social phenomena. Thus, we all benefit from a venue where new concepts and methods can be tested and debated. In this context, our first set of new papers is rounded off by a “Considering 1 Daniel Lee Kleinman, Email: daniel.kleinman@wisc.edu 2 Katie Vann, Email: estsjournal@gmail.com