Eurograd message

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to anoounce a call fro abstract for a special issue of
Tecnoscienza titled “When theory meets practice. Entanglements of ageing
and technology at the cross-roads of STS and Age Studies”

(see the call below and in attachment).

Please spread the word and don’t hesitate to contact the guest editors
if you have any further questions.


All the best,

The editorial team of TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science &
Technology Studies

_


CALL FOR PAPERS - Special Issue

When theory meets practice.
Entanglements of ageing and technology at the cross-roads of STS and Age
Studies

Guest Editors:

Michela Cozza (University of Mälardalen, Västerås, Sweden)
Britt Östlund (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden)
* Alexander Peine (Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherland)

Deadline for abstract submissions: December 10th, 2019

In recent years, ageing and later life have started to be relevant
topics in STS (Cozza et al. 2017; Peine et al. 2015; Sánchez-Criado et
al. 2014; Urban 2017). While social and critical gerontologists have
long debunked biomedical models of ageing to show that ageing “is both a
bio-demographic reality and a social construction reacting back into
each other” (Katz 2014: 18), materiality and embodiments of ageing have
only received limited attention (Latimer and López Gomez 2019). Some
exceptions can be found in feminist technoscience (Joyce and Mamo 2006;
McNeil and Roberts 2012) with studies, for example, on vision and
visuality of technoscience enacting the ageing human body (Åsberg and
Lykke 2010) or works engaged with biomedicine and patient experience of
becoming older (Roberts 2006). Such attention on social and material
aspects of ageing points to where STS scholars have started to engage
with critical gerontologists and explore the co-constitution of ageing
and technology (Peine and Neven 2019). Such studies have critiqued, in
particular, the widespread assumptions among policy makers,
health-oriented researchers and other practitioners that ageing and
technologies are separable, and have instead explored the assemblages
and enactment through which they exist only in relation to each other
(Joyce et al. 2017; Wanka and Gallistl 2018).

The entanglement between ageing and technologies can be put into the
foreground by focusing on design. Design can be defined as “an
intervention in practice” (Shove 2014: 41) through which designers
configure materials, ideologies, and competences that affect the
everyday life. When thinking on the ageing population and the
unprecedented diffusion of technologies made with older people as the
target group, the relevance of design emerges straightforwardly (Cozza
et al. 2018). Some design researchers have urged to open the black box
of technologies of this kind and analyse the configuring of their social
and material components by applying STS theories (Cozza et al. 2019;
Frennert and Östlund 2014; Östlund et al. 2015). The critical
potential of STS may help to challenge assumptions on technology,
ageing, and later life and open up to alternative views.

For this special issue, we invite to zoom in on technological design,
implementation, and evaluation as relevant sites for the co-constitution
of ageing and technology. In particular, _we explore the notion of
“theory”, and precisely how theories of ageing inform, clash, become
interfaced and reassembled at these sites_. Building on Kurt Lewin’s
(1945) maxim that “there is nothing as practical as a good theory”, we
look for contributions that explore what happens when theories meet
practice (for instance, when theories of privacy by design need to be
cared for in practice, when theories of plug-and-play meet practices of
bricolage, when theories of aging configure processes of co-creation).
In short, we seek contributions that explore how theories of ageing and
older people are constituted in the practices of designing, implementing
and evaluating technologies. Such technologies may include, but are not
limited to, active and passive monitoring devices, robotics, smartphones
and/or tablets, smart home devices, medical technologies, and others.

This special issue of Tecnoscienza. The Italian Journal of Science &
Technology Studies invites papers that explore issues related (but not
limited) to the following themes:


o the constitution of ageing from a sociomaterial perspective
o

the design processes from the point of view of scholars at the
cross-roads of STS and Age Studies

o

the co-creation of technologies with and for older people

o

the relationship between technology, ageing, and later life from
the point of view offeminist technoscience/gender studies

o

the contribution of post-human theories to the analysis of
technologies for older people

o

potentialities and limits of STS theories and/or “interventions”
in studying design practices having older people as target group



Deadline for abstract submissions: December 10th, 2019

Abstracts (in English) with a maximum length of 500 words should be
sent as email attachments to redazione@tecnoscienza.net and carbon
copied to the guest editors. Notification of acceptance will be
communicated by mid-January, 2020. Full papers (in English with a
maximum length of 8,000 words including notes and references) will
be due by April 30th, 2020 and will be subject to a double blind
peer review process.

For information and questions, please do not hesitate to contact the
guest editors:

*
o Michela Cozza, michela.cozza@mdh.se
o Britt Östlund, brittost@kth.se
o Alexander Peine, A.Peine@uu.nl

References


Åsberg, C. and Lykke, N. (2010) Feminist technoscience studies, in
“European Journal of Women’s Studies”, 17 (4), pp. 299-305.
Cozza, M., De Angeli, A. and Tonolli, L. (2017) Ubiquitous technologies
for older people, in “Personal and Ubiquitous Computing”, 21 (3), pp.
607-619.
Cozza M., Crevani, L., Hallin, A. and Schaeffer, J. (2018) Future
ageing: welfare technology practices for our future older selves, in
“Futures. The journal of policy, planning and futures studies”, doi:
10.1016/j.futures.2018.03.011
Cozza, M., Cusinato, A., Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (2019)
Atmosphere in participatory design, in “Science as Culture”,
https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2019.1681952
Frennert, S. and Östlund, B. (2016) What happens when seniors
participate in new eHealth schemes?, in “Disability and Rehabilitation:
Assistive Technology”, 11 (7), pp. 572-580.
Joyce, K. and Mamo, L. (2006) Graying the cyborg. New directions in
feminist analyses ofaging, science, and technology, in T.M. Calasanti
and K.F. Slevin (eds.), Age matters. Realigning feminist thinking. New
York/London, Routledge, pp. 99-121.
Joyce, K., Peine, A., Neven, L. and Kohlbacher, F. (2017) Aging: The
socio-material constitution oflater life. In U. Felt, R. Fouché, C.
Miller and L. Smith
Doerr L (eds), The handbook ofscience and technology studies (fourth
edition). Cambridge: The MIT Press, pp. 915-942.
Katz, S. (2014) What is age studies, in “Age Culture Humanities”, 1, pp.
17-23.
Latimer, J. and López Gómez, D. (2019) Intimate entanglements:
Affects, more-than-human intimacies and the politics of relations in
science and technology, in “The Sociological Review Monographs”, 67 (2),
pp. 247-263.
Lewin, K. (1945) The research centre for group dynamics at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, in “Sociometrics”, 8, pp. 128-135.
McNeil, M. and Roberts, C. (2012) Feminist science and technology
studies, in R. Buikema, G. Griffin and N. Lykke (eds.), Theories and
methodologies in postgraduate feminist research: researching
differently. New York, Routledge, pp. 29-42.
Östlund, B. Olander, E., Jonsson, O. and Frennert, S. (2015)
STS-inspired design to meet the challenges of modern aging. Welfare
technology as a tool to promote user driven innovations or another way
to keep older users hostage?, in “Technological Forecasting & Social
Change”, 93, pp. 82-90.
Peine, A. Faulkner, A., Jæger, B. and Moors, E. (2015) Science,
technology and the ‘grand challenge’ of ageing—understanding the
socio-material constitution oflater life, in “Technological Forecasting
and Social Change”, 93, pp. 1-9.
Peine, A. and Neven, L. (2019) From Intervention to Co-constitution: New
Directions in Theorizing about Aging and Technology, in “The
Gerontologist”, 59 (1), pp. 15-21.
Roberts, C. (2006) What can I do to help myself? Somatic individuality
and contemporary hormonal bodies, in “Science Studies”, 19 (2), pp. 54-76.
Sánchez-Criado, T., López, D. Roberts, C. and Domènech, M. (2014)
Installing telecare, installing users: Felicity conditions for the
instauration of usership, in “Science, Technology, & Human Values”, 39
(5), pp. 694-719.
Shove, E. (2014) On ‘The design of everyday life’, in “Tecnoscienza.
Italian journal of science & technology studies”, 5 (2), pp. 33-42.
Urban, M. (2017) ‘This really takes it out of you!’ The senses and
emotions in digital health practices of the elderly, in “Digital
Health”, 3, pp. 1-16.
Wanka, A. and Gallistl, V. (2018) Doing age in a digitized world – A
material praxeology of aging with technology, in “Frontiers in
Sociology”, 3 (6), doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2018.00006

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pdf which had a name of SI 2019 STS and Age Studies - call for abstract.pdf]
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