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Message posted on 04/11/2019

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

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

the design processes from the point of view of scholars at the

cross-roads of STS and Age Studies

the co-creation of technologies with and for older people

the relationship between technology, ageing, and later life from

the point of view offeminist technoscience/gender studies

the contribution of post-human theories to the analysis of

technologies for older people

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

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