Dear all,
Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this message. Below you will find
the call for papers for a workshop organized by STS Austria this September. We
hope to be able to see you there, and look forward to receiving your
abstracts. Please get in touch if you have any questions.
Call for Papers
Workshop STS Austria, 13-15 September 2021, Graz:
Digital Living, Digital Infrastructuring
Science and Technology Studies has repeatedly shown that the social, cultural,
technological and political conditions of research, knowledge production and
innovation processes are being re-shaped through the digitization of data, the
virtualization of communication and collaboration, and the design of
underlying infrastructures. The COVID-19 pandemic has, however, drawn new
attention to the role of digital infrastructures in private and public life.
Politics, work, education, research, and everyday life now rely on virtual
spaces and digital online platforms. The increased visibility of our
dependence on digital infrastructures has made it clear that access to and
control of such infrastructures are unequally distributed, both within
Austrian society and internationally. While these infrastructures both
contribute to new forms of social change and stabilize existing social
relations, they invoke changing forms of individual and collective agency
through invitations to participate, collaborate, trade, rate, comment, and
share. Yet due to the private nature of digital infrastructures available to
the general public, they largely remain outside of democratic control.
Starting from this heightened awareness of the role of digital
infrastructures, this workshop will offer an opportunity to reflect on STS
scholarship on the digital and to advance theoretical work on infrastructuring
and digital practices. The concept of infrastructuring evokes doing as a
metaphor and refers to the phenomenon that digital infrastructures emerge
dynamically and surprisingly, and are at the same time stable and fragile. We
are interested in conceptual and empirically grounded perspectives on the
digital and digital infrastructuring that consider its dynamics in relation to
human subjectivities as well as broader questions of politics, power and
social order. We propose to address digital practices and infrastructuring
around themes such as:
The wider sociotechnical networks surrounding digital tools and
platforms (including large international platforms such as Google, Amazon,
Alibaba, Tencent, or Zoom) in fields as diverse as research, social media,
public administration, and others;
The creation of new global and local realities of governance and
communication ranging from the ubiquitous means of holding online meetings
to the increased digitization of government services;
The multiple controversies, tensions, and disruptions that are
emerging around (private) digital infrastructures, including, for example,
privacy and discrimination concerns around facial recognition, or delays in
COVID-infection data collection and (online) presentation.
We specifically invite contributions that explore such themes from diverse
methodological starting points, ranging from ethnographic studies of
micro-practices to perhaps more abstract macro studies of (global) power
relations.
We invite anyone interested in presenting a paper contributing to STS
perspectives on digital practices and infrastructures to send an abstract
(max. 300 words) to STS Austria office@sts-austria.org by 31 May 2021. We will
send out notifications of acceptance by 30 June.
We aim for a hybrid online/offline format. Although we would prefer
participants to be part of the full workshop, a hybrid format allows for
participation from people who will not be able to travel to Graz (for Covid or
other reasons).
The workshop will be a three-day event, starting in the afternoon of September
13 (CET) and ending in the morning of September 15 (CET), to allow people to
travel to and from Graz before and after the workshop.
[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pdf which had a name of Call_Workshop_digital_infrastructuring.pdf]
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