Message posted on 18/05/2023
Call for Abstracts: 4S open panel - Biometrics and their Infrastructural Worlds
Dear all, Continuing our tradition of organizing conversations on biometrics at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conferences, Ranjit Singh (Data & Society) and I are convening an open panel entitled "Biometrics and their Infrastructural Worlds " for this year's conference on 8-11 November 2023 in Honolulu, Hawai'i. More information about the conference can be found here . We hope you will consider submitting an abstract to our panel, detailed below. Instructions for submitting abstracts (250 words) can be found in the conference call for submissions . The deadline for submission is 26 May 2023. When making the submission, please remember to select "Biometrics and their Infrastructural Worlds" (Panel #135). You'll also be able to indicate whether you plan to participate in person or virtually. Please reach out to me and Ranjit (ranjit@datasociety.net) with any questions. We look forward to your submissions! Best wishes, Michelle Spektor Lecturer Science, Technology, and Society Tufts University Michelle.Spektor@tufts.edu --- *Biometrics and their Infrastructural Worlds* *Panel #135* Biometric data form conditions of possibility for imagining, representing, and intervening in individual and collective identities. These data, however, are also a means to create technological infrastructures that serve a variety of social and political purposes. Body measurements can be incorporated into passports, and other pre-existing identification and surveillance infrastructures, that distinguish citizens from non-citizens. Biometric data and their promise of unique identification are inscribed in systems that control access to healthcare and voting, as well as classification systems that reinforce inequalities related to, race, ethnicity, gender, class, age, disability, and nationality. Sensors in 'smart' devices and buildings measure human activity in order to regulate energy consumption, while the built environments of border crossings rely on biometrics to regulate the mobility of populations. These biometric infrastructures can transfer to new geographic, political, and temporal contexts, where their original technological designs and political aims may persist or change. For example, some post-colonial police departments inherited fingerprint systems from their colonial predecessors, but aimed to reframe them as infrastructures of nation building. This panel extends questions about the meanings of biometric data to include what these data do in the world - especially when they are imbricated into infrastructures that organize the societies, ecologies, and built environments in which we live. Taking an expansive view of what counts as biometrics, this panel welcomes papers that critically examine the consequences, politics, and human experiences of past and present infrastructures around the world that rely on measurements of life itself. *Contact:* spektor@mit.edu & ranjit@datasociety.net *Keywords:* biometrics; infrastructure; identification; identity; classification _______________________________________________ EASST's Eurograd mailing list Eurograd (at) lists.easst.net Unsubscribe or edit subscription options: http://lists.easst.net/listinfo.cgi/eurograd-easst.net Meet us via https://twitter.com/STSeasst Report abuses of this list to Eurograd-owner@lists.easst.netview formatted text
EASST-Eurograd
mailing list
30 recent messages
30 recent messages
- 03/07/2025 University assistant position (pre-doc, 100%, 4 years) in STS, University of Klagenfurt
- 02/07/2025 Book Release: The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room
- 01/07/2025 Postdoctoral researcher on Aquatic STS (University of Helsinki)
- 01/07/2025 Visiting research fellowships, Tema Technology and Social Change, LinkoĢping University
- 01/07/2025 The Nuclear-Water Nexus: new edited volume with 25 contributors!
- 30/06/2025 TATuP 34/2 (2025) "Beyond short termism" & CfA "Exploring technologies through imaginary worlds"
- 27/06/2025 Full professor in Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna, deadline 17 September 2025
- 27/06/2025 CfA Funding for Research Sabbaticals (Fellowships) and Working Groups
- 25/06/2025 Reminder: June 27 Community Call: “Mapping Water Care Initiatives in the Americas”
- 25/06/2025 History of the Philosophy of Technology Resource
- 24/06/2025 AAA – Anthropologie & deĢveloppemen=?utf-8?q?t =E2=80=93 Les formes contemporaines de l=E2=80=99argent=5FCont?= emporary forms of money.
- 23/06/2025 CfP: FOR 2026 - The Future of Open Research
- 20/06/2025 New book on global carcinogen regulation
- 19/06/2025 Realities of Autonomous Weapons / OA book from BUP / Hybrid book release with editors & L.Suchman
- 19/06/2025 Tenure Track positions open in Chile, deadline 07.07
- 19/06/2025 Advertising STS Winter School
- 17/06/2025 Instructions for authors for JAIS Special Issue on Contemporary Innovation in Information Infrastructures.
- 17/06/2025 Call for participation: Preparing Wishes for the Afterlife - Thinking with Death and Legacy in Artistic Practice
- 13/06/2025 Call for a special issue in Futures
- 13/06/2025 Postdoc Position in Sociology of Innovation & Digitalization (JKU Linz)
- 12/06/2025 CfP Workshop "AI x Crisis: Tracing New Directions Beyond Deployment and Use" | Aarhus Conference 2025 (Extended Deadline)
- 12/06/2025 Athena is offering 2 postdocs on mission-oriented innovation for food and health system transitions
- 11/06/2025 [mat-num] June 18 - Mia Bennett, “=?windows-1252?q?Polar frontiers=2C polar orbits=3A The spluttering launch ?= of Arctic commercial spaceports”
- 10/06/2025 CFP: Promises and Conflicts in the Infrastructuring of Agricultural Digitalization
- 10/06/2025 Talk: Aaron Perzanowski "The Law and Policy of Repair" (Maintenance & Philosophy SIG, Thursday June 12th 2025, 18-1915 UTC+1)
- 10/06/2025 FW: Symposium University of Liverpool 18 June 2025: How might be feel problems differently? (Re)thinking the case study methodology in STS
- 09/06/2025 Protocols for Knowing Microbes Otherwise =?utf-8?q?=E2=80=93 Art and practice session at Nordic STS =28Stockholm=2C ?= 11-13 June)
- 09/06/2025 Fully funded 3 y Postdoctoral Researcher =?utf-8?q?=E2=80=9CBuddhist Ethics for a Systemic Answer to the Attention E?= conomy”
- 06/06/2025 Call for Abstracts - ARS'25 (Naples, Italy) - Session on "Technoscientific networks”
- 06/06/2025 Free webinar on anti-microbial resistance June 10th