Hello! We invite submissions of abstracts (250 words) for our in-person panel at the upcoming 4S conference in Seattle, September 3-7 2025.
Panel title: Communities Of Critique and Tech Organizations
How might we transform our investigations by treating critique itself as an object of analysis (Boltanski & Thévenot 1999)? This panel adds to empirically grounded approaches by studying the conditions under which tech actors acquire “critical capacity,” the roles of tech ethicists navigating organizational terrains, and the practices of “valuation” (Helgesson & Muniesa 2013) in various forms of critical technical practice. Amid growing calls for reform focusing on the social and ethical impacts of technology (such as AI), tech organizations respond by assembling novel networks of institutionalized practices. These ‘sentinels of critique’—positioned to manage and channel such responses—are also employed by established machineries of governance to address whistleblowers and other signs of critical issues within a sector. What are the transformations that critique undergoes as it is integrated into Big Tech organizations, for instance, through existing, familiar governance mechanisms such as IRBs (Friesen et al. 2021)? We invite contributions addressing questions including:
What kind of positions are available to scholars - and do scholars make available to themselves - when they work with communities of critique in Big Tech?
How can we understand and/or compare the distinct purchase of different models of criticality in different settings?
What theoretical frameworks (existing or emerging) allow us to analyze cultures of critique, and where do they fall short?
What are the novel networks that are assembled by tech organizations in order to engage critique or to be ethical? How can we trace the arc of technical responses to critique?
How do STS scholars differentiate their critique from that which they encounter in their fieldsites?
What kinds of complicities co-exist within, alongside and athwart critique? Can critique be bought and sold?
Where do practitioners draw lines between evaluation and criticism, and how?
When and how does critique function as fuel, and to what end?
Sayan Bhattacharjee, PhD Student, University of Washington (sayanbe@uw.edu) (Primary contact)
Rachel Douglas-Jones, Professor, IT University of Copenhagen (rdoj@itu.dk)
David Ribes, University of Washington (dribes@uw.edu)
The deadline for abstract submissions is January 31st, 2025: https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_seattle.php
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