apologies for unintended crossposing
7th STS Italia Conference
JUNE 14-16, 2018 – University of Padova
TECHNOSCIENCE FROM BELOW
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
TRACK 5
Environmental data from below:
Enactment and participation challenging environmental governance
Convenor: Paolo, Giardullo, University of Padova, paolo.giardullo@unipd.it
The present track is about the generation, analysis and use of environmental
data as a form of science participation enacted from below. Governance of the
environment is inextricably linked to data. Interventions, policies and future
scenarios for sustainability are all based on data generated and analysed
within specific institutional settings, such as supranational agencies,
environmental protection agencies and official statistics. In this sense, the
activities of analysis, publication and diffusion of environmental data
actively contribute to shape and delimit the field of environmental
governance’s authority through expertise.
Whatever the strategy pursued by decision makers may be (e.g. to defuse
possible conflicts; to enlarge consensus), procedures of data collection and
analysis, as well as their purpose, tend to be restricted to within accredited
settings and further performed in institutional loci. Currently, these
patterns may be bypassed by new trajectories ofengagement that develop
alternative processes of empowerment for non-experts. Social movement research
has signalled the growing tendency of grassroots movements, NGOs and activists
to contest official data. Statactivism is conceptually a specific kind of
participation as well as contestation by non-institutional actors using data
analysis. Other research fellowships refer to data activism as particularly
focusing on digital technologies adopted for the collection of data. This
general tendency invests the environmental domain as well, and it offers new
forms of participation through data. Indeed, environmental movements as well
as other concerned groups not only put the role of institutional expertise
under scrutiny; they can also contribute to developing alternative forms of
scientific knowledge production. Thus, participation is transforming through
the challenge of creating evidence and the organisation of data collection
from below. This contrasts with solicited forms of participation through data,
such as citizen-science projects. An S&TS perspective, paying attention to
sociotechnical assemblages of data infrastructures and the practices related
to them, may bring a better understanding of these ongoing processes.
Therefore, the present track aims to gather theoretical as well as empirical
proposals focussed on combinations of heterogeneous actors in relationship to
data collection, management and sharing of environmental issues, such as (but
not only limited to):
- heterogeneous assemblages for the generation of environmental data from
below;
- design and creation of ad hoc infrastructures for data collection, analysis
and sharing of environmental data;
- practices of maintenance and management of bottom-up data infrastructures;
- analysis of expertise aligned for the implementation of data infrastructures
from below;
- practices of civic hacking for the environment; and
- the role of alternative baselines as new tools of political environmental
participation.
Abstracts should be submitted by February 15, 2018 to the conference email
address: 7thstsitaliaconf@gmail.com and to the emails of convenors' selected
track.
Submission should include:
1. Author’s name and surname, institution and email address
2. Title
3. Abstract’s text (no more than 300 words)
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