Call EASST4S Prague2020 "Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and Agency of STS in Emerging Worlds"
Dear all,
please find the call for our upcoming conference - by EASST & 4S - at
https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/
Deadline for Panel proposals is 31st Oct 2019
https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/call-for-papers-and-panels/
This is the focus:
Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and agency of STS in emerging
worlds
How has the world changed since 2016 when EASST and 4S met in Barcelona?
Since then, efforts to frame “alternative” approaches and futures appear
to have been co-opted by powerful actors. Big Data has been fiercely
replacing former identities with digital identities for humans, animals
and artefacts. Geopolitical and epistemic centres have further
multiplied. The global temperature of the planet continues to increase,
as do global emissions of CO2. Wildlife biodiversity is decreasing,
while the first CRISPR-Cas engineered babies with altered germlines were
born. Modern nation-states have become more unstable even as we see the
tentative emergence of new collectives and solidarities. The #metoo
campaign has sparked a new wave of articulations of and conflict over
gender power asymmetries contributing energy to other ongoing efforts
against asymmetric differentiations and exclusions in and beyond
academic contexts.
These are just some of the major shifts that create feelings of urgency,
unease and confusion. Calls to “act now” proliferate. And yet, while
technoscience and its products ever more tangibly shape our planet and
lives, politicians, publics, and even academics feel helpless.
We invite STS scholars to examine such spiralling changes that generate
these feelings of urgency and powerlessness in ways that make our
research relevant to wider academic and non-academic publics. For the
meeting in Prague, we especially welcome inquiries into longer term
continuities and discontinuities and material legacies of modernity—both
desired and undesirable—that have been built into our sociotechnical
infrastructures and ways of living. We want to pay special attention to
the ways in which geopolitical, economic and epistemic globalization is
localized and distributed over Planet Earth. What are the means and ends
of STS in different places? What does it take to intervene and be
relevant here and there? Whom do we want to speak and act with? Who
wants to speak and act with us?
We encourage STS researchers to ask reflexive questions with regard to
our own existing and potential practical contributions to these ongoing
developments. How do we, can we and should we (re)organize our own
professional practices to the differences we desire? How may we
collaborate across regions, genders, races, religions or disciplines
without reproducing inequalities? How shall we publish, (co)author and
cite in inclusive ways? How do we rethink and remake ways of recognizing
and crediting the work of others in an era of pervasive audit and
(self)tracking? How do we liaise, meet up and travel responsibly in a
time of climate disruption and overproduction of waste? How can we
engage with policymaking and society at large amidst the dynamics of
“alternative facts”?
We welcome experiments in conference formats. Apart from regular paper
sessions, we also invite submission of walking seminars, performances
and participatory formats of knowledge making and exchange. We plan to
collaborate with local artists as unruly participant witnesses and
agents of intervention into the conference.
https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/focus-and-themes/
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