Dear colleagues,
Please find below our call for abstracts for the seminar “Digitizing
peoples in uncertain times: Interface methods for interventions on
populations,” organised by the Processing Citizenship ERC project on May
13th and 14th 2021.
More info is also available on our new website
.
For those who are interested in the topic, please submit title, 300-word
abstracts, author’s name and surname, affiliation and email address to
webmaster@processingcitizenship.eu
no later than March 15th, 2021.
We look forward to receive your contributions,
The Processing Citizenship team
On May 13th and 14th 2021, the Processing Citizenship ERC project
organizes the seminar “Digitizing peoples in uncertain times: Interface
methods for interventions on populations”. The seminar aims to address
the emergent methods used to create data about populations, as well as
the interventions we as social researchers can develop to create
alternative epistemic forms about vulnerable, dispersed, invisible or
just emergent populations.
During “the first pandemic of the datafied society” (Di Salvo and Milan
2020), pandemic-related contingencies have furthered the already steady
global demand for fast, reliable and quantifiable methods to create
knowledge about populations. The production and circulation of data for
counting population is never neutral, but performative of polities, and
the COVID-19 pandemic is the last source of uncertainty demanding even
more digitization of population data.
The performative potential and non-neutral character of data about
populations suggests two directions of investigation that promise to
turn out strategic in the post-pandemic sociotechnical
research landscape. First, it highlights the key role of the methods
through which knowledge about populations is created. Second, it calls
for interventions at the interface of social research and social action.
The seminar’s overarching goal is connecting the Science and Technology
Studies (STS) and digital sociology methodological debate to critical
and interventionist studies on the data management of populations. The
intention is to investigate and reflect on the hybrid (i.e. digital and
analogue, qualitative and quantitative) interface methods to be
furthered to study the data-based management of populations.
To this end, the seminar invites scholars to present and discuss in
several panels these two main threads of investigation. On one hand,
which methods of knowing populations are being introduced to cope with
new uncertainties? Shall these methods aim at universality - a common
claim when it comes to Big Data, or should they come to terms with some
forms of invisibility? Which new regimes of inclusion/exclusion do they
introduce? What should fair and just ways of knowing populations
in security, health, mobility, education, or pandemics encompass? On the
other hand, what is the role of social scientists, especially those
engaged with sociotechnologies, in dealing with those methods? What can
intervening in population management mean for STS scholars? To what
extent can methods for social research and methods for social action
overlap? Do we need alternative methods, or maybe we’d better combine
existing digital and analogue, qualitative and quantitative methods in
new ways? Which forms of intervention are more suitable to achieve fair
and just enactment of populations? How can we deploy the principles of
situated interventions in empirical and often sensitive fields?
These are some of the questions the seminar tries to address thanks to
the participation of world-class keynote speakers, as well as by openly
inviting participants to submit their research to one of the panels.
Confirmed keynotes
Noortje Marres, Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary
Methodologies, University of Warwick.
Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Associate Professor of Interactive Governance of
Health Interventions, Free University Amsterdam.
Submissions guidelines
Please submit title, 300-word abstracts, author’s name and surname,
affiliation and email address to webmaster@processingcitizenship.eu
Deadline: March 15th, 2021
Notification of acceptance: March 30^th , 2021
/We expect to be able to select around 15 papers. /
Conference settings
Given the continuing pandemic, the Seminar will be held mainly or
exclusively online. Should the possibility to (partially) convert it
into a modality in presence arise by March 2021, the seminar venue will
be the University of Bologna. In this case, travel costs for accepted
participants to the panels who prefer to attend in person will be
covered by the Processing Citizenship project. No fee requested.
More info about seminar rationale and themes
https://processingcitizenship.eu/digitizing-peoples-in-uncertain-times-interface-methods-for-interventions-on-populations/
/
/
/Event organized with the patronage of the Alma Mater Research Institute
for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
/
/This project has received funding from the European Research Council
(ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under grant agreement No 714463/
//
//
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