Dear colleagues,
We are delighted to share with you this call for contributions to an edited
volume (Routledge) on technology decline, phase-out, destabilisation,
discontinuation and adjacent concepts, edited by Bruno Turhneim, Harro van
Lente, Peter Stegmaier and myself.
We are looking for case studies and/or discussion of policy processes and
implications of (the dynamics of) phased-out, declining or obsolescent
technologies, preferably from outside Europe. Please see the (intentionally
provocative) blurb of the accepted book proposal below:
The Doomsday Clock, a US NGO that since 1945 has been tracking existential
risk to humanity, showed that at the start of 2020 we were closer than ever to
the doomsday. The climate crisis and advanced technology going out of human
control are probably among the main existential threats to humanity in this
century. Recent years have seen growing emissions and advancements in
ethically uncertain technology, such as autonomous weapons. This indicates
that we as a species may be on a pathway to environmental and socio-economic
catastrophe. Currently, this is largely discussed through the lenses of how
certain paths may be purposely created or reoriented. Instead, in this book we
focus on the possibilities for reversing, or stepping out of established
technological trajectories as they become undesirable or misaligned with
environmental and equality objectives. We argue that to deal with the risk,
public and private decision-makers must revisit the lessons of the past when
societies turned away from chemical and nuclear weapons, DDT, ozone-depleting
aerosols and other disruptive technologies. Using past and contemporary
examples, we show which strategies might work and which might not, and how a
democratically supported decision to turn away from a questionable technology
could be initiated and navigated.
The deadline for submissions of first drafts is very soon: June 1, 2021. The
word limit is 8,000 with references.
We would like to ask you to first contact us a.s.a.p. if you plan to submit a
contribution.
Due to space limits, we will only be able to include a couple of contributions
most relevant to the topic.
Please use
z.koretsky@maastrichtuniversity.nl
for communication and submissions.
Best wishes on behalf of the editors,
Zahar Koretsky
PhD candidate at Maastricht University STS group
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS)
z.koretsky@maastrichtuniversity.nl
www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/z.koretsky
Latest publication:
Koretsky, Z., & van Lente, H. (2020). Technology phase-out as unravelling of
socio-technical configurations: Cloud seeding case. Environmental Innovation
and Societal Transitions, 37, 302-317.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2020.10.002
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