Dear all,
we welcome submissions to our panel on ‘Practices and Materialities of
Predictive Knowledge Systems’ at the STS-Hub 2025.
Conference: STS-Hub 2025: ‘Diffracting the Critical’, Berlin, March
11–14, 2025, conference website:https://sts-hub.de/25/
Convenors: Kevin Wiggert, Ingmar Mundt, Jana Pannier
Panel description:
Two actual developments can be observed in the production of knowledge: On the
one hand, knowledge is becoming increasingly datafied and algorithmised. In
addition, more and more knowledge is being collected in an anticipatory or
predictive manner about future situations and conditions. This knowledge may
be relevant to decision-making for actors and organisations but it remains
highly speculative and contestable in ontological and epistemological terms,
especially when taking their material backing into account. This panel will
therefore focus less on existing approaches to future or anticipatory
imaginaries. In taking a diffractive approach, differences and interferences
between established and anticipatory or predictive forms of knowledge come
into view, as well as emerging concrete practices and their materialities.
Therefore, the aim of this panel is to examine these through the analytical
lenses of (a) which knowledge about the future is made ‘tangible’ or
‘durable’ in the present and which material and temporal conditions are
created for this and (b) for whom which ontological and epistemological
challenges arise. This touches, for example, on questions of anticipatory or
predictive infrastructures, modes and practices of anticipating, enacting,
(re)organising, and contesting predictive knowledge systems, or governance
approaches to deal with future materialities.
We invite researchers of Science and Technology Studies and Critical Data and
Algorithm Studies as well as related fields to send us abstracts of not more
than 200 words (and a short bio of around 75 words) which address, but are not
limited to, the following questions:
How do predictive knowledge systems shape current practices, and what material
infrastructures support them?
What epistemological and/or ontological challenges arise when making
speculative knowledge ‘durable’ in the present? What tensions exist
between established knowledge and predictive knowledge, and how are they
negotiated?
How are predictive knowledge systems enacted, made sense of, and contested in
practice?
How do predictive knowledge systems reconfigure power relations, and who
benefits or is excluded?
How do the material and temporal conditions of predictive knowledge systems
influence the governance or practices of dealing with anticipatory knowledge?
How are specific predictive or anticipatory artifacts (e.g. predictive
algorithms, prototypes, scenario analysis etc.) constituted, stabilised or
entangled in future-orientated practices?
How is data gathered, constituted, interpreted, and used within predictive
knowledge systems to make predictions towards the future?
Please send your abstract to kevin.wiggert@tu-berlin.de and
jana.pannier@wzb.eu until October 31, 2024. We are looking forward to your
submissions! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Best regards,
Kevin, Ingmar, and Jana
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