Dear all,
We are organising an open panel for 4S 2025, Sept. 3-7, Seattle, WA. on DATA
LOSS. More information about the conference and the submission link can be
found here: https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_seattle.php.
Abstracts are due Jan 31. Below is the call with more detail about the theme
and scope. Please get in touch with any questions!
-Katie
Data Loss Reverberations: Exploring Disappearance, Destruction and
Dispossession in Digital Societies
This panel explores data loss as a fundamental rather than anomalous feature
of digital infrastructures and datafication processes. While digital societies
are often associated with data accumulation, we examine how various forms of
loss - from disappearance and destruction to dispossession - shape
socio-technical systems and generate new political formations.
We seek papers investigating data loss in knowledge and memory
infrastructures, including memory institutions, bureaucratic systems, and
community archives. Topics of interest include:
Data disappearance in digital archives
Data destruction as acts of violence or care
Community impacts of platform closures and content moderation
Critical perspectives on data/software lifecycles
Memory technologies as inherently amnesic systems
Theoretical frameworks for understanding data loss
Methodological approaches to studying loss
Politics of loss in relation to memory and justice
While STS scholarship has developed frameworks for studying knowledge
infrastructures - from cybernetic imaginaries to big data environments -
research has primarily focused on data accumulation and persistence. Through
concepts like data friction and information infrastructures, scholars have
illuminated conditions enabling data flows. This panel extends this work by
examining loss and erasure as constitutive forces in digital systems.
We especially welcome submissions from early career researchers and scholars
examining how data loss intersects with gender, sexuality, racialization,
coloniality, and class. We are particularly interested in work that critically
engages with these dimensions of power and inequality in digital
infrastructures.
We encourage submissions exploring how data loss reverberates across:
Time (historical erasures echoing in the present)
Scale (small infrastructural losses with cascading effects)
Space (loss rippling across institutional/national boundaries)
Experience (from technical infrastructures to social practices)
The panel aims to develop new frameworks for understanding how data loss
shapes knowledge infrastructures and influences questions of memory,
accountability, and justice.
Keywords: Information, Computing and Media Technology, Data and
Quantification, Feminist STS
Organizers:
Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, University of Copenhagen
(nannab@hum.ku.dk)
Katie MacKinnon, University of Copenhagen
(kam@hum.ku.dk)
Amelia Acker, University of Texas at Austin
Louis Ravn, University of Amsterdam
Frederik Schade, University of Copenhagen
Esme Colbourne, University of Copenhagen
Katie MacKinnon
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Copenhagen
Department of Arts and Culture
Karen Blixens Vej 1
Copenhagen S
DENMARK
TEL +45 91 82 59 14
kam@hum.ku.dk
katiemackinnon.xyz
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