CfP: Phenomenological Approaches to Media, Technology and Communication

Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Approaches to Media, Technology and Communication

2013 International Communication Association (ICA) Preconference

ICA Theory, Philosophy and Critique Division

17 June 2013, Birkbeck, University of London

Paper proposals are invited from a very wide range of perspectives, including but not limited to media history, media archaeology, audience studies, political theory, metaphysics, software studies, science and technology studies, digital aesthetics, cultural geography and urban studies. Though all proposals should relate in some way to phenomenological thinking, this should be interpreted broadly, ranging from core thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre to those with looser affiliations to phenomenology per se, for example Arendt, Bergson, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Garfinkel, Ingold, Latour, Whitehead and Harman.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Dr David Berry, Swansea University
• Professor Nick Couldry, Goldsmiths, University of London
• Professor Graham Harman, American University of Cairo
• Professor Lisa Parks, UC Santa Barbara
• Professor Paddy Scannell, University of Michigan

Please send an abstract (max 200 words) of your paper to both Scott Rodgers (s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk) and Tim Markham (t.markham@bbk.ac.uk) by 20 November 2012. Authors will be informed regarding acceptance / rejection for the preconference no later than 20 December 2012.

CfP: Social Studies of Management and Organizations

See below:

Dear All,

We are organizing a PhD conference with a track on Social Studies of Management and Organizations.

The idea of this track/theme is to received papers that builds on Science and Technology Studies and advance the study of management and organizational topics from this perspectives. For example we expect contributions that use the concepts like ‘market devices’/’organising devices’ and the STS oriented literature on objects. A second example is papers that use conceptualizations like performativity and reflexivity and their impact on the management and organization studies. Finally, we also welcome other actor-network approaches; anthropological, ethnographic and sociological studies of organisations that open up common questions that had been visited (or not) by the broad range literature on science and technology studies.

This track is part of day event in the broad field of Critical Management Studies named: ‘Who and what is management for?’

Respondents

Daniel Neyland, Senior Lecturer, Lancaster University Management School

Daniel Neyland’s research interests cover governance, accountability and ethics in the form of science, technology and organization. He draws on ethnomethodology, science and technology studies, constructivism, Actor-Network Theory and the recent STS turn to markets.

Javier Lezaun, Lecturer, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford

Javier Lezaun’s research interests focus on the legal, political and social dimensions of techno-scientific change, particularly in the life sciences and biomedicine.

The University of Leicester School of Management is running a one day BSA postgraduate conference on 10 January 2013.

Abstracts of 300-500 words should be submitted to events@britsoc.org.uk by 8 October 2012, or on the BSA website, including the name and date of the conference. Conference papers should be 6,000 – 8,000 words.

Please download a call for abstracts here.

Date

10 January 2013.

Contact

Please contact Juan Espinosa Cristia for more information

About

The conference is broadly themed around Critical Management, based on the multi-disciplinary ‘Leicester Model’ that draws from across the social sciences. Unlike mainstream Business Schools, at Leicester we are concerned with challenging the status quo and giving voice to those individuals, groups and societies who are traditionally overlooked in global management.

Costs and Travel Grants

The costs to BSA members is £10, and £25 to non-BSA members. This money goes towards lunch and drinks for all attendees.

Thanks to generous support from the Graduate Dean at the University of Leicester, we can also offer up to ten PhD travel grants of £50 each. To apply for these please include a short grant application statement (50-100 words) stating your travel costs and needs.

Please feel free to contact me if you have questions of any type.

Juan Espinosa C.

Organization Team

School of Management

University of Leicester

Policy meets ANT workshop

Call for participation
Policy meets Actor Network Theory: doctoral student workshop

Policy has become “increasingly central concept and instrument in the organization of contemporary societies [and] now impinges on all areas of life so that it’s virtually impossible to ignore or to escape its influence” (Wedel et al 2005: 3). It has been closely associated with the political in terms of decision making, yet it stems into specific domains for setting goals and means of achieving them.  Policy occupies space at the crossroads – for some it is at the overlap of authority, expertise and order. For others it merges politics, science, technology, and society. And for yet others, policy is associated with administration, management and organization. It conveys deliberation and purpose, competence as well as rationality.

The analytical approach known as Actor Network Theory (ANT), born in science and technology studies, is notoriously known for not being a theory in the strict sense of a testable, predictive and explanatory model. Starting as a negative reading of what is the world enacted in much of social theory ANT offers a set of ontological considerations in the larger scheme of things and associated methodological propositions at the level of research design. In the 1990’s, ANT inspired analytics have also ventured to studies of policy via the governmentality studies and their interest in mentalities as well as technologies of government and in the action at a distance. However, governmentality studies today as a mainstream body within policy analysis are more associated with the former interest in ‘mentalities’ of governing.

Our workshop wants to build on these traditions. We want to ask how ANT may enhance our understanding of policy beyond the rationalist vs. social constructionist debate which has marked policy analysis. This question also implies interest in innovative research design for studying policy which would move beyond the traditional commitments to either global or local scaling of research. We want to engage with some of the key propositions of ANT as deployed in our own empirical analyses of complex realities in the making. Here we refer to a series of methodological commitments applied to the study of policy worlds:

• principle of symmetry as a way of working in the same analytical register with both success and failure of a policy or a reform
• study of translations as a way of working with the complexities of new and often unexpected realities crafted in policy process and implementation
• study of socio-material arrangements with a revised concept of agency which allows for materialities to have effects rather than merely index the social and the symbolic; the question extends to what materialities are engaged in holding policy worlds together
• study of ‘ontological politics’ as a way of working with non-coherent realities and their co-ordination,
• question of ‘performativity’ as a way to rearticulate analytical focus on the ‘existence’ of policy worlds in the making

Each participant will have 60 minutes allocated to their work. During this hour they will introduce their paper, providing an overview of the content and argument (approximately 10-15 minutes), followed by critical comments and questions from a predefined main discussant (approximately 10-15 minutes). The author then has a ‘right of reply’ (approx. 10 minutes), before general discussion of the paper (approx. 20-25 minutes).

All papers (max 8000 words) will be electronically circulated to all participants two weeks in advance of the workshop. Participants are required to read the papers. Organizers will name main discussants for each paper who will prepare a detailed reflection of the allocated paper.

PhD students interested in joining the workshop should email an abstract (500 words) to the organizers which will show how their research project fits within the parameters of the workshop and provide a brief summary of their paper.  Selected participants will be asked to submit full paper two weeks prior to the event for circulation. Deadline for abstract submission is 30 March 2012.

Workshop will be held on 21 and 22 June 2012.

Venue for the workshop will be confirmed. Currently, funding is being raised to support workshop participants in attending. There will be no attendance fee.

This workshop is part of University of Kent, South-East ESRC Doctoral Training Centre Advance Training in sociology of policy.

Contact:

David Kocman, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent, dk218@kent.ac.uk
Aleksandra Lis, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, lis_aleksandra@phd.ceu.hu

CfP: Making the World Happen

Making the World Happen: International Events and the Logistics of Globality

111th AAA annual meeting, Borders and Crossings, November 14-18, 2012, San Francisco, CA

Paper abstracts are invited for this panel to be submitted to the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA).

International events (Olympic Games, World’s fairs, World cups, transnational meetings and conventions) play nowadays a significant role in the creation and densification of global connections for the flow and circulation of people, materials, capital, technologies and ideas. Whereas anthropologists have often paid attention to the symbolic and ideological dimensions of international events, analyses of the institutional, managerial and logistical frameworks of these events have predominantly been economic in orientation with a focus on their overall costs and benefits. Conversely, the recent surge of publications in event management tellingly displays a new corporate interest towards the discipline of cultural anthropology as ethnographic insights are being valued as useful toolboxes in the ongoing management of conflicts and controversies in the context of international events. This panel will bring together ethnographic investigations into the organizational layers of these short-lived global hubs in order to explore in comparative guise their complex assemblages of material and infrastructural configurations that allow for the effectivity of transnational operations.

Submitted proposals for presentations should address one of the following topics:

1. Following controversies: Opening the black box of international events sheds light on the debates and conflicting concerns that emerge between various stakeholders (individual, institutional, international, non-human, etc.) around issues such as design, themes, orientation, outsourcings, public safety, legal harmonizations.

2. Assembling atmospheres: Events designed for the fostering of global connections and the development of international exchange rely on the manufacture of breathable spaces, that is the constitution of artificial climates, spheres of immunity, air-conditioned globalities (Sloterdijk) achieved through an ecology of devices and infrastructures.

3. Spatiotemporal attunements: International events are also anchored upon the existence of “grooved channels” (Geertz, Bestor) that support the engineering of a “ready-made” globalization in order to facilitate the enactment of the daily operations of global connectivity. These include the creation and enforcement of standards that accompanies the transnational extensions in the circulation of materials, people and commodities, the constitution of “obligatory passage points” (Callon), and the establishment of hourly schedules for deliveries, inspections, maintenance, accounting activities, etc.

Please submit the following information to Van Troi Tran (vantroitran@fas.harvard.edu) by Friday, March 16, 2012 for consideration:

Name, Institutional affiliation, Paper title, 250-word abstract, Contact information

Organizers: Van Troi Tran, Sophie Houdart

For more information:

American Anthropological Association: http://www.aaanet.org/

AAA 2012 Annual meeting guidelines and rules for participation: http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm

Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology: http://sunta.org/

The New in Social Research

Spring 2012 seminar series at CSISP and the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, London

• Feb 7:  Alex Taylor | Microsoft Research – Executable biology: at the borderlands of technoscience
• Feb 21: Matt Fuller and Graham Harwood | Goldsmiths – Database as Funfair
• Feb 28: Evelyn Ruppert |Open University – Doing the Transparent State: Methods and their Subjectifying Effects/Affects
• March 7: Bruno Latour | Science Po, Richard Rogers|University of Amsterdam – Digital Societies: between ontology and methods
• March 20: Javier Lezaun | University of Oxford – Cinematography and the Discovery of Social Kinetics
• March 27: ECDC | Goldsmiths – Energy Communities and Design Interventions

Forthcoming events with Callon, Latour et al.

20 February 2012,  18:00 – 19:30 – Bruno Latour at the Science Gallery in Dublin.

7 March 2012, 16:30 – 19:00 –  Bruno Latour & Richard Rogers:  “Digital societies: between ontology and methods,” at Goldsmiths, London

30 March 2012 – 12:30 – 16:30 – Michel Callon, Fabian Muniesa, Adam Leaver and Karel Williams: “How Methods Move in Markets,” at Open University, Camden, London

CfP: Empirical Philosophy of Science

Call for Papers: Empirical Philosophy of Science – Qualitative Methods, Sandbjerg, Denmark,  March 21-23, 2012 – workshop organised by Center for Science Studies, Aarhus University. Extended Deadline: December 2, 2011.

The workshop seeks to explore the benefits and challenges of an empirical philosophy of science: What do philosophers gain from empirical work? How can empirical research help to develop philosophical concepts? How do we integrate philosophical frameworks and empirical research? What constraints do we accept when choosing an empirical approach? What constraints does a pronounced theoretical focus impose on empirical work?

Keynote Speakers:

• Nancy Nersessian, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Lisa Osbeck, University of West Georgia
• Erika Mansnerus, London School of Economics
• Hauke Riesch, Imperial College London

CfP: Knowledge in a Box

The tobacco association aside, I love the idea of this conference: Knowledge in a Box: How Mundane Things Shape Knowledge Production, July 26-29, 2012; to take place at a renovated tobacco warehouse (the tobacco museum) in Kavala, northern Greece.

We invite proposals from scholars in the history of science, technology, and medicine, science and technology studies, the humanities, visual and performing arts, museum and cultural studies and other related disciplines for a workshop on the uses and meanings of mundane things such as boxes, packages, bottles, and vials in shaping knowledge production. In keeping with the conference theme, we are asking contributors to include specific references to the ways in which boxes have played a role—commercial, epistemic or otherwise—in their own particular disciplinary frameworks.

Update: here is a direct link to the conference website: KNOWLEDGE IN A BOX : How mundane things shape knowledge production, with  the programme, abstracts, list of attendees etc.

NYC gets real speculative

See the punctum books blog for a detailed schedule for all the speculative realism/object-oriented ontology events coming up in New York City in the next couple of weeks. I hope these will be recorded and posted online. Who wouldn’t want to know “what causes space?” for instance?

Harvard STS conference videos

Somatosphere has posted several videos from the Science and Technology Studies: The Next Twenty conference that took place at Harvard on 7-9 April 2011. It includes the following:

Does STS Matter, and to Whom? 
Theodore Porter (UCLA) and Andrew Jewett (Harvard) discuss the relationship of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to other academic fields, policymakers, and practitioners.

STS and the Law: Reframing Rights 
Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard) and Douglas Kysar (Yale) discuss the recent edited volume “Reframing Rights.” The discussion centers on the biological sciences and their associated technologies as providing moments for society to ask fundamental questions about their “bioconstitutional” rights.

STS, Economics, and Sociology: Do Economists Make Markets? 
Pierre-Benoit Joly (Paris-Est and IFRIS) and David Stark (Columbia) discuss how STS research has affected work in economic sociology, and what other STS tools might be usefully applied.

Defining the Boundaries 
Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Chicago) gives a provocation for STS scholars to think again about STS’s close ties to post-colonial studies, with specific references to Indian life sciences in relation to the Western sciences. Discussants Javier Lezaun (Oxford) and David Winickoff (UC Berkeley) debate other “elsewheres” STS travels to, whether it could travel everywhere, and how best it travels.

STS on Difference
Steven Epstein (Northwestern) delivers a provocation on whether or not STS has made a difference, arguing that it has not done as much as it could. Nelly Oudshoorn (Twente) suggests some productive ways forward, and Sherine Hamdy (Brown) argued that STS scholars have missed opportunities by ignoring the linkages between science, religion, and difference.

Science and Technology Studies and the Public Sphere‬ 
Beginning with a provocation from Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard) this session discusses how the public sphere is viewed from within STS, followed by reflections from Myles Jackson (NYU Polytechnic) and Brian Wynne (Lancaster).

Opening the Black Box 
Trevor Pinch (Cornell) provokes this session by looking at where STS has gone and where it is going. David Kaiser (MIT) continues the conversation by focusing on the problem of scale in “black box” studies. Antoine Picon (Harvard) pushes back by suggesting that perhaps STS hasn’t opened the black box after all.