CfP: IJANTTI special issue on 3D Printing, Space Entrepreneurship and Advanced Battery Technology as Challenges to ANT

Calls for Papers (special): International Journal of Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation (IJANTTI)

Special Issue On: The Breakthroughs in Additive manufacturing (3D Printing), Space Entrepreneurship and Advanced Battery Technology as Challenges to Actor-Network Theory

Submission Due Date
9/15/2014

Guest Editors
Ivan Tchalakov, University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria

Recommended Topics
Topics to be discussed in this special issue include (but are not limited to) the following:

• ANT (and related approaches) based case studies of additive (3D) manufacturing: key innovations and their actor-networks – the complex web between 3D computer aided design (3D scanning), 3D printing equipment and production of appropriate material to be used by the equipment; of emerging consumer oriented business models; 3D printing and biotechnologies – new perspectives in implant and replacement organs manufacturing and related legal, ethical, psychological and other issues.
• ANT (and related approaches) based case studies of space entrepreneurs, their companies and technologies they developed, and the emerging new ‘actor-world’ (space tourism, asteroid mining, colonization of Mars, Moon, and asteroids);
• ANT (and related approaches) based case studies on electric vehicles, advanced battery technology, smart energy storage and related issues;
• ANT-based methodology for responsible innovation: emerging technologies, divergent developmental paths, and possible socio-technical scenarios
• Elaboration and refinement of ANT key notions (heterogeneous community, sociotechnical network, script, flux, translation, intermediary and mediator, etc.) To better understand:

• Transition from large scale corporate-based innovation to smaller scale entrepreneurial-based innovation and related technological change (as exemplified by the case with space industry
• Transition from subtractive (cutting and drilling) to additive (3D) manufacturing and reconfiguration of related techno-economic networks, including the changes in underlying notions of ‘design’, of ‘materiality’ and ‘object’, etc.
• The possible disruptive changes in century old patterns of automotive industry and electric power
• Philosophical and methodological critique of ANT inspired by or relevant to the new developments in additive manufacturing, space industry, green energy production and use, etc. Essays examining the potential of some resent trends in philosophy are highly appreciated (such as Speculative Realism movement and especially G. Harman object-oriented ontology, Karen Barad’s agential realism, Isabelle Stengers’ Cosmopolitics, non-orthodox reading of Aristotelian Metaphysics of Bradshaw, Beere and some others, philosophy of Alain Badiou, etc).

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.

Material Participation

Check out Noortje Marres’s new book, Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics from Palgrave. A recording of the book launch (involving Javier Lezaun (Oxford), Celia Lury (Warwick), Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths) and moderated by Monika Krause (Goldsmiths)) can be listened to here.

What is the role of things in political participation? This innovative book develops a fresh perspective on everyday forms of engagement, one that foregrounds the role of objects, technology and settings in public involvement. It makes a distinctive contribution to debates about the role of things in democracy, but it also offers empirical analyses of contemporary devices of participation, such as smart meters, demonstrational eco-homes and sustainable living gadgets.

New blog on anthropology of science and technology

A new blog to bookmark on the anthropology of science and technology from the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC) at the American Anthropological Association. Kicked off with an inaugural post by the editor, Patricia G. Lange, and a post by Lucy Suchman on the military-industrial-media-entertainment network.

Between ontology and methods

I only just saw that CSISP at Goldsmiths have posted the audio and video of Richard Rogers and Bruno Latour’s talk on “Digital Societies: between Ontology and Methods” (March 7, 2012 16:30-18:00) on their website.

In this joint event, Bruno Latour and Richard Rogers will present their respective programmes for researching digital social life. If digital networked media are transforming social life as well as social research, what are the implications for our analysis of digital societies? In taking up this question, Latour and Rogers will examine the changing relations between technology, research methods and ontology in digital social life, and what this means for the emerging field of digital sociology.

The technology and politics of evaluation

Another exciting event from the laboratory of inSIS at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford:

How’s my feedback? The technology and politics of evaluation

Tuesday, 28 June 2011, 9:00-17:00

Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

There is hardly anything that is not being evaluated on the web these days. Books, dishwashers, lawyers, teachers, health services, ex-boyfriends, haircuts, prostitutes and websites are just some examples targeted by novel review, rating and ranking schemes.

Used in an increasing number of areas, these schemes facilitate public assessment by soliciting and aggregating feedback and distributing it as comments, ranks, scales and stories. So how are we to judge the effectiveness of these schemes? What modes of governance are implicated in their operation? What is it to evaluate the evaluators – and will this business ever end?

Speakers include: Malcolm Ashmore (Colombia/ Loughborough University), Andrew Balmer (University of Sheffield), Stefan Schwarzkopf (Copenhagen Business School), Ian Stronach (Liverpool John Moores University), Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths, University of London), Steve Woolgar and Malte Ziewitz (University of Oxford).

For more information visit their website.

Phenomenological Approaches to Ethics and IT

Lucas Introna (who was one of the panellists at our February 2008 Harman Review event) has just updated his entry on “Phenomenological Approaches to Ethics and Information Technology” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In it he also makes the point that there are some linkages between phenomenology and Latour:

Before proceeding it should be noted that the most recent work of Bruno Latour (2002, 2005) suggests that he has taken up many of the insights of phenomenology in his ongoing work. Thus, the later Latour (2002, 2005) can be seen as a bridging figure between the constructivist tradition and the phenomenological tradition (for more detailed arguments in this regard refer to Graham Harman’s (2009) book on Latour’s metaphysical ground).

Digital Methods Summer School 2011

See the following announcement:

Digital Methods Summer School 2011

Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, 27 June – 8 July 2011

After Cyberspace: Data-rich Media

The Digital Methods Summer School, now in its fifth edition, trains post-graduates, PhD candidates and motivated students and scholars in how to undertake Web research after cyberspace. The idea of “after cyberspace” is an invitation to think through and study the web without resort to the traditions informing “virtual” and “cyber” corporality, politics and identity. Rather the web, first with locative technology, later with language and national webs, and more recently with college and corporate networking software (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) continues to be grounded.

The application deadline is 8 April 2011. Candidates will be informed on 15 April 2011.

Installing (Social) Order

An interesting new blog focusing on the social studies of infrastructure, with a penchant for STS and ANT.

No doubt that computer science is the formative mode of building the models of contemporary social life. Interactional settings, inter- and transorganizational networks as well as the internal structures of macro-social phenomena like science, politics, economy, art and the media are ‘nerved’ with heterogenous, overlapping and sometimes antidromic tendencies to be formed by extremely distributed but nonetheless large scaled information infrastructure.

Technology and the financial crisis

The Information Systems and Innovation Group (ISIG) in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics will be hosting the 11th Social Study of ICT (SSIT) Workshop on 28 March 2011. Here is the detailed programme and you can register here.

This year’s SSIT workshop has invited leading academics and practitioners to open the discussion on the way information systems development has coped with the continuous innovation in the financial sector in the past decade; the resulting information infrastructures; and the pressures for new enterprise architectures and IS development practice at the aftermath of the crisis.

In this one-day conference, organized by the Information Systems and Innovation Group of the Department of Management, information system scholars, social scientists and CIOs from commercial and central banks, will present their views and lead a discussion on this topic.

SSIT11 will be followed by the 7th Social Study of IT Open Research Forum (SSIT-ORF7) on 29 and 30 March 2011, also at the LSE. SSIT-ORF is a unique venue for PhD students and junior researchers to present their work in progress on technology and information systems related topics in a constructive atmosphere.