Dear colleagues,
As part of the upcoming STS-CH conference that will take place at the
University of Basel on August 31 and September 1, 2023, we invite you to
submit your proposals to the following panel:
The Living Rooms of Computation: Practices, Alignments, Frictions
In a 2015 article entitled “The Cathedral of Computation”, Ian Bogost
invited social scientists to move away from sensationalist and devout
discourses about the absolute power of algorithms and computation to better
document – empirically and agnostically – the constitutive relationships
of a culture ‘with computers in it.’ As the 10th anniversary of this
visionary proposition is approaching, this panel proposes to investigate
digital technologies under the lens of the infra-ordinary (Perec 1989), i.e.,
as they emerge from mundane situated practices. The panel addresses, but is
not limited to, three sets of interrelated questions: First, where are the
computing devices that irrigate contemporary societies imagined and designed?
While ethnographic inquiries have documented academic (Jaton 2021), corporate
(Christin 2020), and crowdsourced (Gray and Suri 2019) computational
groundwork, much remains to be done to better understand the multiple
locations in which our digital society is imagined, produced, and enacted.
Secondly, who are the people who manufacture, assemble, design, or enact
computational devices (algorithms, software, referential databases, hardware)
and what are the political and economic arrangements (Callon 2021) that these
people are part of? Thirdly, how and through what means are computational
tools and devices put to work? If several ethnographic and historical
investigations have managed to account for the work of programming (e.g.,
Pütz 2021) and assembling electronic components (e.g., Haigh, Priestley and
Rope 2016), the concrete work required to put computers into use remains
little documented. In parallel to ethnographic and historical glances on
infra-ordinary practices, the panel invites empirical and conceptual
socio-anthropological contributions highlighting the disruptive alignments and
frictions (Edwards et al. 2011) that shape contemporary computer-related
activities.
More details are available here: https://sts2023.ch/call-for-papers/#P20
Warm wishes,
Florian Jaton (STS Lab, University of Lausanne) and Anna Jobin (Institute
Human-IST, University of Fribourg)
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