Easst 2010 - TRACK 4: WHAT OBJECTS DO: DESIGN, CONSUMPTION AND SOCIAL PRACTICES

Dear all
we just remind you the deadline to submit an abstract to the track WHAT OBJECTS DO: DESIGN, CONSUMPTION AND SOCIAL PRACTICES at EASST 2010 in Trento, Italy, 2-4 September 2010.  

EASST 2010 - TRACK 11. PERFORMATIVE INFRASTRUCTURES, MULTIPLE MOBILITIES

Dear Colleagues, I am pleased to invite you to submit abstracts to the track 'Performative Infrastructures, Multiple Mobilities' at the EASST 2010 Conference in Trento  (Italy). The deadline is 15th March 2010 (see instructions below), just one week is left! Please circulate widely to your lists, and excuse for cross postings. Best regards, Alessandro Mongili

 

EASST 2010 – PRACTICING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, PERFORMING THE SOCIAL
TRENTO, SEPTEMBER 2ND - 4TH 2010

EASST 2010: PRACTICES AND THE ENVIRONMENT: PERFORMING SUSTAINABILITY AND DOING STS

Dear all

We invite you to submit an abstract to Track 36: ‘Practices and the environment: performing sustainability and STS’ at EASST 2010 in Trento, Italy, 2-4 September 2010.

The track details are below and attached.

The deadline for submissions is coming up soon, 15 March, 2010, and the submission instructions are here: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010/abstract-submission

We look forward to seeing you in Italy.

Best regards, Ruth Rettie, Kingston University Kevin Burchell, Kingston University Eleonore Pauwels, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

PRACTICES AND THE ENVIRONMENT: PERFORMING SUSTAINABILITY AND DOING STS

This track focuses on sustainability technologies as practices, including the practices of innovation, governing and consumption that underlie sustainable and unsustainable behaviours, and the adoption of behaviours that are held to be more sustainable (for example, lower energy consumption, choosing particular modes of transport and waste reduction). Our interest in sustainability as a practice emerges in part from Elizabeth Shove’s (2003) observation that unsustainable patterns of consumption are inscribed in every day, taken-for-granted human activities. Employing Theodore Schatzki’s notion of practice as a nexus of temporally emerging, tangled, differentiated and dispersed performances, sayings, emotions, technologies, people and things, we ask what kinds of understandings, procedures and engagements (Schatzki, 1996; Warde, 2003) mobilize and stabilize practices of sustainability. Further, rather than bracketing sustainability technologies as discrete entities, we ask how a practice-based approach might help us to understand their social shaping within practices. Finally, we ask what a practice-based approach means for doing STS.

EASST track: BIO-OBJECTS - LIFE IN THE 21st CENTURY

Call for abstracts:

 

EASST 010 – PRACTICING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, PERFORMING THE SOCIAL

TRENTO, SEPTEMBER 2ND - 4TH 2010

 

TRACK 16. BIO-OBJECTS – LIFE IN THE 21st CENTURY

 

Bio-objects, or concepts, materialities and processes that are related to “life”, play

a crucial role in the 21st century in which increasing knowledge of life and its

components are fundamentally transforming what life means and where its

boundaries lie. New developments in the biosciences - especially the

molecularisation of life - and their influence on healthcare and other aspects of

our society are analysed in a diverse body of literature, looking into ethical, legal

and social implications of these new developments. New bio-objects deserve a

special focus, because they are produced by, and in their turn, are producing

these developments in special ways.

 

In our terms “bio-objects” are a new mixture of relations to life, or perhaps more

specifically spatio-temporal configurations to which ‘life’ is attributed. They are

new ongoing boundary projects between entities that were once considered ‘pure’

substances making up particular, discreet forms of living organisms. As a

consequence, the boundaries between human and animal, organic and

nonorganic, living and suspension of living, time and space, subject and object,

agency and effect are questioned, destabilised and in some cases re-established.

Making the study of bio-objects explicit enables us to use it as a heuristic device –

to point out and start tracing the new relations that make speaking about life and

living as objects possible. However, with the concept we do not intent to reduce

life to a thing or an entity - a mute object without agency. Rather, by questioning

life’s status as an ‘object’ –bio-object – of current technological innovations we

want to point out how life is in constant interplay with novel techniques aiming at

re-routing, diversifying, collecting and commodifying the vital processes that ‘life’

consists of. Thus, bio-objects cannot be reduced to any pure form preceding them

- rather, their plane of existence is something that could be seen as a network of

unstable ontologies, an ongoing process rather than a stable form of being. As

such, bio-objects contest the boundary lines between entities we have

accustomed to take for granted, as existing by themselves and for themselves,

and open up a new space for thinking what is it that we think is scientifically

graspable in ‘life’.

 

The session on bio-objects traces a variety of contemporary bio-objects in their

emergence, stabilisation and circulation through a number of countries. It will

consist of diverse empirical investigations that provide new ways of thinking

about how novel bio-objects enter our contemporary life and societies. They range

from traditional to advanced configurations of life and living such as artificial hips,

cloned animals, embryos, cybrids, genetic resources, biobanks and the forms of

governance that surround them.

 

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent through the local organizing committees website at http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010 by March 15th .

 

Convenors

Sakari Tamminen works as a researcher in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Helsinki. His areas of interests include human-nonhuman boundaries in new scientific practices and the re-constitution of national borders through the life and flesh of nonhuman forms of life. (http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/sospsyk/english/tamminen.htm)

Aaro Tupasela works as a researcher at the Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki. His areas of interest include the sociology of science, the sociology of knowledge, public understanding of science, bioethics and the regulation of biomedicine. (www.valt.helsinki.fi/staff/tupasela/english.htm)

Niki Vermeulen is currently a visiting researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Studies of Science at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her areas of interest include the history, organisation, and impact of large-scale scientific collaboration in the life sciences. (http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/mitarbeiterinnen/niki-vermeulen/)

 

 

CFP: Technoscientific and Social Dynamics of Health and Healthcare

CALL FOR PAPERS

Technoscientific and Social Dynamics of Health and Healthcare

 Keynote speakers:

Carlos Novas – Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Canada

Ilpo Helén – Department of Sociology, University of

ERQ Call for Papers: New Groups and New Methods? The Ethnography and Qualitative Research of Online Groups

ERQ Call for Papers:

New Groups and New Methods? The Ethnography and Qualitative Research of Online Groups

Special Issue (volume 4, number 2, 2011) of “Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa” (Ethnography and Qualitative Research)

Edited By: Stefano De Paoli & Maurizio Teli

Online groups, also called “virtual worlds”, “virtual communities”, or “digital collectives”, are those social groups whose members’ interactions are mediated primarily by the Internet. Par-ticipation in these groups has a variety of purposes and takes place via a variety of technologi-cal platforms. These include, for instance, platforms for social networking (such as Facebook, Second Life and social networks in general), platforms that have a productive purpose for par-ticipants (such as projects for the development of Free and Open

one week left for EASST2010 track on Semiotics and STS (track n. 7)

Dear all
we remind you to submit an abstract to the "ARE WE STILL HALFWAY OF THE TURN?" PRACTICING SEMIOTICS, PERFORMING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES track at EASST 2010 in Trento, Italy, 2-4 September 2010. 

Track details are below and can be also found at http://events.unitn.it/sites/events.unitn.it/files/EASST010Track_07.pdf

The deadline for submissions is 15 March, 2010, and the submission instructions are here: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010/abstract-submission

We look forward to seeing you in Italy.

EASST track "Technology, Innovation and Images of Health and Aging"

Dear colleagues,

This is a friendly reminder that we are convening a track “Technoloy, Innovation and Images of Health and Aging” during the upcoming EASST Annual Conference in Trento. Abstracts can still be submitted until 15 March through the following website: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010.

Looking forward to your contribution. We are planning to publish a selection of the best papers in an edited volume or special issue.

Best regards,
Alexander Peine, Birgit Jaeger, Alex Faulkner, Ellen Moors (convenors)



CALL FOR ABSTRACTS - SUBMISSION DEADLINE 15 MARCH 2010

Cfp - Governance and the Grid - SASE conference, June 24-26 - March 12 deadline

Apologies for cross-posting

Dear colleagues,

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract to the panel “Governance and the Grid. Delivering Electricity, Establishing Markets, Shaping Consumption” at the SASE conference in Philadelphia, June 24-26. See details below.

Best regards,
Catherine Grandclément and Vincent Lagendijk

Call for papers - Governance and the Grid. Delivering Electricity, Establishing Markets, Shaping Consumption
A panel proposal for the conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) – Network F – Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation - Philadelphia, June 24-26, 2010. http://www.sase.org/

Panel organizers:

CfP - IT APN Conference on Experiments, system innovation and sustainability transitions in Asia, 15-17 July, 2010, Chiang Mai