[Air-l] CFP: After Social Construction: Technology, Knowledge and Society

[Jonathan Sterne]

[CFP -- please distribute widely; apologies for cross-posting]

AFTER SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION: TECHNOLOGY, KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIETY

A Special Issue of _Social Epistemology_

500 word proposals due:  1 December 2003

Submission Deadline: 1 March 2004

Issue Editors Jonathan Sterne and Joan Leach

Formatted .html and .pdf calls available at 
http://www.pitt.edu/~jsterne/asc.html.

As promoted by Bruno Latour, Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, and many 
others, social construction of technology (SCOT) approaches have been 
a major force in technology studies.  They have offered vital 
alternatives to positivistic and deterministic conceptions of 
technology; rich notions of human and technological agency; and new 
objects and approaches for the cultural, historical and philosophical 
approaches to technology.  At the same time, critics have charged 
that SCOT does nothing more than repeatedly discover that it objects 
are "socially constructed."

As the approach becomes more established in technology studies, and 
as authors like Ian Hacking challenge the limits of the SCOT 
paradigm, we want to know what comes next.  Is this a moment to find 
the next step after social construction?  Or is this a moment where 
we can build a new social epistemology of technology that presupposes 
a constructionist paradigm?

For our special issue of _Social Epistemology_, the editors seek two 
kinds of submissions:

***full length essays (approximately 9000 words) that challenge, 
extend, rethink or pose robust alternatives to the SCOT approach

***short position papers of no more than 1000 words for a forum on 
the SCOT paradigm and the future of technology studies.

Visit the _Social Epistemology_ page at Routledge for full style guidelines:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/sepauth.html

Email submissions are preferred, though snail mail is acceptable. 
Send all submissions and queries to:

Jonathan Sterne
Department of Communication
University of Pittsburgh
1117 Cathedral of Learning
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA

Email MS Word or .rtf encoded attachments to: jsterne at pitt.edu