[Air-l] PhD course announcement at IT University of Copenhagen

[T.L. Taylor]

Hi folks. I will be hosting a PhD course at the IT University of 
Copenhagen on June 2-4 entitled "Mundane Technologies: The Structures 
and Practice of Everyday Use". The guest lecturers for it will be 
Lucy Suchman and Nina Wakeford. The course will explore the 
intersections between the structures of use embedded in technologies 
(be it physical configurations or software and architectures) and the 
actual practices that circulate through them. Rather than taking 
technological artifacts at face value, this course will examine 1) 
the embedded values, social & political configurations, and 
use-orientations within a technology (normative orientations) and 2) 
the intervening ways actual use is constructed, contested, and 
negotiated. The course will take up the notion of the "imagined user" 
and draw on work that seeks to understand the (at times messy) 
co-construction of technology and everyday users. Additionally, 
consideration will be given to methodological orientations that 
foster research exploring this relationship. The course will include 
students from a variety of fields, including those doing work on 
computer gaming, CSCW, Ubicomp, and internet studies to name a few. 
Students will focus on exploring - through the readings and 
reflections on their own research - the intersections between 
systems, values, and practices. Despite divergent objects of study 
(across several research departments), the goal of the course is to 
create a venue for some shared inquiry into the normative aspects of 
systems and the intervening everyday use of technological artifacts.

Space is limited and applications are required. Check out 
http://www1.itu.dk/sw29224.asp for more details (ECTS will likely be 
5 if a paper is submitted and a lesser amount if not).

	TL
-- 
___________________________________

T.L. Taylor, Associate Professor
Center for Computer Games Research
Dept. of Digital Aesthetics and Communication
IT University of Copenhagen
Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark
+45 7218 5035 (tele) / +45 7218 5001 (fax)
tltaylor at itu.dk / http://www.itu.dk/~tltaylor/