[Air-L] CFP: The Global South and the Global Cyberspace (4S, Nov. 2-5, 2011, Cleveland)

[Yuri Takhteyev]

I am organizing a 4S session that would be of interest to many AOIR
members. This year 4S (the Society for Social Studies of Science) is
meeting in Cleveland on November 2-5, 2011. (See
http://www.4sonline.org/meeting for details.)

This session is organized in collaboration with the Latin American
Network of 4S but submissions involving other regions in the south are
also very much welcome.

If you are interested in participating, please send an abstract of a
paper (minimum 250 words, maximum of 400 words) to
yuri.takhteyev at utoronto.ca by March 7, 2011. If you have any
questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Session Title: The Global South and the Global Cyberspace

Fifteen years ago an American poet living in California proclaimed the
Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, a world “both everywhere
and nowhere,” foretelling the coming obsolescence of the “Governments
of the Industrial World” from China to the United States, thanks to
the rise of the new digital information and communication
technologies. In the following years, those technologies have played a
key role in the visions of the coming globalized world. At the same
time, the Cyberspace has for the most part been a “northern” domain.

This panel will explore the place of the Global South in the Global
Cyberspace, as well as more broadly the relationship between ICTs and
globalization in southern contexts. We welcome papers looking at how
ICTs are used by different actors as tools in their own globalization
projects, as well as papers looking at the increasing globalization of
the development of ICTs. The latter could include the more recent
outsourcing of what used to be considered “northern” high-tech work to
the south, the increased role of the distributed communities of
software developers (including those working on free / open source
software), as the well as the more mundane importation of “northern”
ICTs into the southern contexts.

The papers should focus on the Global South, including in particular
Latin America, considering either the south-north ties or the lateral
ties between southern regions. Historical perspectives on the
relationship between ICT and globalization would be highly welcome,
including those looking back to the days before the 1990s.

Yuri Takhteyev

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http://takhteyev.org/