[Air-L] Call for Participation: Stanford STS Conference on Governing Technology (due 3/22/2013)

[David Nemer]

Apologies for cross-posting.

Please forward widely!

We welcome submissions from any field and institution to the first annual
Stanford Graduate STS conference, "Governing Technology." More information
is below.

Thank you, and we hope to see you in May!
- Morgan, Damien, Mark, and the rest of the GSST conference committee

----------------------------------------------

Governing Technology: Material Politics and Hybrid Agencies
*Thursday, May 9 and Friday, May 10**, 2013*
*Stanford Humanities Center*
*http://governing.morganya.org *

This conference aims to bring together two communities of scholars: those
examining the ways that states and other institutions have sought to govern
technologies, and those examining the ways that technologies have
influenced the practice and form of governing. In the process, we will
revisit the concept of governance through the lens of *material politics*.

As some technologies promise the world and others threaten to overrun it,
scholars in the humanities and social sciences have turned a critical eye
to the agentive power and material effects of technology, as well as the
responses that this power invokes. Research on technology’s entanglements
with states, transnational organizations, and other powerful institutions
has often taken its cues from science and technology studies. In
particular, pioneering work in STS on materiality, on governmentality, and
on hybrid and nonhuman agency has become more and more a part of mainstream
work in history, geography, anthropology, communication, literary studies,
sociology, and beyond. Scholars from across these fields have, in turn,
developed new frameworks of analysis that go beyond classic conceptions of
governmentality and materiality to incorporate their own disciplinary
strengths.

Cornell professor Steve
Jackson<https://sites.google.com/site/stanfordstsgrad/conference/keynote>
will
discuss the interplay between governance and technology in his keynote
lecture <https://sites.google.com/site/stanfordstsgrad/conference/keynote>.
The conference will wrap up with a roundtable discussion on building the
STS community in the Bay Area and beyond, featuring STS professors from
Stanford and several nearby Universities of California.

Call for Participation

We invite papers that consider (or critique) the relevance of *material
politics* in understanding the relationship between governance and
technology: how states and other institutions respond to challenges imposed
by new and emerging technological developments and how technologies,
understood broadly, become part of governing.

Papers from any discipline or institution are encouraged. Possible topics
include, but are not limited to:

   - Natural resource management and extraction
   - The politics of environmental regulation and tourism
   - National or transnational policies on innovation and intellectual
   property
   - The regulation and development of biotechnology
   - The agency and role of non-governmental organizations
   - Governing dangerous materials
   - The politics of agricultural technologies
   - Medical innovation and regulation
   - The *un*governability of certain technologies
   - The politics of technology in public health or urban planning
   - Historical accounts of technological governance or agency
   - Theoretical discussions or critiques of material agencies
   - Theoretical discussions of governance through the lens of material
   politics

Please submit the following to *governing.technology at morganya.org*:

   - *A submission abstract* of no more than 250 words
   - *A brief biography* of no more than 50 words to be included in the
   conference program

The deadline for submissions is *March 22, 2013*. Notifications will be
sent and the schedule posted by April 12, 2013.




-- 
*David Nemer*
PhD Candidate in Social Informatics
School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University
Editor of the Social Informatics Blog - http://socialinformaticsblog.com
http://www.dnemer.com dnemer at indiana.edu