[Air-L] Final call for abstracts on "Future Making" for Danish STS Conference. Deadline March 15

[Annette Markham]

**apologies for any cross listing***

Dear AoIR Colleagues,

Please note the March 15 deadline. It's only 300 word abstracts, so that's
plenty of time :)

Join me and many other STS colleagues in June, 2015 at the Danish STS
(DASTS) Conference in Aarhus, June 2-3, 2015. http://sts.au.dk/dasts16/

You can submit papers in many different sessions. I'm organizing a panel
called Future Making: Methods, 'Data', and Social Change."

See below for session details.

Session 6: FUTURE MAKING: METHODS, ‘DATA,’ AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Organizer: Annette Markham, Aarhus University. Please submit Title and 300
word abstract before the end of March 15, 2015 via the webform:
http://sts.au.dk/dasts16/submit/ .  For questions, contact sessions
organizer: amarkham [at] dac [dot] au [dot] dk

Session Description: How do people make sense of intensely local but
digitally mediated and heavily networked life in the 21st Century? How do
individuals deal with the enormous amounts of data they generate and
accumulate in their everyday digital lives? What stories are told through
this data? How much of the story does an individual actually control? What
stories are automatically generated by how we organize our files (or not),
switch computers, use multiple storage devices, both in the cloud and in
our pockets?

These questions are well suited to an STS approach, especially if we
embrace the challenge to move beyond description to intervention. Within a
proactive stance of ethical future making, what creative practices can we
offer to developers, citizens, and policy makers to critically interrogate
the situations constituted through automation and datafication? How might
our well-honed STS methods help people grapple with, manage, or make sense
of the complexity of the personal big data they produce as they live their
everyday lives in a digital era?

This track invites contributions that address these questions and build a
case for intervention; modes and attitudes of inquiry that contribute
research expertise to collaborative and participatory social change. Format
can be traditional paper presentations, but track participants are
particularly encouraged to consider how their ideas can be conveyed through
workshops, creative presentations, exhibitions, interactive discussions, or
other ‘unconference’ activities. These experimental formats are useful for
thinking through practices other than academic discourse, while being
grounded firmly in robust academic methodologies, to develop models for
inquiry that are oriented more toward social change than scholarly
description.

More specific to the topic of building better digital futures, this track
is designed to provoke energetic discussions of how STS scholarship can
transform findings into interventions, raise consciousness about the
automated and algorithmic processes increasingly curating our memories, and
help people develop personally meaningful methods for documenting,
archiving, and later re-exhibiting lived experience, whether individually
or as part of larger groups and municipalities.

The focus of individual submissions should connect to this track theme.
Proposals are not limited to the following, but could be focused on one or
more of these well known problems of contemporary digital culture:

*Datafication*. This term marks the growing tendency to digitize, quantify,
and transform human experience into data; this process increasingly directs
personal and professional activities. When used as part of big data
calculations, our experiences are equalized and flattened into data points,
giving the illusion that all experiences are equally meaningful and
ultimately accessible. Our digital traces are stored in large government
and privately held data centers, bought and sold for marketing,
personalization of apps, or just to keep track of us. Data are
simultaneously invisible and everywhere. They assume an “itness,” making
their qualities seem concrete and incontrovertible.

*Algorithmic interpellation*. Algorithms manipulate data and feed us
information about ourselves. Future norms and structures are emerging
through current designs and frameworks for thinking about social media
platforms; the automated and corporatized features of these platforms do
not necessarily operate in the best interest of people.

*Locus of control*. As information becomes digitized, such as family
photos, letters, and other everyday artifacts, information that helps
individuals remember gets lost in deep file structures and outdated
devices. Although there are many apps and programs to help us sort through
these datasets, the digitizing processes has not significantly improved our
ability to seamlessly retrieve and make sense of past events. At a broader
structural level, similar question can be raised: What is the role of
social media platforms in creating our memories? How much does the
automated Facebook curation of our Year in Review exhibit, for example,
dictate the stories that will eventually be understood as individual
memory, generational history, and cultural heritage?

*Hegemonic culturing*. Whatever we define as a case, a situation, or a
phenomenon is at least a complex play of negotiations, alignments and
realignments within society. How do these structures and processes function
hegemonically, neutralizing and naturalizing certain ways of being while
obscuring other alternatives? This question is important particularly when
and if people don’t think of datafication or algorithmic processing as
problems at all.  A subtle shift in the discourse over the past 20 years
indicates a growing acceptance of the ‘fact’ of constant surveillance and
mass data collection by companies that provide users with applications,
platforms, and devices. At the same time, individuals are increasingly held
personally responsible for actions online, while the platforms and
infrastructures are portrayed as natural carriers and neutral collectors of
data.
submit session abstract for consideration by March 15 here:
http://sts.au.dk/dasts16/submit/


*****************************************************
Annette N. Markham, Ph.D.
Professor MSO, School of Communication & Culture, Aarhus University
Affiliate Professor, School of Communication, Loyola University, Chicago
amarkham at gmail.com
http://markham.internetinquiry.org/
Twitter: annettemarkham