[Air-L] CFP: The production of participation in the digital world, Trondheim, Dec 12-13

Thu Aug 22 05:56:45 PDT 2019

Sorry, correct dates in the heading should have been Dec 12-13

On 22.08.2019 14:46, Hendrik Storstein Spilker wrote:
>
>
>   The Production of Participation in the Digital World
>
>
>   Call for papers and information about workshop in Trondheim, 12-13
>   December 2019.
>
>
>     _Information_
>
> The skeleton of our digital future is in the making today. In recent 
> years, there has been a raising concern both in academia and the 
> public about the way digitalization shapes society in overt and covert 
> ways. Digital infrastructures both supports, transforms and co-creates 
> social institutions and social life. With semi-autonomous, «smart» and 
> «learning» algorithms, digital infrastructures have been delegated 
> more responsibility and autonomy in filtering, sorting, and 
> classifying vital information, and also with providing advice and 
> making decisions, at the same time as they become less transparent to 
> public scrutiny. Thus, digitalization transforms society and citizens 
> more intensively both in scope and depth – not least in terms of 
> potentials and risks related to democratic participation and empowerment.
>
> Public responses to this development have largely been reactive, 
> dealing with the effects of the technologies rather than their raison 
> d’etre. At the same time, this development has only to a limited 
> degree been conceptualized by the social sciences.
>
> In order to pave the ground for a more proactive approach to 
> technology development, our research group /Digitalization and social 
> life/ at the Department for sociology and political science, NTNU 
> invite to a two-day workshop in Trondheim in December. We call for 
> contributions that confront the challenges posed by digitalization 
> empirically and conceptually.
>
> With the heading /the production of participation/, we invite to a 
> workshop where different arenas for and aspects of the development of 
> digital technologies and infrastructures are studied, with a special 
> focus on how the developments influence users’/citizens’/costumers’ 
> participation and empowerment in digital society. Our starting point 
> is that the conditions for future participation are carved out and 
> battled over, openly or covertly, by and between different “production 
> sites” and “actor collectives”. Although large platforms and 
> technology companies may have dominated the battlefield the last 
> decade, they are not the only contestants. Governments, 
> nongovernmental organizations, cooperatives, consumers, citizens, 
> incumbent businesses, individual entrepreneurs, hackers, visionaries, 
> engineers, branders and workers all participate and contribute, 
> consciously or unconsciously, to the shaping of the infrastructures of 
> the future as they maneuver them today. More or less stable 
> collectives and alliances are formed, and clashes among actors 
> pursuing different interests take place at various levels, local, 
> national, supranational, global.
>
> We call for contributions that address the sites, actors and dynamics 
> involved in /the production of participation/://How is this work 
> carried out? Through which strategies and techniques? Under which 
> frameworks? What are the objectives and agendas of the various 
> stakeholders? And how do they comply with democratic ideals of citizen 
> empowerment and participation?
>
>
>     _Call for papers_
>
> The workshop will have 2-3 invited speakers (see below) and else 
> consist of presentation of papers.We hereby invite those interested to 
> send in title/abstracts of proposed papers/presentations, about 
> 100-250 words, to Hendrik Storstein Spilker, email: 
> hendrik.spilker at ntnu.no <mailto:hendrik.spilker at ntnu.no>(*deadline 
> 20/10 2019*)*. *We want to include a fairly broad scope of papers, 
> both theoretical and empirical, descriptive and normative, to cover 
> the breadth of research efforts in this area, but encourage all 
> contributors to actively address and engage in the challenges 
> formulated in the title and ingress of this call.
>
> The seminar language will be English.
>
> For updates about place and program, follow our event page at 
> https://www.facebook.com/events/2101469596815391/ *//*
>
> *//*
>
>
>     _Keynote speakers_
>
> We are very happy to announce the following exiting key note talks by 
> our invited speakers:
>
>
>     Dr. Lina Dencik, University of Cardiff: Civic participation in a
>     datafied society
>
> Citizens are increasingly assessed, profiled, categorized and ‘scored’ 
> according to data assemblages, their future behavior is predicted 
> through data processing, and services are allocated accordingly. In a 
> datafied society, state-citizen relations become quasi-automated and 
> dependent on algorithmic decision-making. This raises significant 
> challenges for democratic processes, active citizenship and public 
> engagement. At the same time, we have seen a (re)emergence of 
> citizen-centered democratic practices, from citizen assemblies to 
> crowdsourced policies, that suggest a recognised need to enhance 
> citizen voice in decision-making. Drawing on the on-going 
> collaborative project ‘Towards Democratic Auditing’ carried out by the 
> Data Justice Lab, in this talk I will engage with the question of 
> advancing civic participationin a context of rapid technological and 
> social transformation, considering also experiments in new democratic 
> practices to ensure legitimacy, transparency, accountability and 
> intervention in relation to data-driven governance. In so doing, I 
> will outline emerging terrains for developing citizen agency in a 
> datafied society.
>
> Bio: Lina Dencik is Reader at the School of Journalism, Media and 
> Culture at Cardiff University, UK and is Co-Founder of the Data 
> Justice Lab. She has published widely on digital media, resistance and 
> the politics of data and is currently Principal Investigator of the 
> DATAJUSTICE project funded by an ERC Starting Grant. Her publications 
> include /Media and Global Civil Society/ (Palgrave, 2012), /Worker 
> Resistance and Media /(Peter Lang, 2015), /Critical Perspectives on 
> Social Media and Protest /(Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015) 
> and /Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society /(Polity, 2018). 
> Website: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/182924-dencik-lina
>
>
>     Dr. Thomas Poell, University of Amsterdam: Governing platforms and
>     Value-Centric Design
>
> Digital platforms enable user-driven forms of organization and 
> collective action (Benkler 2006; Bennett and Segerberg 2013, Shirky 
> 2008). Yet, platform-based activity is simultaneously centrally 
> monitored and shaped through ubiquitous techno-commercial 
> infrastructures (Couldry 2015; Fuchs 2017; van Dijck 2013). As 
> platforms penetrate every sphere of life, this combination of 
> distributed user participation and top-down techno-commercial steering 
> undermines public institutions and destabilizes social relations, 
> enhancing the precarity of labor, unsettling urban communities, and 
> disrupting democratic public debate (van Dijck, Poell & de Waal 2018). 
> In the light of these problems, this paper considers how the 
> platformization of society can be governed in correspondence with 
> vital public values. It argues that due to the nature of 
> platform-based activity, effective governing arrangements need to be 
> organized through a framework of ‘cooperative responsibility’, which 
> revolves around the dynamic interaction between platforms, public 
> institutions, and users, which include individual citizens, but also 
> incumbent businesses, advertisers, NGOs, political parties, and other 
> societal organizations (Helberger, Pierson & Poell 2018, 1). However, 
> a major obstacle in developing such arrangements are the progressively 
> entangled economic interests of the involved actors. In the name of 
> optimization and cutting back public expenditure, governments actively 
> contribute to platformization by deregulating markets and privatizing 
> public infrastructures, while citizens increasingly dependent on 
> asset-based welfare schemes revolving around platforms. Hence, future 
> governing arrangements will need to be based on a new political pact 
> informed by key public values and geared towards reducing dependence 
> on corporate platforms. Reflecting on these challenges and drawing on 
> proposals for value-centric design, this presentation will sketch the 
> contours of such a pact.
>
> _Bio_: Thomas Poell, Ph.D. is senior lecturer in New Media & Digital 
> Culture and Program Director of the Research Master Media Studies at 
> the University of Amsterdam (NL). He has published widely on digital 
> platforms and popular protest in Canada, Egypt, Tunisia, India, and 
> China, as well as on the role of these platforms in the reorganization 
> of key economic sectors, including journalism, education, and health 
> care. Poell is co-author of /The Platform Society/ with José van Dijck 
> and Martijn de Waal (Oxford University Press, 2018), offering a 
> comprehensive analysis of how platforms disrupt markets and labor 
> relations, circumvent institutions, transform social and civic 
> practices and affect democratic processes. Furthermore, he co-edited 
> /The Sage Handbook of Social Media/ with Jean Burgess and Alice 
> Marwick (Sage, 2018), /Social Media Materialities and Protest /with 
> Mette Mortensen and Christina Neumayer (Routledge, 2018), and /Global 
> Cultures of Contestation/ with Esther Peeren, Robin Celikates, and 
> Jeroen de Kloet (Palgrave/McMillan, 2017). Website: 
> http://www.uva.nl/profiel/p/o/t.poell/t.poell.html.
> -- 
> Hendrik Storstein Spilker,
> Professor in the sociology of media and technology,
> Department of sociology and political science,
> NTNU
> Projects:
> STREAM (Streaming the culture industries):https://www.hf.uio.no/imk/forskning/prosjekter/stromming-av-kulturindustriene-stream/
> DICE (Digital Infrastructures and Citizen Empowerment):https://www.ntnu.no/iss/dice
> New book out: Digital Music Distributionhttps://www.routledge.com/Digital-Music-Distribution-The-Sociology-of-Online-Music-Streams/Spilker/p/book/9781138673908

-- 
Hendrik Storstein Spilker,
Professor in the sociology of media and technology,
Department of sociology and political science,
NTNU
Projects:
STREAM (Streaming the culture industries): https://www.hf.uio.no/imk/forskning/prosjekter/stromming-av-kulturindustriene-stream/
DICE (Digital Infrastructures and Citizen Empowerment): https://www.ntnu.no/iss/dice
New book out: Digital Music Distribution https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Music-Distribution-The-Sociology-of-Online-Music-Streams/Spilker/p/book/9781138673908