[Air-L] CFP: The production of participation in the digital world, Trondheim, Des 13-14

Thu Aug 22 05:46:45 PDT 2019

  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 Distribution https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Music-Distribution-The-Sociology-of-Online-Music-Streams/Spilker/p/book/9781138673908