[Air-L] SSN Seminar: 'Prototype Nation: China & the Contested Promise of Innovation' with Prof Silvia Lindtner

[Thao Phan]

Please join us for this online seminar hosted by the Deakin Science and
Society Network <https://scienceandsocietynetwork.deakin.edu.au/> (SSN).
You can join the conversation on Twitter by following us at @SSNDeakin and
using the hashtags #SSNseminar

*Register here: *https://ssnseminar-silvialindtner.eventbrite.com.au

*Date/time:* Tuesday 30th March, 10am - 11:30am (Australian Eastern
Daylight Time, GMT+11)


*Title:*Prototype Nation: China & the Contested Promise of Innovation

*Abstract:*

How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become
transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the
nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a
transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and
entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image.
Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and
development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the
financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement
and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation. Lindtner’s
investigations draw on more than a decade of research in makerspaces, tech
incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals
of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures,
served the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic,
assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that
entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy,
investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of
sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation. Prototype Nation shows
that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial
life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of
promise and violence.

*About the speaker:*

*Silvia Lindtner *(she/her) is Associate Professor at the University of
Michigan in the School of Information and Associate Director of the Center
for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). She is a founding member of
Precarity Lab, a research collective working on various forms of
insecurity, vulnerability, and social and cultural exclusion that digital
platforms produce, and mediate. She is the co-founder of the China research
collective Hacked Matter, dedicated to critically investigating processes
of technology innovation, urban design, and production cultures in China.
Lindtner's research interests include cultures and politics of technology
innovation and entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on the gendered
and racialized forms of labor necessary to sustain and incubate
technological promise. Lindtner draws from more than ten years of
multi-sited ethnographic research, with a particular focus on China's
position in the global political economy of technology production.
Lindtner’s work contributes to the fields of STS (science and technology
studies), cultural and feminist anthropology, China studies, HCI (human
computer interaction), global communication studies, science and technology
policy, and design. Her research has been awarded support from the US
National Science Foundation, IMLS, Intel Labs, Google Anita Borg, and the
Chinese National Natural Science Foundation.

*About the respondent:*

*Dr Luke Heemsbergen* is a Lecturer at Deakin University, Australia, and
researches the political relations afforded through our digital choices in
the real world. He was previously a Research Fellow at the Melbourne
Networked Society Institute, and a ‘Berktern’ at Harvard’s Berkman Klein
Center for Internet & Society. His main research interests are based in the
(digitally) networked terrain of radical transparency and democratic
governing. Recently he’s been thinking about digital artefacts in the real
world and physical artefacts from the digital world (from 3D printing to
new ways of augmenting ‘reality’).

*Dr Leonard Hoon* is a Senior Research Fellow in the Applied Artificial
Intelligence Institute, leading the Health Technologies and AI Ethics
portfolios for the institute, and is a Chief Investigator with the
Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Hub for Digital
Enhanced Living. Leonard leverages his background in software engineering,
usability and product management to enable research translation. Dr Hoon
operates in discovery through to delivery of commercial research projects
for the institute including work in human factors, natural language
processing and the operationalisation of artificial intelligence.

*Watch the seminar:*

Seminar will be available to stream on YouTube live. Access using the live
link: https://youtu.be/9WOJdCjA6LE

Q&A with the speaker to follow. To send questions/participate in the chat,
you'll need to sign-in using a YouTube account
<https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-comment-on-youtube?r=AU&IR=T>.

The seminar will be recorded and available to watch on the SSN YouTube
channel after the Livestream.

If you have any questions, please send to ssn-info at deakin.edu.au
<http://ssn-info@deakin.edu.au/>