[Air-L] "Platform" fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study

[Christian Sandvig]

Dearest AIR colleagues,

The residential fellowship theme for 2023-24 at the Institute for Advanced
Study School of Social Science will be "Platform" -- If you hold a Ph.D.
and are working on this theme please consider applying! More information
below. Please feel free to forward as appropriate.

Christian

--
Christian Sandvig
Co-Director, Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC)
University of Michigan
http://umich.edu/~csandvig - http://esc.umich.edu/


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PLATFORM

A platform aspires to operate across devices and experiences,
de-emphasizing form in favor of content. A platform can be a foundation for
political ideology, a web-based application for discourse, a system
yielding multifaceted biomedical and communicative ends, and more. From a
social science perspective, a platform can be understood as an
infrastructure for action, an architecture or affordance that enables and
constrains social, economic, and political possibilities, and conditions
how we represent and experience the world. The Platform theme aims to
incite scholarly thinking across platforms of different kinds, and in
different mediums—including analog, electronic, and virtual—to explore the
norms and practices that organize, permeate, and stem from them. What
historical, technological, theoretical, and policy perspectives and
methodologies are key for understanding platforms and how they operate in
academia, government, and industry, as well as in the physical world and in
the realm of social relations?

The theme will explore ways to account for the expansion, rise, and
influence of “the platform” in global society. In what ways do
platforms—such as biomedical technologies–structure, reorganize, and
consolidate science, knowledge, and markets? How does the dominance of
private platforms produce forms of inequality—including along vectors of
race, gender, class, nation, and region—and compel reimaginings of public
infrastructure? How do today’s platforms differ from the social
infrastructures and architectures of the past? Platforms have become
default archives for both personal and institutional artifacts like data,
text, sound, and images. Whose history is being preserved and whose is
lost? How does exclusion from a platform—such as the deplatforming of
controversial nations or figures, and particular forms of speech—highlight
its power?

These queries and considerations are suggestive and do not exhaust the
concerns of this year long engagement of the Platform theme. Scholars from
across the social sciences as well as the information sciences, the
humanities, law, and related fields are encouraged to apply.

The theme will be led by Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor at the
Institute for Advanced Study (IAS); Lisa Nakamura, Gwendolyn Calvert Baker
Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan; and Christian Sandvig,
H. Marshall McLuhan Collegiate Professor of Digital Media at the University
of Michigan.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: OCTOBER 15, 2022

https://www.ias.edu/sss/sss-fellowships