[Air-L] Reminder: Dec 1 Deadline for Platforming & Unplatforming Workshop in Los Angeles

[Alexander Halavais]

Hello, AoiRists, Hope those of you in the US have had an enjoyable
Thanksgiving. Just a reminder of the rapidly approaching deadline for
proposals for our upcoming workshop. Don't hesitate to send any questions
or queries our way. We look forward to seeing some of you in LA in the new
year. Best, Alex Halavais Platforming and Unplatforming: A Research Workshop

Los Angeles, February 4-5, 2023

(Writing Sprint, February 6-7, 2023)

Over the last decade, there has been growing concern over the influence of
platforms on multiple spheres of life. Definitions of “platforms” are
various and controversial. As defined by van Dijck, platforms are,
“providers of software, (sometimes) hardware, and services that help code
social activities into a computational architecture; they process
(meta)data through algorithms and formatted protocols before presenting
their interpreted logic in the form of user-friendly interfaces with
default settings that reflect the platform owner’s strategic choices”
(2013, p. 29). As Tarleton Gillespie (2010) notes, the choice of the term
“platform” itself is an indication of the role many of these sites hope to
project and establish their role in society as a “neutral intermediary.”
Yet, major social platforms like Facebook and Twitter have affected
(inflected, infected) social discourse, leading to questions of how people
use and are used by these platforms (Burgess, 2021). And while social
platforms have dominated many of these conversations, interdisciplinary
scholars have called attention to the platformization of everything from
healthcare to business education (e.g., Ajunwa & Greene, 2019; Berg et al.,
2018; Kelkar, 2018; Kellogg, Valentine, & Christin, 2020; Lee et al., 2015;
Zhang, 2021). Critical attention to platforms and platformization across
domains raises common questions: namely, when we all use the same “Software
as a Service” how far does that remove the locus of control from the users
and from the institutions and organizations they work within?

We invite you to join us for a two-day unconference and workshop that seeks
to bring together researchers from across disciplines who are seeking to
understand the role of platforms, broadly construed, in society and within
institutions, the threats and opportunities they pose, and how effective
policies might be crafted to address them.

An optional writing sprint will follow the unconference, with the intention
of producing substantial collaborative and individual works, to be
published in a collected volume.

We ask participants interested in attending the workshop to submit a 500 to
1000 word position paper, no later than December 1, 2022, to
unplatforming at gmail.com. The position papers may include any of the
following:


   -

   Explorations of how we should be defining and conceptualizing platforms
   themselves. What is included in these definitions, and what might be missed?
   -

   A potential empirical study of a specific platform.
   -

   An analysis of the conceptual traditions and methodologies that may be
   of most benefit to researchers interested in studying platform mediation.
   -

   Structures of ownership and control for platforms.
   -

   Theoretical perspectives that advance our understanding of the
   relationship between platforms and users.
   -

   Design implication or policy position papers that address the role
   platforms are playing in society.
   -

   Critical examination of the field of platform studies itself.


We are seeking unformed, unpolished work that is at a stage that can be
influenced by the discussions that will occur at the meeting. Additionally,
this work can take many forms: research ideas or drafts, speculative
fiction, and other forms of creative work.

Registration for the workshop is free to participants. The workshop is
sponsored by the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the College
of Health Solutions and at Arizona State University, and will be held in
the historical Herald-Examiner Building in Los Angeles.

We have invited several people to help to encourage our conversations and
think about possibilities:

   -

   Roderic N. Crooks, UC Irvine
   -

   Paul Dourish, UC Irvine
   -

   Lilly Irani, UC San Diego
   -

   Michael Yudell, Arizona State University


Organizing Committee:

   -

   Alexander Halavais
   -

   Kathleen (Katie) Pine
   -

   Nicholas Proferes
   -

   Shawn Walker



Works Cited

Ajunwa, I., & Greene, D. (2019). Platforms at work: Automated hiring
platforms and other new intermediaries in the organization of work. In Work
and labor in the digital age. Emerald Publishing Limited.

Berg, J., Furrer, M., Harmon, E., Rani, U., & Silberman, M. S. (2018).
Digital labour platforms and the future of work. Towards Decent Work in the
Online World. Rapport de l’OIT.

Burgess, J. (2021). Platform studies. In S. Cunningham & D. Craig
(Eds.), Creator
culture: An introduction to global social media entertainment (pp. 21-38).
NYU Press.

Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of “platforms.” New media & society, 12(3),
347-364.

Kelkar, S. (2018). Engineering a platform: The construction of interfaces,
users, organizational roles, and the division of labor. New Media &
Society, 20(7), 2629-2646.

Kellogg, K.C., Valentine, M.A., & Christin, A. (2020). Algorithms at work:
The new contested terrain of control." Academy of Management Annals, 14(1),
366-410.

Lee, M. K., Kusbit, D., Metsky, E., & Dabbish, L. (2015, April). Working
with machines: The impact of algorithmic and data-driven management on
human workers. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human
factors in computing systems (pp. 1603-1612).

Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of
social media. Oxford University Press.

Zhang, L. (2021). Platformizing family production: The contradictions of
rural digital labor in China. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 32(3),
341-359.


Please share this call. A copy is available online at:
https://socialdatasci.org/platforming/


-- 
// Alexander Halavais (he/him)   @halavais      alex.halavais.net
// Associate Professor of Social Data Science  socialdatasci.org
// New College, Arizona State University          theprof at asu.edu
<http://asu.edu/>