[Air-L] "Digital Methods for Critical Consumer Studies" Summer School, 2nd edition - Call for applications

[Alessandro Gandini]

Apologies for cross-posting

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We are pleased to announce the second edition of the “Digital Methods for
Critical Consumer Studies” Summer School, which will take place on 24-28
July 2023 at Villa del Grumello, Como, Italy.

The DMCCS school

The overarching scope of the Summer School is to introduce students to the
basic Digital Methods’ concepts, strategies, techniques, and tools, as well
as to stimulate them to apply such methodological arrays to
consumer-related topics. In doing so, the School aims at fostering
students' ‘activist’ attitude towards digital data by encouraging them to
take seriously the ethics of digital research as well as the redistribution
of the social value of digital data to the public.

The main topic of the DMCCS23 will be:
“Exploring the nexus among surveillance capitalism, consumer culture, and
social media”

This year the School will be dedicated to the theme of surveillance
capitalism and its nexus with consumer culture. Digital platforms such as
Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. configure as ad hoc ‘surveillance devices’
for systematic data extraction from the mass of users they host – data that
are used for explicit business purposes (e.g., targeted advertising,
development of AI products and services, etc.). To meet their business
purposes, platforms not only need an enclosed space where to monitor, track
and predict user behaviour; they need to design spaces where to constrain
users’ activities into standardised patterns of action in order to make
their behaviours predictable. Social media like Twitter, Instagram, or
TikTok seem particularly suited for this purpose, since they provide users
with free tools to produce creative content, create communities and express
their identities. All these tools are, yet, purposely designed to capture
such social-cultural processes, transform them into data points, and
convert them into marketing and business products – for a global and
emerging socio-economic model that Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance
capitalism.

Specifically, this year, we will address surveillance capitalism
empirically through three main lines of research:

   1.

   Mapping imaginaries and practices of surveillance capitalism within
   social media environments
   2.

   Detecting and mapping the standardization of cultural production on
   social media (e.g., memetic behaviours)
   3.

   Repurposing surveillance methods for social research purposes as well as
   exposing mechanisms of surveillance itself.

Programme

The school will be articulated across 5 days. Mornings will be dedicated to
teaching activities, which will be managed by the teaching team and
teaching assistants. The afternoons will be dedicated to student activities
(overseen by teaching assistants). During the last day of the school
students will present their work and receive feedback from directors,
teaching assistants, keynote speakers, and fellow colleagues. A final
discussion will conclude the School activities. Keynote speakers will be
Prof Janice De Negri-Knott (University of Bournemouth) and Dr Sophie Bishop
(University of Sheffield). Find the detailed programme here
<https://dmcs2023.lakecomoschool.org/programme/>.

Call for participation

Applications should be sent to alessandro.caliandro at unipv.it by 15 March
2023. Applications must entail a CV and presentation letter, containing: a)
brief bio; b) interests of research; c) motivation to participate in the
Summer School.

Further information on the programme, fees and accommodation are available
at https://dmcs2023.lakecomoschool.org.

Best,

The School Directors

Alessandro Caliandro (Università degli Studi di Pavia;
alessandro.caliandro at unipv.it)
Alessandro Gandini (Università degli Studi di Milano;
alessandro.gandini at unimi.it)
Guido Anselmi (Università degli Studi di Catania; guido.anselmi at unict.it)


-- 
Alessandro Gandini
Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Milan, Department of Social and Political Sciences
via Conservatorio 7, 20122 Milan
@afrontiercity