[Air-L] CfP 4S Open Panel - Data Loss Reverberations: Exploring Disappearance, Destruction and Dispossession in Digital Societies

[Katie MacKinnon]

Dear all,

We are organising an open panel for 4S 2025, Sept. 3-7, Seattle, WA. on *DATA
LOSS. *More information about the conference and the submission link can be
found here: https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_seattle.php.
Abstracts are due Jan 31. Below is the call with more detail about the
theme and scope. Please get in touch with any questions!

-Katie

*Data Loss Reverberations: Exploring Disappearance, Destruction and
Dispossession in Digital Societies*

This panel explores data loss as a fundamental rather than anomalous
feature of digital infrastructures and datafication processes. While
digital societies are often associated with data accumulation, we examine
how various forms of loss - from disappearance and destruction to
dispossession - shape socio-technical systems and generate new political
formations.

We seek papers investigating data loss in knowledge and memory
infrastructures, including memory institutions, bureaucratic systems, and
community archives. Topics of interest include:

   -

   Data disappearance in digital archives
   -

   Data destruction as acts of violence or care
   -

   Community impacts of platform closures and content moderation
   -

   Critical perspectives on data/software lifecycles
   -

   Memory technologies as inherently amnesic systems
   -

   Theoretical frameworks for understanding data loss
   -

   Methodological approaches to studying loss
   -

   Politics of loss in relation to memory and justice

While STS scholarship has developed frameworks for studying knowledge
infrastructures - from cybernetic imaginaries to big data environments -
research has primarily focused on data accumulation and persistence.
Through concepts like data friction and information infrastructures,
scholars have illuminated conditions enabling data flows. This panel
extends this work by examining loss and erasure as constitutive forces in
digital systems.

We especially welcome submissions from early career researchers and
scholars examining how data loss intersects with gender, sexuality,
racialization, coloniality, and class. We are particularly interested in
work that critically engages with these dimensions of power and inequality
in digital infrastructures.

We encourage submissions exploring how data loss reverberates across:

   -

   Time (historical erasures echoing in the present)
   -

   Scale (small infrastructural losses with cascading effects)
   -

   Space (loss rippling across institutional/national boundaries)
   -

   Experience (from technical infrastructures to social practices)

The panel aims to develop new frameworks for understanding how data loss
shapes knowledge infrastructures and influences questions of memory,
accountability, and justice.

Keywords: Information, Computing and Media Technology, Data and
Quantification, Feminist STS
Organizers:
Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, University of Copenhagen (nannab at hum.ku.dk)
Katie MacKinnon, University of Copenhagen (kam at hum.ku.dk)
Amelia Acker, University of Texas at Austin
Louis Ravn, University of Amsterdam
Frederik Schade, University of Copenhagen
Esmée Colbourne, University of Copenhagen