[Air-L] 4S Call: Housing, property, and technoscientific capitalism

[Pelle G Tracey]

Hello AoIR!

Please consider submitting to a 4S open panel Erin McElroy and I are organizing, "Housing, property, and technoscientific capitalism." 250 word abstracts are due April 30th. Submissions and further details: https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php.

Full panel description:

Housing is an essential yet fraught feature of modern life. If a house is “a machine for living in” (Le Corbusier 1931), we might think of housing as an infrastructure for living, complete with complex and varied relationships to power, capital, and histories of violence and exclusion.

Increasingly, the process of finding, renting, buying, living in, or being forced out of, housing, is mediated through platform firms and algorithmic governance. Screening tools automatically deny “problematic” tenants; rents and home prices are dictated by coordinated, collusive systems; and governments allocate ever-insufficient emergency housing through quantifying human suffering. Wherever one looks, technoscientific capitalism and its attendant practices, discourses, and artifacts creep further into our most intimate spaces, our homes.

This panel aims to draw together researchers in Science and Technology Studies and adjacent fields whose work focuses on understanding these dynamics and plotting strategies for resisting them. We welcome submissions at the intersections of housing, property, and technoscience conceived broadly, including but certainly not limited to, works along themes of:

- ‎Assetization and rentiership (Birch 2020; Cooper 2024)
- ‎The “uneven, gendered, and racialized labor formations” that underpin landlord technology and platform real estate, and give lie to its promise of a frictionless experience (McElroy 2024)
- ‎Histories of property innovation, and racialized accumulation and dispossession (Fields 2024)
- ‎Shared, informal, and non-normative housing arrangements (Maalsen 2023)
- ‎Proptech as surveillance infrastructure (Sadowski 2022)
- ‎Gendered or patriarchal impacts of tech on social reproduction and the home space (Sharma 2017)
- ‎Commercial real estate, data centers, and “landlords of the internet” (Greene 2022)
- ‎Precarious care labor in senior, subsidized, supportive, or shelter housing (Tracey & Garcia 2024)

Many thanks!
Pelle


Pelle G. Tracey, PhD (he/him)

Assistant Professor, Information School

University of Washington

ptracey at uw.edu