Call for Papers: 4S, 2016, Barcelona

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Consider submitting to our track at this year’s combination 4S / EASST meeting in Barcelona, August 31 – September 3! (submission deadline, fast approaching: Feb 21, 2016)

Title: Social Studies of Politics: Making Collectives By All Possible Means

Short Description: The challenge: to explore new ways of studying “politics as usual” by taking inspiration from the conceptual repertoire developed in STS for scrutinizing “science as usual”. We invite proposals for papers which mobilize STS concepts, methodologies, and practices in studying with “politics as usual”.

Long Description: The adage “technology is politics by other means” emphasizes that technoscientific practices contribute to the making of collective orders which are not given by nature, but made, involving decision, power, and authority. While the 4S/EASST motto “science & technology by other means” is meant to be a conspicuous alternative to laboratory and epistemic authority-based reality-making, it also provides an occasion to come back to “politics by the same means”. The challenge: to explore ways of studying “politics as usual” by taking inspiration from the conceptual repertoire developed in STS for scrutinizing “science as usual”. We invite proposals for papers that mobilize STS concepts, methodologies, and practices for studying and engaging with “politics as usual”. This includes actors, knowledges, institutions, discourses, practices, infrastructures, etc., that make-up what we “traditionally” call politics and the political process, but also those that are not on that traditional list. Examples include studies of publics, policy, parties, interest groups, social movements, terrorist groups, state and non-state agencies, political representation and communication, democracy and participation, parliaments and lobbyism, nation-states, populations and stateless persons, international relations, diplomacy and conflict, multi-level and global governance, protest and resistance. A general interest is with the tools and machineries of knowing and assembling governance, the epistemic and ontological practices that make these specifically political realities, actors, processes, powers, and modes of authority. Recalling the conference motto: what are we to do about the seemingly intransigent politics of re-assembling “technoscientific practices along routes that do not follow once established divides”?

Conveners: Nicholas Rowland (The Pennsylvania State University), Jan-Peter Voss (Berlin University of Technology), and Jan-Hendrik Passoth (Technische Universität München)