2014 DASTS Conference on RUC

Call for papers: Enacting Futures – extended deadline for abstracts is April 4
This year’s DASTS conference wants to highlight and display the political, conceptual and practical consequences of the ontological turn. Rather than continuing with the Modern belief in grand narratives and a singular ontology, researchers within the field of STS outline an alternative history with several modes of existence and thus a plurality of truth conditions. But what are the implications of multiple modes of existence? How are diplomatic encounters and politics performed across modes? And what does the plurality of truth conditions mean for the institution of Academia? How can we envision new forms of posthumanities in socio-technical worlds? With these questions, the theme of the conference will be enactments of futures.

At the location of Roskilde University this theme is particularly fitting. Since its origin in 1972 Roskilde University has been propagating action research and problem-based group-work to not only criticize but also engage in practices for example through participatory design and research processes. When DASTS is for the first time held at Roskilde University, we find it appropriate to reflect upon a new utopian agenda for researchers. Also, as STS is growing and moves beyond its original fields of science and technology studies, contributions are invited to consider different fields of research as different modes of existence, considering the spreading of STS across disciplines as a transdisciplinary approach. Last but not least, the theme of the conference is inspired by the AIME project: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, which contributors could reflect upon concerning its theoretical foundation and its online platform.

To address the theme of enacting futures, contributions could focus on identifying characteristics of specific modes of existence, addressing connections between different domains, comparing domains, and/or discussing diplomacy, negotiations over values, and the (re-)invention of subjectivities/posthumanities and institutions. In doing so, contributors could turn attention to research methods and practices, looking at connections to politics, private companies, and/or artistic approaches. DASTS also invite artistic contributions that can be set on display and/or shown at the conference. It is also a possibility to couple traditional conference paper presentations in dialogue with an artistic oeuvre.

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The call for papers is meant as inspirational. More than inviting papers relating to the announced theme, we also welcome papers and oeuvres discussing and/or performing other STS subject matters. The DASTS annual conference is open for all and the committee welcomes entries from all areas of science and technology studies. Especially junior researchers wanting to present and discuss their research are invited to present their work. The main purpose of the conference is to fertilize STS research broadly by providing an occasion for researchers working with STS in Denmark to exchange their current works and thoughts, and of course to stimulate networking across STS-inspired environments. For this latter reason the conference fee also includes conference dinner. The main language is Danish, but presentations in English are welcome, and a few sessions as well as the key note presentations will be held in English. The conference aims to be a friendly and encouraging scientific environment in which not only well-established scholars, but also Ph.D. and master students should feel confident to present and discuss their work with colleagues.

Keynotes at DASTS 2014: Adrian MacKenzie and Kristoffer Ørum.

Registration is now open: http://ruconf.ruc.dk/index.php/DASTS2014/DASTS2014

Practical information
Dates: June 12 – 13, 2014
Place: Roskilde University, Universitetsvej 1, DK-4000 Roskilde

Deadline for submission of abstracts (max app. 300 words): April 4, 2014 (extended).
Please state in your abstract your preferred language of presentation, and if English is a possibility for you.
Abstracts should be submitted to dasts@ruc.dk.

Great event in a couple weeks at Penn State; details at Larry Backer‘s “Law at the End of the Day” blog. Hoping to attend myself.

Many thanks, Nicholas, for the kind introduction – it’s great to be back as a guest blogger! Last time I was here, I wrote a series of posts about the material practices of democratic politics, and the ways in which they were being coordinated and distributed by the Hungarian Parliament as a complex political technology. That was in late 2011. Since then I’ve become a postdoc researcher at the Department of Sociology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, and got involved in the setting up of an Open Access book publisher called Mattering Press.

Last week I participated in a very interesting symposium, organised by the Centre of Disruptive Media at Coventry University (more precisely, by Janneke Adema and Gary Hall). It was the first of a series of events called Disrupting the Humanities, and I was asked to talk about Mattering Press as an initiative that aims to rethink scholarly publishing. While preparing for the event, I remembered an older project of mine, which was about the technologies and techniques of illegal publishing in communist Hungary, and decided to use that as a case to articulate what might be called the politics of self-publishing. What follows is a shortened version of my talk – hope you’ll find it interesting.

Mattering Press and STS

Mattering Press started in early 2012 as a publishing initiative of the Flows, Doings, Edges collective: a peer-support group of young scholars interested in relational research. Sensitive to the politics of knowledge production we began to explore the possibilities of alternative modes of engaging with works we find interesting and important. (Our first books are due to appear in the end of 2014.)

The term ‘mattering’ comes from science and technology studies (more precisely from Karen Barad’s 2003 paper). Since the appearance of the first lab studies in the late 1970s and 1980s, STS scholars have been busy extending their gaze to a wide range of sites, from hospitals through high-tech innovation centres to stock exchange trading rooms, in order to explore how scientific knowledge is being produced and distributed through seemingly trivial material practices – and how it could be produced and distributed differently. Ironically, what’s been largely missing from the list of the usual sites in STS-inspired works are the institutions that play one of the most important roles in shaping the academic world STS scholars themselves operate in, namely publishers.

Continue reading →

Fascinating discussion of economics and abandonment.

CFP: New Materialist Methodologies: Gender, Politics, and the Digital

25-26th September 2014

Barcelona

Deadline for abstracts is the 1st of May.

http://newmaterialistconference.wordpress.com

The time has come to talk of many things: 

Of Oysters–and Windfarms–

Of hurricanes–and oil spills–

And why politics needs these things–

and whether bacteria eats oil

In Making Things Public, Latour sets forth to “designate a risky and tentative set of experiments in probing just what it could mean for political thought to turn ‘things’ around, or ‘What would an object-oriented politics look like?” (p.14).  It was this chapter–”From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public”–that prompted much of my thought about what a “thing” oriented International Relations might look like. My research is focused on bacteria and microbiomes and bodies and parasites, but sometimes other things make themselves known. This is the most magical part of a “thing” oriented politics: those objects demanding attention, making themselves known, pushing us to respond to the world and everything in it.

I have a forthcoming chapter in a book taking objects in IR as its subject entitled Making Things International.  This book is something new and exciting from a disciplinary standpoint, and my chapter on microbes joins others on corpses, passports, viruses, drones, dirt, bodies, and barbed wire, to name just a few from the collection. Now, hanging out with STS folks makes this seem easy, but IR has chosen its objects of study from a rather short list.  We talk about the State with a capital S, sometimes NGOs, admittedly, more and more attention is focused on the individual, but it is generally bounded by international law or rationalist assumptions of individuality over sociality. The International Criminal Court has brought individual accountability to a system of sovereign immunity, but progress is slow and fitful and markedly anthropocentric. Even with global climate change, decline in biodiversity globally, and the countless number of extinctions, IR doesn’t really talk about “nature” as much as it should given the climate crisis as the acme of politics now immanent to the globe.   

That said, a good place to start with objects in politics is with disasters, or “What can things do for us?”  Let’s look at a recent study proposing wind turbine “farms” off the coast and then one about oysters and their role in curbing superstorms off the US Atlantic coast.

Admittedly, this is still looking at objects anthropocentrically, but it’s a start. Also, I know that recognizing “things” as crucial to survival, safety, or health, or happiness doesn’t translate to a democracy that incorporates them explicitly, but even finding these actants on the radar can open a dialogue about the role humans and others play in complex eco(social)systems. 

 A recent study by Stanford, published in Nature Climate Change, has concluded that wind turbines can aid in lessening the damage from superstorms like Sandy and Katrina. Unlike seawalls, they can also generate electricity. Using a climate-weather model, the study found that “large turbine arrays” of 300+ would significantly reduce windspeed, rarely suffer damage during high wind storms, and that the net cost is estimated to be less (“capital plus operation cost less cost reduction from electricity generation and from health, climate, and hurricane damage avoidance) than the net cost of fossil fuel electricity generation.  Unfortunately, the number of turbines to take the edge off of Katrina would be 78,000 wind turbines placed offshore. Currently, there is political resistance to any wind turbines in many areas of the US and many question whether this would be worth the cost.  The two largest wind farms in the works in New England and Texas have only 200 turbines. 

Futurity writes that the cost of Sandy totaled $82 billion, and there is the added bonus of electricity generation to sweeten the financial deal. A further question would be the ecological impact to the ocean. This was not addressed in the articles I found.

popsci.com

This article on the role oysters in taming superstorms is a wonderful example of an object oriented look at the world.  In October 2012, Paul Greenberg wrote about the destruction of the indigenous oyster in New York, Crassostrea virginica, and the effects their underwater reefs have had on stabilizing the shoreline previous to over-harvesting by humans. To quote from the article:

“Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.”

Of course, as Greenberg points out, our protection is at an end due to our “poor behavior”. Like the Walrus and the Carpenter from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, we ate them all up. 

“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none–
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.

Then we started farming oyster beds, but that didn’t go so well after dumping raw sewage in the ocean.

In conclusion, he points out that storms like Sandy will both increase in savagery and frequency, and that we need the  oysters back in the bays to protect us (and they taste good, too).  This is made difficult because of poaching and pollution, but human-run programs have tried to get reefs started again. From the perspective of an object oriented democracy, oysters need NY reps, right? And wind turbines  should have their say against those arguing against them– “ugly” skylines or electricity?

Future blog posts along this line could involve oil eating bacteria in the Gulf coast….anti-bacterial handsoap and our “superbugs”…    

Check it out here; thanks dmfant.

In this post from Andrzej, we ask the question: can we switch-off war?

I am from Poland. These days, we are a little over-sensitive about Ukraine, and now even more so about Crimea crisis. I would like to show you very interesting article, which I found here: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/vladimir_putin_s_crimean_mistake_the_russian_president_is_miscalculating.html.

The author is analyzing the possibility of war and future existence of puppet pro-Russian Yanukovith Crimea state from an “infrastructure perspective”. It reads:

The Crimea could explode into bloodshed. To prevent if from happening, maybe turning off the power for 15 minutes will force a reboot in Putin’s aggressive, misguided, and ultimately doomed scheme.

The main idea is quite simple: most of the electric power, water supplies, and 70% of food is from the Ukraine mainland, and, as a result, peninsula is not self-sustainable. The author’s idea, copied form Ukrainian internet, is that Ukrainian government should make this fact visible to Putin and the world by switching power for 15 minutes:

Getting a job at Google(?)

FYI–great looking conference coming up! It seems that NIck and I return to this cabinet of curiosities quite often…

The Anthropocene, Cabinet of Curiosities Slam

Nov. 8-10, 2014 University of Wisconsin, Madison

Call for Submissions

We are in the midst of a great reawakening to questions of time—across the
spans of geological, ecological, evolutionary, and human history.  It is a
reawakening precipitated, not by a nostalgia for the past, but by a sense
of urgency about the future.  The Anthropocene, coined in 2000 by
ecologist Eugene Stoermer and popularized by Nobel Prize-winning
atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, is one of the most resonant examples of
how the urgency of the future has prompted scientists, artists, humanities
scholars, and social scientists to engage creatively with the emerging
legacy of our geomorphic and biomorphic powers. The advent of this new
scientific object—the Anthropocene—is altering how we conceptualize,
imagine, and inhabit time.  The Anthropocene encourages us to reenvisage
(in Nigel Clark’s phrase) future and past relations between “earthly
volatility and bodily vulnerability.”  What images and stories can we
create that speak with conceptual richness and emotional energy to our
rapidly changing visions of future possibilities?  For in a world deluged
with data, arresting stories and images matter immeasurably, and play a
critical role in the making of environmental publics and in shaping
environmental policy.

The Anthropocene is just one among many moments in time when new
scientific objects have altered humanity’s relationship to the past,
present, and future.  The coming-into-being of scientific objects such as
fossils, radioactivity, genetic mutations, toxic pesticides, and ice
cores, to name a few, have precipitated different narratives and
imaginings of the human past and the human future.  What might a cabinet
of curiosities for the age of the Anthropocene look like?  What objects
might jolt us into reimagining environmental time across diverse scales,
from the recent past to deep history?  How might certain kinds of objects
make visible the differential impacts—past, present, and future—that have
come to shape the relationships among human and non-human beings, living
in an era of extreme hydrocarbon extraction, extreme weather events, and
extreme economic disparity?

The Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE)
and the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison are pleased to be partnering with the Rachel Carson
Center for Environment and Society (RCC) in Munich and the KTH
Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL) in Stockholm to host an
international workshop that invites artists and writers, scientists and
humanists, scholars and activists, to participate in “The Anthropocene,
Cabinet of Curiosities Slam.”  The workshop will take place in Madison,
Wisconsin from Nov. 8-10, 2014.  In the spirit of poetry/spoken word
slams, contributors will be asked to pitch in a public fishbowl setting an
object for the Anthropocene that asks us to rethink humanity’s
relationship to time, place, and the agency of things that shape planetary
change.  How is the appearance and impact of homo sapiens as a geomorphic
force registered in the sediments of history, the objects around us, and
the things yet to be?  What emotionally layered Anthropocene objects can
surprise, disturb, startle, or delight us into new ways of thinking and
feeling?  What objects speak to resilience or adaptation, to vanishing
biota or emerging morphologies?  Based on the audience response at the
slam, contributors will be invited to participate in the design of an
Anthropocene cabinet of curiosities as part of a larger exhibit on the
Anthropocene being planned by the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
Presentations will also form the basis of a collected series of short
essays to be published as part of the CHE, RCC, EHL collaborative project
on Environmental Futures.

To apply, please submit a 200-word abstract of your proposed object and
its importance in opening up questions of time, agency, and/or
intergenerational equity in the Anthropocene, along with a visual
rendering of the object.  Please also include a CV or artist profile.
Materials should be submitted to Garrett Dash Nelson, ggnelson@wisc.edu
by Friday, April 11th.  A limited amount of funding is available to cover
the travel costs of participants.

For more information, please visit
http://che.nelson.wisc.edu/activities/environmentalfutures/

In case you missed it—and you might have if you aren’t in US academia—Nicholas Kristof wrote a NYT blog about the alleged disengagement of America’s professors, especially those in Political Science and International Relations.  Since then, there have been multiple replies and responses to his opinion about the state of the professoriate in the US. I wasn’t going to respond until I read Kristoff’s reply to the replies and realized this dialogue should continue. In the spirit of his call to action, as Claire Potter wrote in her letter to Kristof, I will add my two cents from the frontline in the brave new world of neoliberal postsecondary education.  I have blogged on many of the issues before so I won’t rehash what I’ve gone on record saying previously or spend too much time on what others have written already.

To sum up, Kristof writes in “Dear Professors, We Need You” that most professors are smart, but are irrelevant, arcane, willfully unintelligible, and disdainful of  non-academic audiences. In short, we hide behind our walls when we could be doing SO MUCH MORE.

To begin, I want to say, “I hear you, man.” I appreciate your sincerity and belief in the academic’s role in society.  You are right in your concern that there is a recurring sentiment of anti-intellectual feelings in politics.  Progressive intellectuals should be more active, yes. You are right that jargon sucks and willfully obscuring ideas through pretentious language is counter-productive.

But let me add to the story here. Accessibility of university research to the “average” American is not just blocked by vagueness, jargon, and an increasingly quantitative focus (by this I assume you mean a continued support of positivist approaches), but also by mega publishing companies that firewall and charge exorbitant amounts of money for the regular reader to access our work. Often this is research funded by public money and yet is inaccessible to the public through no fault of the professor. The publishing companies are profiting from the charges, not the authors and, to add insult to injury, we are required to publish in these journals by this “publish or perish tenure process” you call out. Or, in my case, I publish to even have a shot at permanent employment. I am part of a group–Occupy IR Theory–that is fighting this constriction of our scholarly output.  We want our word to be accessed by wider audiences and to have debates in the public sphere, but we are blocked by for profit publishing companies who own our work.  We are forced to “sell” our work to keep our jobs or get jobs in academia.  To chime in with Mr. Vouten: We are right here, Mr. Kristoff.   Many academics are forging ahead with Internet publishing and alternative presses in order for our voices to be heard. While I am first to line to echo your frustration on willful jargon in Political Science, it is a piece of a larger problem that you identify solely with individual academics not pulling their weight in the public arena.

There is also the matter of punching your weight in the public arena.  You don’t acknowledge the plight of many recent PhDs.  Jobs are down by 40%, there’s no work in the private sector either, and many are in tenuous and exploited positions.  I can’t believe you haven’t read these statistics. This elephant in the room is the reality of finding and keeping employment in academia. Most young scholars are spending their time applying for food stamps, working in horrible conditions for low pay, and spending hours and hours applying for jobs that we don’t get. Doesn’t leave much room for engagement, but many of us do anyway. It’s a labor of love. Adjunct, visiting, tenure track, tenured professors all know that it is not uncommon to spend 60-80 hours a week teaching, doing service to our university, advising students, researching, and writing. We work more than full-time jobs. In some cases for those in adjunct positions, as Miya Tokumitsu writes in the Jacobin, they provide high-skilled labor for low wages because the “do what you love” ideology is so embedded in academia. Tokumitsu also stresses that this helps to explain why (and this will resonate with you, Mr. Kristof) the tenured and “proudly left leaning faculty remain oddly silent about the working conditions of their peers. Because academic research should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts.”

This leads to another conclusion: Quite frankly, some academics are better placed to engage and support public engagement than others. Perhaps you, and others who are well placed, can secure a place for others to speak? This means using your privilege and then stepping back to let those marginalized by the system have a go. In short, yes, academics often marginalize ourselves, but some of us have more help in our disenfranchisement from public intellectuality than others. Some aren’t “cloistered like monks,” but exploited like peasants, to use your metaphor.

Okay, so what is this public intellectual anyway? You write that “over all, there are, I think, fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.” This brings me to another point. Unless employed at an R-1 university, professors are also teachers. Is this not public engagement? To be honest, I spend most of my time teaching, grading, and responding to the students in my classes and not writing my jargon-y, esoteric, and specialized research.  I am also active in my community. I organize for primary and secondary education reform and organize talks and films that are open to the public.

You also assume that it is a good idea for professors to be involved in policy. This sometimes goes badly.  I am hoping to see another blog about the role of academics in justifying slavery, colonialism, and in economic departments, wanton destruction of national and international economies by spreading belief in factually incorrect and harmful ideologies like free market capitalism, austerity, and trickle-down economics. These professor/consultants earn fortunes hocking weak theory and bad public policy. This doesn’t even address the revolving door in politics.  Who is allowed to speak to policy makers? Corporations, ex-CEOs, and lobbyists, that’s who.  Maybe that problem should be debated, too. Dear Corporations, we don’t need you.

Just some food for thought.  I think any of these academics below (and there are many more listed in Corey’s response), warrant a guest blog in the NYT to address these issues with you in more depth.  What do you say? Maybe Anne-Marie Slaughter or the Brookings Institute can find some space for adjuncts who would like to be heard?

The responses have been varied and productive.  I will list some of the links here:

Nick Voeten’s reply from the Washington Post  “Dear Nicholas Kristof: We are right here.”

Corey Robin reply “Look Who Nick Kristoff’s Saving Now”

Claire Potter on the Tenure Radical “A Letter From a Public Intellectual”

Mischiefs of Faction “Nicolas Kristof still doesn’t get it”

Here in US we have been struggling through the coldest winter in a lifetime. What is invisible to most of us while we scrape our cars, pay outrageous heat bills, and hope for summer is a that snow day for the school kids means potential deaths for those on the streets.
This is a pointed institutional analysis of the battle in downtown Portland around compassion, “livability” and the “rejuvenation” of downtown areas.

Check out his latest blog:

http://news.streetroots.org/2014/02/07/snowstorm-tent-city-and-portland-police-chief-mike-reese

A group of stellar and amazing scholars in International Relations have hatched a new journal entitled “Journal of Narrative Politics”.  Keep your eye out for the first issue–it’s going to be a great addition to the complex and reflective scholarship we would all like to see more of in the social sciences.

From the website:

Journal of Narrative Politics is an interdisciplinary journal rooted in the study of global politics that explores narrative voice in academic research, writing, and pedagogy, and in the diverse expressions of non-academic communities and social formations. Normatively committed to human dignity, fairness, and peace, Journal of Narrative Politics aims to imagine futures free from colonial, racial, gendered, and economic violences. As a result, Journal of Narrative Politics also commits to forging deep linkages with communities seeking or practicing alternative modes of sociality and governance, and it seeks to challenge the varying tropes of hegemony and oppression in the academy and elsewhere. The journal foregrounds the embeddedness of authors and storytellers in their craft and it aims to publish a diverse range of expressions from this engagement.

While concerned with aesthetics, Journal of Narrative Politics is not a literary journal, but is instead committed to exploring the overlaps between aesthetics, politics, theory, and ethics. However, unlike other scholarly social science journals devoted to narrative, Journal of Narrative Politics is less concerned with the academic analysis of narrative, and more with the expression of narrative itself as a mode of knowing. The journal therefore aims to operate in the overlap between the languages of science and literature with the goal of showing how theory becomes practice and practice theory. It commits to diverse ways of storytelling as knowledge appropriate to the academy, rather than as merely the objects of scholarly inquiry.

Here’s a link to the page. 

http://journalofnarrativepolitics.com/