[ecrea] Call for papers "Democracy and Technology. Europe in Tension from the 19th to the 21st century"

Call for papers "Democracy and Technology. Europe in Tension from the 
19th to the 21st century"
September 19-21, 2013, Université Paris-Sorbonne

6th Tensions of Europe Plenary Conference *
Colloque international du projet ANR Resendem **

Deadline paper abstracts: February 25, 2013


Overall Theme of the Conference

The conference will be devoted to the complex relationship between 
democracy and technology from a European and transnational perspective. 
The core of this reflection will be the complementarities and 
cross-fertilization that arise in the interaction of technology and 
democracy, but also the frictions, tensions, and paradoxes that emerge 
in the discourses, representations and interplay of actors. The 
assumption that technology poses a threat to the liberal democratic 
political order rooted in the public debate, has fueled a critical 
approach to technology in humanities and social sciences. This also 
fueled various shared Europe-wide initiatives of technology assessment. 
Within the Soviet bloc, on the other hand, technology was promoted as a 
tool for building socialism.

More recently, calls for the democratization of decision-making related 
to controversial technical changes made the two terms meet in a dynamic 
no longer of opposition but of mutual construction: "technical 
democracy" would be an expansion of democracy, defined primarily as a 
continuously evolving process rather than a fixed form, open to new 
questions and new ways to find answers.

This historical conference is open to a wide range of interdisciplinary 
inquiry. It invites proposals for papers addressing an issue that up to 
now has mainly been investigated on a national basis. Focusing on 
circulations and appropriations of technology in a European and 
transnational perspective, the conference should open new ways to think 
and talk about the history of Europe.

While European spaces are privileged, papers on the themes of the 
conference but covering other geographical areas will also be considered.

General areas to be explored are:

Technical democracy: serving the citizen or the consumer?

• The concept of technical democracy, its uses, its meanings, its 
realities and imaginary through technologies, spaces, periods; • The 
role of groups of stakeholders such as consumer associations and civil 
society in the design, ownership, development, or resistance and 
rejection of technology.

Technology and democracy: a co-construction?

• Democratic regimes facing technological challenges in their economic, 
political, industrial, ethical, social and/or cultural dimensions; • 
Technology in political discourses (comparative approaches are welcome); 
• Technology as vector of democracy: history of voting technologies; • 
"Democracy by design": how aspects related to the values of democracy 
(privacy, transparency, openness, etc.) are considered in the invention 
of artifacts.

Regulating and governing technology: which models, what practices?

• The evolution, composition, role, challenges and limitations of the 
regulatory authorities; • The evolution of governance in the field of 
technology; • Soft and hard power of technology in democracy; • The 
transition of national and regional governance logics to global governance.

Agoras: spaces for dialogue and debate about technology in democracy

• Public areas of debate around technology and large sociotechnical 
controversies; • Sites and actors involved in mediating between citizens 
and technologies; • The relationship between media and technology in a 
democratic context; • Challenging technology in a democratic context.

Technology against democracy

• Technocracy: confiscated expertise? • Threats to democracy from uses 
of technology (surveillance, intelligence, propaganda, databases, etc.); 
• Democracies at war and the technical armaments choices (gas, napalm, 
nuclear bomb, mines, etc.).


Session formats

The Program Committee welcomes proposals that address the overall 
conference themes in the following three formats:

• Individual paper proposals.

• Research sessions with three papers based on original research, and an 
invited commentator. Because the conference encourages debate, 
appropriate time for discussion should be allocated to the commentators 
as well as the members of the audience. The papers will be 
pre-circulated to all conference participants.

• Research collaboration sessions which are meant to present results of 
a specific project. The session could be paper based, but could also 
focus on a discussion of the framing and wider implications of the 
specific project connected to the future of Tensions of Europe network.

Please note that paper and/or session proposals not directly related to 
the conference theme but relevant for the TOE network will also be 
considered. For more information on the TOE intellectual agenda see 
www.tensionsofeurope.eu and www.makingeurope.eu


Deadlines and Time-line

The deadline for proposals is February 25, 2013.

For paper proposals, please submit a title and abstract of no more than 
500 words. Authors are invited to submit their titles and abstracts 
electronically on the homepage of the 
conferencetoe2013paris.sciencesconf.org with a copy sent by email to 
toe2013paris AT sciencesconf.org.

For session proposals, please submit a brief abstract of the session 
(maximum 600 words) along with a one-page abstract for each participant. 
The organizer(s) are invited to submit their session abstracts 
electronically on the homepage of the conference 
toe2013paris.sciencesconf.org with a copy sent by email to toe2013paris 
AT sciencesconf.org. Please note that on the website, for technical 
reasons, each abstract, even of a research session, has to be submitted 
individually.

The Program Committee will inform about its decisions no later than 
April 20, 2013.

Since the conference papers will be made available before the conference 
on our website, we will ask you to send them as PDF file to toe2013paris 
AT sciencesconf.org before July 15th 2013.

We are seeking to provide a contribution towards travel, fees and/or 
accommodation costs for those who have no opportunity to participate 
otherwise.


Program Committee :

Pr Maria Paula Diogo, Chair, Universidade Nova de Lisboa,

Pr Pascal Griset, Université Paris-Sorbonne

Pr Martin Kohlrausch, K.U. Leuven

Dr Léonard Laborie, CNRS

Dr Larissa Zakharova, EHESS

Please direct queries to Arielle Haakenstad, conference secretary 
(toe2013paris AT sciencesconf.org).

* Tensions of Europe (TOE) is an international scientific network 
consisting of almost 300 scientists from all over Europe and the United 
States. TOE explores the role of technology as an agent of change in 
European history by organizing inspiring conferences and summer schools 
as well as by stimulating international research collaboration and 
disseminating research results to various 
audiences.http://www.tensionsofeurope.eu/

** “Large technical networks and democracy: innovations, practices and 
groups involved in the long term, from 1880 to the present day (France 
and Europe)”. Resendem project is supported by the Agence Nationale de 
la Recherche. It revisits the history of the fields of mobility, 
communications and energy, in terms of community involvement in their 
construction and management.http://www.msha.fr/resendem/



----------------
ECREA-Mailing list
----------------
This mailing list is a free service from ECREA.
---
To unsubscribe, please visit http://www.ecrea.eu/mailinglist
---
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Postal address:
ECREA
Université Libre de Bruxelles
c/o Dept. of Information and Communication Sciences
CP123, avenue F.D. Roosevelt 50, b-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
----------------