[ecrea] CfP - AoIR preevent on STS and Internet governance

Call for Contributions

Deadline: 15 June 2016

The Internet Rules, But How?
An STS take on doing Internet governance


Preconference workshop – AoIR 2016
5 October 2016 – Berlin, Germany

Workshop facilitators:
Dmitry Epstein, Christian Katzenbach, Francesca Musiani, Julia Pohle

Keynote speaker:
Laura DeNardis


Over the last decade, the regulation and governance of the Internet at 
the national and international level have attracted growing attention by 
policy-makers and researchers. This is particularly the case in 
post-Snowden times which increased distrust of formal government 
institutions and their ‘dangerous liaisons’ with the private sector.

Traditionally, Internet governance (IG) research focussed on new 
institutions that have been explicitly established to negotiate the 
Internet’s technical coordination or deliberate Internet-related public 
policy issues. Recently, authors have criticised this institutional 
focus, including a small group of scholars who draw on perspectives from 
Science and Technology Studies (STS), calling to rethink and 
substantiate questions of ordering and governing the net. Their 
contributions highlight the day-to-day, mundane practices that 
constitute IG, take into account the plurality and ‘networkedness’ of 
devices and arrangements involved in the governance of information 
technology, and investigate the invisibility, pervasiveness, and 
apparent agency of the digital infrastructure itself.

IG, in this view, consists of practices and controversies of design, 
regulation, and use of material infrastructures. Accordingly, the 
observation and investigation of practices require different, innovative 
research approaches, which delve into the variety of ways in which 
digital uses and practices may be an integral part of today’s IG. In 
this way, STS-informed perspectives are increasingly instrumental for 
challenging and expanding our understanding and for informing our 
examination of ordering and governing processes in the digital realm.

This preconference workshop seeks to nurture the growing interest in 
researching and observing IG from an STS-informed perspective. More 
broadly, the workshop aims to facilitate a discussion and an exchange of 
perspectives about the intertwined roles of design, infrastructures, and 
informal communities of practice in IG.

For the full-day workshop, we are inviting contributions for four sessions:

1.    The first research panel will focus on theory, inviting papers 
that share a strong conceptual interest in understanding how STS can 
inform theoretical perspectives on Internet governance, for instance by 
revealing socio-technical controversies or by unveiling power and 
control structures embedded in Internet architecture and its governance 
institutions;

2.    The second research panel will focus on STS-informed empirical 
work on Internet governance, inviting papers that make use of the 
conceptual and methodological tool-sets of STS to observe and study IG 
practices and the ways in which the norms shaping the provision, design 
and usage of the Internet are negotiated, and de- and re-stabilised;

3.    For the methodological fishbowl session, we will invite 
researchers to report on their experience with STS-inspired Internet 
governance research. The open discussion will focus on the 
practicalities of doing participatory observation in IG and the 
challenges of negotiating one’s role as a researcher and an active 
participant (or even an activist) in IG processes;

4.    For the final open roundtable discussion we are inviting 
researchers to reflect on the notion of “black box” as it relates to the 
treatment of technological artifacts in public and media discourses 
(e.g. related to the French intelligence bill). We foresee that 
unpacking the notion of the “black box” will also help engage IG 
research and researchers with the broader community of Internet scholars 
who are deliberating topics such as politics of platforms and algorithms.

Please submit your contributions no later than June 15 to 
(ig-workshop-aoir2016 /at/ hiig.de). We expect extended abstracts for sessions 
1-2 and position papers for sessions 3-4, max. 800 words. Registration 
at the AoIR 2016 conference is necessary in order to participate at the 
workshop. Notification will be sent out in mid-July so that participants 
can book Early Bird Tickets for the conference before August 1.

This workshop is part of a broader effort of advancing an STS-informed 
conversation on Internet governance. It builds on the successful panel 
on STS perspectives on IG that took place during AoIR 2015 in Phoenix 
and a special issue of the Internet Policy Review to be published in 
early September 2016.

The workshop is supported by the Global Internet Governance Academic 
Network (GigaNet), the Internet Policy Review of the Alexander von 
Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG, Berlin), the 
Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the 
Institute for Communication Sciences (CNRS/Paris-Sorbonne/UPMC, Paris).

Contact:     (ig-workshop-aoir2016 /at/ hiig.de).





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