[ecrea] Call For Papers: Lost in Translation? People, Technologies for Practices and Concepts Across Boundaries

Call For Papers


We are pleased to announce the first joint meeting of the Red EsCTS and 
the Portuguese STS network.  The meeting will take place in Lisbon, 
Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa (Av. Prof. 
Aníbal de Bettencourt, 9, 1600-189 Lisboa www.ics.ulisboa.pt 
<http://www.ics.ulisboa.pt/>) from the 7th to 9th of June with the 
following title: Lost in Translation? People, Technologies for Practices 
and Concepts Across Boundaries. We welcome proposals for papers, 
communications, audiovisual presentations and alternative formats.

Portugal and Spain share many things but they are also divided by 
several boundaries – political, linguistic, historical, technological. 
Part of a same peninsula, they are nonetheless entities on their own 
right: two countries, two political systems, several languages, and, 
furthermore, two academic systems, two STS communities. In a way, they 
represent two sides of a border. And yet, as Science and Technology 
Studies (STS) have taught us, borders and boundaries are far from being 
self-evident.

An STS perspective shows that boundaries are continuously traversed, 
continuously challenged, continuously re-made. It also shows that 
maintaining boundaries is a performative practice, which requires 
separation and integration, difference and translation as well as 
interdiction and transgression. In fact, maintaining borders forcefully 
requires objects, people and information that can pass through such borders.

The idea of ‘boundary objects’, first suggested in 1989 by Susan 
Leigh-Star and James Griesemer, refers to those entities that are 
“plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several 
parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity 
across sites” (Leigh-Star and Griesemer, 1989:393). Boundary objects are 
part of multiple social worlds at once, therefore facilitating 
communication and translation between them; at the same time, they 
reside in the borderlands where two or more social worlds overlap, 
without fully belonging to any of them, like monsters or cyborgs (Bowker 
and Star, 1999).

Are STS meetings a kind of ‘boundary object’? We somehow think so, and 
indeed reflections on boundaries and borders are not new to us. Former 
meetings of the Spanish Red esCTS have explicitly posed the challenge of 
opening up the boundaries of STS and speaking to concerned publics and 
collectives beyond academia. The dynamics and paradoxes of academic 
diasporas have also figured prominently in previous meetings, as many 
Spanish (and also Portuguese) researchers have been forced to migrate 
due to lack of funding or other issues related to the economic crisis 
that has so harshly hit our countries. And we feel that this first joint 
meeting between the Portuguese and Spanish STS communities offers a 
privileged opportunity to continue thinking about boundary crossing, 
identities in the making and remaking, translation between social 
worlds, and technological, political or academic practices beyond borders.

This meeting aims to be an opportunity for STS scholars in Spain, 
Portugal and elsewhere to meet and share their social, academic, 
epistemological and political experiences generated by the difficulties 
and opportunities arising from crossing territorial, linguistic, 
disciplinary, and professional boundaries. We invite individual or joint 
papers, but also short communications, audiovisual presentations and 
alternative format proposals that reflect upon the following themes:

  * Practices, technologies and objects involved in
    dismantling/constituting boundaries, in particular geographic,
    linguistic, disciplinary, technological, and political boundaries.
  * Research practices that work within, and expand, the interstitial
    spaces between conceptual boundaries.
  * STS views and theories on trends of academic mobility specifically,
    and migration more generally.
  * The sociotechnical constitution/mapping out of diasporas.
  * The establishment of hierarchies of academic mobility (“centers” and
    “peripheries”).
  * What do borders mean and who are they designed to keep out? What is
    their role in current EU politics of technoscience?
  * The return (or dislocation) to one’s original country/institution
    and the transformation of individuals and communities who remain.
  * The naturalization of foreign nationals living in Spain and Portugal.
  * Challenges in translating/adapting generic (Anglophone, French) STS
    concepts into other languages and local contexts.
  * Hybridisation of academic identities and careers.

While these suggestions are an opportunity to reflect upon specific 
themes that the organizing committee wanted to draw attention on, we are 
happy to consider proposals and papers that do not directly address 
these topics but fit into an STS conference and may still enrich and 
stimulate our meeting.

We welcome presentations, activities, performances and contributions in 
English, any of the official languages of the Spanish state, and 
Portuguese. Please send your proposal (max. 250 words) to 
(es.cts.es /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(es.cts.es /at/ gmail.com)>, including contact data 
(name, email address, institution if present).

Deadline for sending proposals: Friday 10th of February 2017.

Attendance to the meeting will be open and free of charge.

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