[Commlist] Call for Abstracts - 8th STS Italia Conference - TRACK 13 - Disappearance, maintenance and reinvention in the biographies of technical objects

*TRACK 13*

<https://www.stsitaliaconf2020.com/call-for-abstracts>
*Disappearance, maintenance and reinvention in the biographies of 
technical objects.* 
<https://a7f67c59-118d-44bf-9b5c-7aae7deef875.filesusr.com/ugd/8486e6_6e8bbea8c97347eb8f6982d65b9d7507.pdf>
/*Perspectives on the transformative vulnerabilities of technology at 
the intersection between STS and Media Studies*/ 
<https://a7f67c59-118d-44bf-9b5c-7aae7deef875.filesusr.com/ugd/8486e6_6e8bbea8c97347eb8f6982d65b9d7507.pdf> 

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*Deadline for submission: *9 February 2020*
*
*Details for submissions*: 
https://www.stsitaliaconf2020.com/call-for-abstracts*
*
*Conference website*: https://www.stsitaliaconf2020.com/
Convenors:
Sergio Minniti, University of Padova, (sergio.minniti /at/ unipd.it) 
<mailto:(sergio.minniti /at/ unipd.it)>
Diego Cavallotti, University of Cagliari, (diego.cavallotti /at/ unica.it) 
<mailto:(diego.cavallotti /at/ unica.it)>
Simone Dotto, University of Udine, (simone.dotto /at/ uniud.it) 
<mailto:(simone.dotto /at/ uniud.it)>


Over the last years, we have seen an increasing interest in the 
overlapping areas of STS and Media Studies towards examining the 
multifaceted vulnerabilities of technical objects. Within STS, research 
on maintenance and repair practices has been attracting growing 
attention since the works of Susan Leigh Star (1999) and Marianne de 
Laet and Annemarie Mol (2000), which set the ground for the study of the 
vulnerability of sociotechnical networks. A number of contributions have 
then addressed issues relating to obsolescence and fragility, durability 
and tinkering, adaptation and re-use, to the extent that a distinctive 
interdisciplinary field of inquiry – Maintenance and repair studies 
(MRS) – has emerged. Among the valuable insights offered by this field 
of inquiry is the transformative power of moments of vulnerability, 
which becomes evident when we consider how innovation emerges from 
obsolescence, maintenance and repair, and how new sociomaterial, ethical 
and political orders, as well as new geographies of responsibility are 
established through the practices that deal with technical vulnerability.
Similarly, in Media Studies, growing attention has been paid to the to 
the ever-shifting relations between “old” and “new” media, to the 
suppressed, the outmoded and the technological dead ends in media 
history – see, for instance, Huhtamo and Parikka’s Media Archaeology: 
Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011) - to how “old” media 
may survive in residual conditions and be reactivated or reinvented in 
multiple ways (see Acland’s Residual Media [2007]), and to how allegedly 
“dead media” can be materially revived by a politically infomed art 
method which Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz notoriously described as 
“hardware hacking” (2012).
Way beyond the strictly historiographic level, the discussion on these 
topics raised new social concerns, problematising the effects of the 
planned obsolescence pursued by commercial industry as well as the 
material aspects of mass-produced technology – which enhanced a focus on 
the conditions of hardware circulation, accumulation, disposal, 
decomposition, recycling and renewal also from an ecological angle.
This growing awareness that the study of media change should include 
their life cycles as material objects, reflects a more general interest 
in taking into account the moments of transformation in the social 
biographies of media technologies which often correspond to their 
critical moments of vulnerability.
We aim to enable a fruitful discussion between exponents from the fields 
of STS and Media Studies concerning the manifold processes of 
transformation fostered by or related to the vulnerabilities of 
technical objects over the course of their biographies. Thus, we call 
for papers which address, among others, questions about differences in 
understandings and vocabularies as well as explorations of empirical, 
methodological, and theoretical overlappings.


*Abstracts submission*
Submission (to the conference email address <(stsitaliaconf /at/ gmail.com)> 
<mailto:(stsitaliaconf /at/ gmail.com)> and to the emails of convernors' 
selected track) should include:

1. Author's name and surname, affiliation and email address
2. Presentation title
3. Abstract (less than 300 words)


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