[Commlist] STS Italia Conference CfT 13 - Disappearance, maintenance and reinvention in the biographies of technical objects. Perspectives on the transformative vulnerabilities of technology at the intersection between STS and Media Studies

8th STS Italian Conference
Disentangling Technoscience. Vulnerability, Responsibility and Justice.
Trieste, IT June 17th-19 2021

Call for Track # 13
Disappearance, maintenance and reinvention in the biographies of 
technical objects. Perspectives on the transformative vulnerabilities of 
technology at the intersection between STS and Media Studies

*Deadline for submission: December 18 2020
*Details for submissions*:
https://www.stsitaliaconf2020.com/ <https://www.stsitaliaconf2020.com/>

Convenors:
Diego Cavallotti: (diego.cavallotti /at/ unica.it) 
<mailto:(diego.cavallotti /at/ unica.it)>
Simone Dotto: (simone.dotto /at/ uniud.it) <mailto:(simone.dotto /at/ uniud.it)>
Sergio Minniti: (sergio.minniti /at/ unipd.it) <mailto:(sergio.minniti /at/ unipd.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)>>
<mailto:(stsitaliaconf /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(stsitaliaconf /at/ gmail.com)>> and to 
the emails of convernors' above 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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