[Commlist] CfP: IACSS (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society) 2021, From platforms in cities to the platforming of cities

Call for papers

IACSS (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society) MAIN CONFERENCE 2021

  From platforms in cities to the platforming of cities**

June Wang, City University of Hong Kong

Lik Hang Tsui, City University of Hong Kong

(With support from Digital Society research cluster 
<https://research.class.cityu.edu.hk/digital-society/>, College of 
Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong)

This panel attempts to integrate ideas on the platform in media studies 
and urban geography, and build a constructive flow between them. Initial 
studies on the platforms have inspired critical reflections on different 
subjects, from platform capitalism, platform society, to platform 
urbanism. For Barns (2019), an epistemological development of platform 
pivot is to be traced back to the architecture of platform 
infrastructure design for the encounter of multiple markets, 
decentralisation and re-centralisation of data (Helmond, 2015), and 
premised upon it, the commodification of data (Srnicek, 2017). Platforms 
thus intermediate producers, consumers, and frequently prosumers, 
exploiting their labour and network sociality for an ever-expanding 
participatory community, or the crowd-based economy (Sundararajan, 
2016).  Moving far beyond media studies, the value of platform studies 
is about how a new norm has been distilled from digital platforms and 
institutionalised as a new rule that governs our consensus on "what is 
economy, what is society, and what is a city" — in sum, the 
platformization of everything (Barns, 2020; Rancière, 2013).

This panel thus attempts to solicit efforts that explore the 
platformization of cities. Borrowing the concept of /platform 
pivo//t///and/infrastructuration /(Plantin et al., 20/18; /Barn, 2019), 
we ask how media studies and urban studies might shed light on each 
other by exploring the conditions of visibility and the role/power of 
co-ordinating in platform studies (Richardson, 2020). Topics could 
include, but are not limited to, the following:

How are cities and societies framed and sensed on platforms? How are the 
socio-spatial experiences of cities deployed to articulate discourses 
about cities, through different "ways of seeing" algorithms (Kitchin, 
2017; Willson, 2017), namely, design tactics of classifying, ranking, 
and predicting?

How do digital platforms convert the entire society to 
networkedprosumption sites? How does algorithms-conditioned visibility 
regulate the labouring and prosumption process? Furthermore, how is the 
distributed agency of prosumption co-ordinated to accommodate 
participatory culture, entrepreneurialism, and governance?

How do platforms de-territorialise cities' existing physical fabrics, 
from functional infrastructures to symbolic spaces, and then rearrange 
them according to their redefined visibility (Plantin et al., 2018)? How 
is the idea of platformization and infrastructuration of utility in 
revisiting spatial parameters such as scale, networks, territory and place?

Please send your abstract to June Wang((June.wang /at/ cityu.edu.hk) 
<mailto:(June.wang /at/ cityu.edu.hk)>) before Jan 23 2021.



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