[Commlist] cfp: EPIC2023 - Friction

EPIC2023 Call for Participation
Submission Deadline: March 17
Conference Venue: Chicago
Submission Link: https://tinyurl.com/2fcy6d6s <https://tinyurl.com/2fcy6d6s>
https://2023.epicpeople.org/cfp/ <https://2023.epicpeople.org/cfp/>

Now in its 19th year, EPIC conference is an inclusive event that 
combines supports the professional development, learning, and leadership 
of people who practice and promote ethnography. EPIC is a nonprofit 
organization powered by members and volunteers; learn more.

The core EPIC2023 program is created through a proposal submission, 
anonymous review, selection, and curation process. This year the Program 
Committee invites proposals for these formats: Case Studies, Papers, 
PechaKucha, Visual Ethnography, and Graduate Colloquium. We welcome 
proposals from anyone, in any discipline and sector, who creates 
ethnography or applies ethnographic principles and expertise.

Please read the conference theme and the submissions requirements below:

EPIC2023 Theme: Friction

A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; 
spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together 
produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick… Friction 
reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new 
arrangements of culture and power.
—Anna Tsing, Friction (2011:5)

Friction is a function of the everyday. The experience of friction can 
feel uncomfortable or constraining: impeding our personal and 
professional goals, disrupting flows of data, erecting barriers to 
participation and inclusion, disrupting innovation. As ethnographers, 
however, we also understand friction as a generative force. The diverse 
perspectives, unexpected partnerships, and conflicting goals that 
friction yields can open time and space to plot creative paths forward. 
We invite you to consider Friction at multiple sites and scales:

As practitioners, researchers, designers, innovators, and creators, our 
work is fed by friction. Ethnography inevitably surfaces differing 
interpretations, values, and viewpoints, and issues of positionality, 
bias, and reflexivity. From these we create the frameworks, design 
principles and strategies that enable our organizations to take action 
amid the complexity of life. Our insights and impacts are forged through 
friction—the partnerships, alignments, and dissonance among our teams, 
collaborators, stakeholders, organizations, communities and critics.

Friction is part of people’s engagements with products, services and 
processes. The focus on reducing friction has created key efficiencies 
and helped address struggles, priorities, and inequities from users’ 
points of view, including people excluded from the definition of ‘user’. 
But with our compulsion toward ‘seamless’ experiences, we also reduce 
social interactions to technical transactions, constrain human agency, 
perpetuate inequities, and privilege idealized happy paths at the 
expense of our diverse realities.

Innovation happens in the friction of global connection. As businesses 
and organizations alternately and unevenly pursue profit, disruption, 
connectedness, inclusion, or climate-readiness, ethnography is crucial 
in navigating complex social realities that populate our horizons and 
so-called white spaces. Too many products and policies land, and fail, 
on poorly understood ground. Understanding the friction of the diverse 
interactions that make up our contemporary world is essential to 
organizational learning, decision making, strategy, and foresight.

Submission Requirements

- You may submit only a single proposal (Case Study, Paper, PechaKucha, 
or Visual Ethnography) as a primary/first author. The exception is the 
Graduate Colloquium (applicants to the Colloquium may submit as primary 
author to another track).

- At least one co-author must register for and attend the conference to 
present the work. No automatic discounts are available for presenters.

- Presenters are encouraged to contact us about equity and financial 
inclusion grants: (conference /at/ epicpeople.org) 
<mailto:(conference /at/ epicpeople.org)>.
- Authors must be sure they have all permissions required to present and 
publish all data, research, and materials they intend to include. 
‘Permission’ refers not only to legal requirements and policies of 
employers and clients, but also the documented informed consent of all 
those represented in the work, with consideration for their agency and 
power to consent and within their own social and cultural contexts.

- If your proposal is accepted, you will work closely with a curator to 
develop and refine great presentations and published texts. You will 
commit to deadlines for submitting draft and final versions of both. 
Before submitting a proposal, please ensure all co-authors have the time 
and interest to engage in this process.

- Papers and Case Studies will create both presentations and full-length 
articles. Articles (and abstracts for other formats) will be published 
in the open-access journal Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference 
Proceedings (ISSN 1559-8918) and in EPIC library.

- All co-authors are required to sign a publication agreement.
All presenters must sign media agreements that allow EPIC to video 
record conference events and share video on epicpeople.org 
<http://epicpeople.org>.

Don’t hesitate to contact us with questions—(conference /at/ epicpeople.org) 
<mailto:(conference /at/ epicpeople.org)>


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