Archive for calls, December 2015

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[ecrea] Cfp: digital fabrications amongst hackers, makers and manufacturers: whose ‘industrial revolution’? (4s Barcelona)

Mon Dec 21 23:29:47 GMT 2015



We invite abstracts for a track we are organising on the theme of digital fabrications amongst hackers, makers and manufacturers, and which will take place in Barcelona over August 31 to September 3 as part of the international conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).
Abstracts can be submitted at this link:

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst_4s2016/panels.php5?PanelID=3870

More details below.

Thanks,

Johan Söderberg, Maxigas, Adrian Smith

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Our track brings critical analysis to the plurality of collectives, spaces and futures that are assembling around increasingly accessible digital design and fabrication technologies. Computer integrated tools hold particular historical ironies and contradictions: early introduction threatened skills, livelihoods and identities amongst manufacturing communities – while they are celebrated today as enabling agency, identities and communities for makers. Both processes has been promoted as ’Industrial Revolutions’. STS has much to contribute to understanding, engaging and bridging digital fabrications. Conversely, apparent historical turnarounds in digital fabrication, with tools spilling into new collectives and spaces, offers an opportunity to interrogate STS theory and methodology.
Fifty years ago, social ecologist Murray Bookchin, like other 
commentators welcomed a future in which collectives would own tools and 
organise production non-hierarchically around ‘liberatory technologies’. 
Does grassroots appropriation of digital fabrication in hackerspaces, 
makerspaces and amongst user groups online, mean his future for 
egalitarian tool-based creativity arrived? Or do digital fabrication 
futures reinforce the automation, flexible specialisation, and 
globalised outsourcing documented by David Noble in the 1980s, and that 
has been a driver for the technology amongst manufacturing strategists 
since then? How do the collectives and spaces pursuing these different 
futures intersect, contest, and co-exist?
In analysing digital fabrications, we are particularly interested in the 
critical voices posing unsettling questions:
* Who controls the platforms underpinning these activities and their 
connections, and how does this influence the spaces for peer production, 
and the terms for private appropriation?
* What senses of humanity are invigorated, and which excluded, from the 
political imaginaries, utopias, dystopias, and ideologies embodied in 
digital fabrication technologies?
* How does the materiality of digital fabrications connect to the values 
of sustainable developments?
* Where does the figure of the hacker – forever opening-up technologies 
– lurk in these collectives and spaces; and what has hacker culture 
mobilised and been appropriated by these collectives?
* When and where will future industrial conflicts arise: what are the 
political and economic relations at stake between these collectives, 
spaces and futures?
We welcome papers that provide critical reviews, original empirical 
study, and theoretical development relevant to digital fabrications.
--
maxigas, kiberpunk
FA00 8129 13E9 2617 C614 0901 7879 63BC 287E D166
http://research.metatron.ai/

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