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

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/

In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-hub
http://custodians.online

Share this letter - read it in public - leave it in the printer. Share
your writing - digitize a book - upload your files. Don't let our
knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries - care for the metadata -
care for the backup. Water the ❀❀❀❀❀ - clean the volcanoes.

---------------
ECREA-Mailing list
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier and ECREA.
--
To subscribe, post or unsubscribe, please visit
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
--
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Chauss�de Waterloo 1151, 1180 Uccle, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
---------------