[Commlist] CFP Digital Truth-Making

Call for Papers:
Digital Truth-Making

Ethnographic Perspectives on Practices, Infrastructures and Affordances 
of Truth-Making in Digital Societies

7th conference of the Section “Digitization in Everyday Life” of the 
German Association of Cultural Anthropology and Folklore Studies (dgv)

Institute for European Ethnology & Centre for Anthropological Research 
on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany)

7-9 October 2020

Organizers: Christoph Bareither, Dennis Eckhardt, Alexander Harder, 
Julia Molin

Submission Deadline:  January 31st 2020

Over the last two decades, the ubiquity of digital infrastructures has 
brought about numerous drastic changes to a globalized world. One of the 
most pressing socio-political questions on a global scale is how 
digitization has changed the ways in which particular truths are enacted 
and established in everyday life. On the one hand, this addresses the 
practices of truth-making in political contexts: "post-truth" and "fake 
news" not only dominated the last US presidential election, but have 
also long since become decisive factors in political upheaval in Europe, 
South America and Asia. Social media have become crucial platforms for 
political meaning-making as well as the constitution of emotional 
beliefs and “alternative facts”. But the question of the specifics of 
practices of digital truth-making also encompasses much more than the 
sphere of the political. In the context of platform economies or crypto 
currency, for example, new ways of measuring and comparing the value of 
goods have prevailed that create economic value and thus constitute 
economic truths. In the field of health, software programs and apps have 
long been institutionalized as instrument of biological measuring and 
thus make and re-shape the truths of our bodies. In science, the truth 
of climate change has become an extremely contested object of digital 
(often visual) meaning-making. And in the field of memory cultures, 
numerous digital platforms have emerged as repositories of cultural 
heritage, while implicitly or explicitly curating the truth of 
particular histories. The list could be continued.

Following these and further examples, the 7th conference of the 
dgv-working group “Digitization in Everyday Life” 
(http://www.goingdigital.de/ <http://www.goingdigital.de/>) at the 
Humboldt University of Berlin will examine concrete practices of digital 
truth-making. These practices always build on complex digital 
infrastructures whose specific quality with regard to truth-making is 
increasingly dependent on the relation of human practice and programmed 
algorithms. Today, these digital algorithms and the policies inscribed 
in them decisively contribute to and shape everyday truths. Taking this 
into account, we aim for a discussion of the particular role of 
algorithmic affordances in relation to everyday practices and how truths 
are constituted in-between these dimensions.
We invite papers from a broad range of disciplines to tackle these 
questions. The main focus of the conference, however, lies in the 
potential of ethnographic methods to answer them. While questions of 
truth-making related to digital technologies are often approached 
through large quantitative data sets, we argue that it is the how of 
digital truth-making that requires particular attention. Ethnographic 
approaches, combining “online” and “offline” analysis, are well-suited 
to address this question. We therefore explicitly not only welcome 
papers in the aforementioned empirical fields, but also papers 
addressing crucial methodological questions. Alternatively, we welcome 
proposals for workshops (of 90 minutes) addressing such methodological 
questions. In particular, we are interested in how ethnographic research 
can unfold its potential in analysing the entanglements of digital 
infrastructures, their algorithms and everyday media practices with 
regard to digital truth-making.

Please send your paper and/or workshop proposals (including your name, 
email address, paper title and abstract not exceeding 300 words) until 
January 31st 2020 to (digital-truth-making.ethno /at/ hu-berlin.de) 
<applewebdata://6E656A9A-F5F7-4D05-967E-74E4B59947B4/%22mailto:digital-truth-mak> 


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