[Commlist] CFP for Hacker Cultures @ 2020 4S/EASST in Prague

There are just 10 more days left to submit a paper for our panel around 
Hacker Cultures: Understanding the actors behind our software (see info 
below), for the 2020 4S/EASST joint conference in Prague, taking place 
August 18th-21st. This panel will be run by myself and Mace Ojala from 
the IT University Copenhagen.
 If you are an STS-curious, Hacker-ish-friendly researcher, please 
submit your 250-word abstracts by logging into the 4S website 
<https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/ssss20/index.php?&obf_var=7769284&PHPSESSID=5o6jqvc0jb8tgf8q1v1ss9e0j2>, 
and clicking on our panel under the “submission menu” menu. As 
reference, we are panel number 74.
When in doubt please email me at (bialski /at/ leuphana.de) 
<mailto:(bialski /at/ leuphana.de)> or Mace at (maco /at/ itu.dk) 
<mailto:(maco /at/ itu.dk)>. The deadline for submissions is on February 17th, 
2020.  Looking forward to hearing from you all, Paula & Mace

++++


74. Hacker Cultures: Understanding the actors behind our software

Paula Bialski, Leuphana University Luneburg; Mace Ojala, IT University 
of Copenhagen

The spiralling changes around how we experience our social and physical 
world have stemmed from the massive amount of digital technologies that 
are ubiquitously used in all parts of our society today. Big data, 
offshore data centres, universities, grocery stores run by software 
companies of all shapes and sizes, are often hard to grasp and 
black-boxed, deeming the user unable to participate. These 
infrastructures are constructed by a wide range of “hackers” – a 
slippery term generally applied to anybody building or maintaining 
software or hardware. They (or we?) go by a wide range of labels such as 
programmers, developers (or “devs”), designers, analysts, data 
scientists, coders, sysadmins, dev/ops, or sometimes simply tech. They 
build, break, fix, and secure our navigation system, our banking 
database, our doctor’s healthcare software, our games, our phones, our 
word processors, our fridges and toasters. They work in massive software 
corporations, in teeny startups, or in something in-between. They 
volunteer for, or are employed by, free and open-source projects. While 
their work is ubiquitous, hackers can hold a lot of power but also none 
at all – as the software they are building oftentimes overpowers their 
capabilities of understanding and managing it. Inspired by research 
around hacker cultures, such as Chris Kelty’s work among free software 
communities, Biella Coleman’s work on the Debian communities (2012) and 
the politically-motivated hacker collective Anonymous (2014), or Stuart 
Geiger’s embedded ethnography in Wikipedia (2017 with Halfaker) – this 
panel shines a light on the people who build our opaque and oftentimes 
confusing technical worlds. In doing so, we wish to challenge the role 
of the STS scholar in describing the powers and agencies, and the 
practices and struggles of hacker cultures – a challenge that, in our 
increasingly complex, commodified technical worlds might never be fulfilled.

Submit via 4S/EASST Conference website  
<https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/ssss20/index.php?&obf_var=7769284&PHPSESSID=5o6jqvc0jb8tgf8q1v1ss9e0j2>
Keywords: software, hackers, culture, agency, data collection, 
ethnography, computing

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Big Data

Engineering and Infrastructure


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