Call for abstracts

EASST 010 – PRACTICING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, PERFORMING THE SOCIAL

TRENTO, SEPTEMBER 2ND - 4TH 2010

TRACK 11. PERFORMATIVE INFRASTRUCTURES, MULTIPLE MOBILITIES

Convenors: Alessandro Mongili (University of Cagliari, Italy) and Giuseppina Pellegrino (University of Calabria, Italy)

Emerging landscapes in contemporary society emphasise the role played by hybrid, mobile actors in performing communicative interaction and social practices. In such a scenario, the increasing trends towards convergence, alignment, miniaturization, and portability of technological artifacts (one for all, the mobile phone) are often taken for granted as ‘irreversible’ and ‘unresistable’. Overcoming the common sense view which reifies technological artifacts in terms of things impacting on society, this session aims to attract contributions oriented to inquire critically the relationships between artifacts, infrastructures and processes leading to both of them. On the one hand, the obduracy of technology is the result of hidden processes of categorization, selection and exclusion which are then embedded into complex infrastructures, constraining actors’ choices. On the other hand, the higher and higher mobility of people, information, objects, risks, projects and boundaries enrich the opportunities to perform alternative strategies so coping with a multi-level texture of technoscientific configurations.

The  session   welcomes   contributions  oriented   to  reflect  on  the  ambivalent  relationship between infrastructures and mobilities, aiming to understand especially (but not only):
-   the practices of distributed design of current and future informative infrastructures (e.g. the mobile Internet, wireless networks, embedded intelligent systems, etc.);
-   the role users have in shaping mobile artifacts and information, especially the mobile
phone in different cultural and social contexts;
-   the practice of bricolage and hybridation between designers and users in configuring new technoscientific objects;
-   the theoretical frames which allow to categorize emergent communicative and social interaction;
-   mobility/immobility and their relationships to infrastructures;
-   the concepts of infrastructure and mobility and their consequences in everyday life;
-   the ethical dimensions involved in both infrastructure design and use of mobile information.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent by email (following website instructions at http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010/abstract-submission) by 2010 March 15th.

EASST 2010 Conference website: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010