Call for papers:

EASST 010  PRACTICING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, PERFORMING THE SOCIAL
TRENTO, ITALY, SEPTEMBER 2ND - 4TH 2010

TRACK 39. PRACTICES ON THE MOVE: DYNAMICS, CIRCULATION AND DIFFUSION

This track provides an opportunity to move beyond the study of situated practices (Suchman 1994; Hutchins 1995), and to develop and explore the theoretical resources required to understand and analyse their spatial and temporal dynamics.  The tradition of studying specific sites of practice has tended to obscure vital questions about mechanisms of circulation and diffusion: how do the material, cognitive and symbolic elements of practices travel? How do necessarily local sociomaterial practices relate to path-dependencies and global trends in the elements of which they are
composed? How do related temporalities of circulation affect the
transformation and persistence of social practices?

Contributors are invited to fuse concepts from geography, history,
management and social theory with science and technology studies in order to understand and capture critical trajectories of practices including those of escalation, reinvention, retreat and erosion.  In pursuing these questions, this track seeks to address and confront the multi-sited, multi-scalar and temporal relations involved in the reproduction of practice.  The call for proposals for EASST 2010 represents science and technology as an ecology of heterogeneous elements and interactions. This track provides a chance to focus on the ways that diverse elements circulate and on the implications of these distinctive travel patterns for the emergence, durability and distribution of specific socio-material practices.

The track will enable different strands of science and technology
studies to come together in new configurations.  For example, how do theories of innovation (Von Hippel 2005), diffusion and marketing mesh with notions of sociotechnical scripting (Akrich 1992)?  Likewise, how do technologies carry knowledge cultures and vice versa? This deliberately conceptual/theoretically-oriented track puts the geographies, choreographies and dynamics of sociomaterial practices centre stage.

We invite papers that address these fundamental theoretical concerns from contrasting positions and perspectives, and with reference to a range of empirical cases  in particular, detailed analyses of mobile technologies; ICTs; embedded infrastructures; scientific networks; formal and informal communities of practice and distributed material cultures.

Suggested themes include:
-      The life of elements: how do the heterogeneous ingredients of practice circulate?
-      How are local knowledges/technological configurations abstracted, distributed and reversed or re-enacted.
-      Codification, inscription, regulation
-      Sites of exchange: exhibitions, internet, media and mediation
-      Methodology: how to study paths, projects, processes
-      How technologies carry or are carried by practices
-      Different temporalities of circulation and how these shape
processes of innovation
-      How elements and practices become stuck; how they endure and disappear and how they become immobile

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

For more information about the conference, please visit
http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010.

Track convenors:

Allison Hui is a PhD student and tutor in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University.  Her current research examines the convergence of leisure practices and mobilities of people, ideas and objects.( http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/gradschool/pgrprofiles/259/)

Elizabeth Shove is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University.  She currently holds and ESRC climate change leadership fellowship, focusing on Transitions in practice: climate change and everyday life.
(http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/shove/)

Nicola Spurling is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at
Lancaster University. Her research is concerned with the intersections and interactions of individuals careers with everyday practices, institutions and government policy.
(http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/pgrprofiles/256/)