ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–Information, Computing and Media Technology

3. AI through an education perspective: concerns, potentials, and trade-offs

Rodrigo Barbosa e Silva, Stanford University; Ana Carolina Goes Machado, Stanford University

Educators, policymakers, and civil society have attempted to address the complex phenomena behind the continuous advancement of artificial intelligence. Several educational systems currently use AI to promote personalization, adapt content to different learning styles, and to understand student characteristics. These AI applications have raised ethical concerns, such as data protection, fairness, and equity. Should we allow data processing on learner behavior, history, and actions? What biases does AI mirror, and how do these biases affect students?

We are interested in ways that Science, Technology, and Society practitioners can interpret and act on AI developments for  improving student educational achievement when considering the risks and social concerns. Paraphrasing Paulo Freire, how can we have an educational system as a practice of freedom, when taking into account the latest (ab)uses of AI in education and society at large?

National strategic plans, universities, social movements, and organizations around the world have begun to create specific programs to take steps towards an understanding of AI as a matter of public concern. Historically, STS scholars have warned of potential benefits, trade-offs, and risks of technologies. We invite submissions on AI as it applies to education and policy including but not limited to:

Emerging issues

Data fairness and equity

Ethical aspects of commercial platforms in Education

Power relations, control, and agency

International trends: how different countries address freedom, control, classification, and critical thinking

Public policy on AI and Education

Engagement in civil society and policymaking at large amidst the dynamics of “alternative facts” in AI?

Contact: rodrigo7@stanford.edu

Keywords: education, artificial intelligence, public policy, critical pedagogy

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Governance and Public Policy

8. Approaching the Digital Anthropocene

James Maguire, IT University Copenhagen; Rachel Douglas Jones, IT University Copenhagen; Astrid Andersen, Aalborg University

It is becoming increasingly more difficult to address digital questions without considering how they overlap and intersect with environmental concerns. We make the digital from the natural world, crafting metals and plastics into sleek handheld forms, while powering our data through vast quantities of energy consumption. We observe and make our understandings of environments through digital devices, spreadsheet accounting and carbon calculations. We have brought epochal shifts into being through rhetoric, disciplines, and geological measures. The Anthropocene is a digitally mediated and produced time.

Yet the ‘we’ of these statements is an unevenly distributed set of actors, and the politics of producing (knowledge of) the Digital Anthropocene are pressing. From planetary observation and oceanic measurement to marine tailings, the appropriation of precious metals and labors of pollution, anthropogenic knowledge is deeply woven in with computation, tools, media and devices. It is also constituted through histories of colonialism, political economy, and ways of being in and knowing the world.

This panel invites scholars with an interest in the manifold interfaces and overlaps between and within the environmental and the digital. Our aspiration is to begin a conversation on how researchers can approach what we are provocatively calling the Digital Anthropocene. We invite papers from those who are already conducting research at this interface, as well as those who are interested in contributing to the generation of an ambitious and newly emerging field within STS.

Contact: jmag@itu.dk

Keywords: digitalization, anthropocene, temporality, politics, environmental knowledge making

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

10. Artificial Africa: Seeing urban algorithms through infrastructure, labour, justice and aesthetics

Kerry Holden, Queen Mary, University of London; Matthew Harsh, Cal Poly; Ravtosh Bal, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science are taking off in African cities, and with it, a new incarnation of development policy and practice is emerging. Following knowledge for development and ICT4D, AI4D targets transport, health and finance in anticipation of transforming African societies. The resultant problems with AI typical of debate in the Global North are also anticipated to impact African societies: displacement of labour, data protection and privacy, bias in algorithms and so on. We aim to move away from the idea that doing technoscience in African cities generates artificial social realities that are dislodged and disassociated from more authentic experience. In challenging the assumed universalism of AI, we invite paper proposals exploring four critical dimensions: infrastructure, justice, labour and aesthetics. What kinds of materialities support algorithmic-life in Africa, and how do tensions in the extension of critical infrastructure become points of creativity and vulnerability? What counts as the everyday work of data science and to what extent does it subvert the distinction between informal and formal labour that has long characterised studies of work in African cities? Does data science make possible a regenerative, ground-up form of justice in which un-alienated value circulates? What are the aesthetics of artificial intelligence in African cities and how are technoscientific futures infused with socio-political imaginaries? How do art and fiction provide alternative future-scapes? We hope to open up scope for critical interventions that rethink the relationship between knowledge, technoscience and society in Africa.

Contact: k.holden@qmul.ac.uk

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Africa, Afrofutures, infrastructure, labour

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

15. Broken and livable futures with automated decision-making

Tuukka Lehtiniemi, University of Helsinki; Minna Ruckenstein, University of Helsinki

The growing use of automated decision-making (ADM) makes automation increasingly relevant to the lived experience of people, with examples ranging from credit scoring and predictive policing to self-care within health services and automated content moderation. A technological imaginary favours the strengthening of existing infrastructures with ADM: it is characterized by political-economic aims of efficiency and optimization. A critical imaginary, in contrast, questions technological developments: recent research details problematic aspects of ADM systems, for instance, their connections to discrimination and inequalities, and their lack of transparency and accountability.

Our panel concentrates on re-articulating ways in which ADM systems are currently described and debated. To make possible a creative move beyond the dominant logics of automation driven by the technological imaginary, scholars themselves should bypass their critical imaginary and explore alternative conceptualizations and frameworks. Therefore, we seek to open a practical and analytical space for the re-articulation of ADM systems and their effects. We expect papers to demonstrate that new socio-technical directions are possible, bringing into being ADM futures that we would rather live in. Various theoretical or methodological approaches might be employed, including broken world thinking to highlight breakdown, dissolution and change as starting points in discussing ADM (Jackson, 2014); situated interventions that experimentally engage with ADM practices to produce new normative directions (Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015); or feminist approaches offering alternative ways to care for socio-technical arrangements (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012). Together, the papers can reinvigorate research on ADM systems and identify harms and benefits that are currently not addressed.

Contact: tuukka.lehtiniemi@iki.fi

Keywords: Automation, decision-making systems, technological imaginary, critical imaginary, socio-technical futures

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Big Data

20. Categories of Hatred: Unearthing algorithmic cultures of hate groups, marginalization, and surveillance of minorities

Melissa Adler, Western University; David Nemer, University of Virginia

Categories and classifications make algorithmic cultures possible. Unlike former bureaucratic classificatory technologies that assumed and insisted upon the stability of categories, the categories in Big Data machinery are on the move by design—shifting, modulating, defining, and redefining (Cheney-Lippold 2018). This modularity also functions to refine and tailor categories to their users and users to their categories. The consequences of these algorithmic functions depend upon their context—whether their purpose is policing or border patrol, selling goods and services, or organizing political movements. For example, one might argue that online hate groups gain power by specifying the characteristics of the targets of their hatred and installing those profiles within information communication technologies are intimately connected in and through algorithms, in vast, networked apparatuses that serve state capitalism. This panel will explore the use and formulation of categories in various contexts, including hate groups in instant messaging and social media platforms, surveillance of visible minorities, consumer profiles across different platforms, and so on. The panel has three primary aims: 1) To understand the ways that categories function in different algorithmic contexts and cultures. 2) To unearth the methods by which ICTs actively produce and refine categories, and to what ends. 3) To gather a sense of the role of categories in the interconnectedness of local and global contexts, governments, corporations, and militaries within and across ICTs.

Contact: nemer@virginia.edu

Keywords: hate group, classification, algorithm, social media, surveillance

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

23. China, Technology, Planetary Futures: Lessons for a World in Crisis?

David Tyfield, Lancaster University; Jamie Allen, Critical Media Lab; Andrew Chubb, Lancaster University

Two issues are set to become increasingly central in coming decades. First and foremost, amidst the Anthropocene, are issues of environmental crisis at planetary scale, and what this means for a global economy and associated model of science and innovation premised upon ever-accelerating exploitation of natural resources.  Secondly, and in comparison a highly neglected issue in mainstream (still largely Western) social science, is the rise of China.  But how these two issues will come together and shape the 21st century receives even less attention, even as their conjunction is likely to prove increasingly influential.  This is both an increasingly problematic oversight and a missed opportunity for insights that do not merely confirm relatively established, i.e. Euro-Atlanticist and short-termist, readings of the state of the ‘world’.  STS has much to contribute to the development of this missing analysis, not just because the construction of new environmental, infrastructural and technological (and, in particular, digital) innovations from and in China is already evident as a key dynamic. But also because of STS’s capacity to draw on empirical exploration that does not take theoretical categories as given but pursues development of new illuminating concepts adequate to a constantly changing socio-technical landscape of uncertain futures.  This panel thus invites contributions studying Chinese socio-technical projects (in China or overseas, e.g. via the Belt Road Initiative (BRI)) for insights into how these two ‘mega-trends’ may be coming together; and what may be learned from China, positively or negatively, to confront the current apparent impasse(s) regarding global crisis.

Contact: d.tyfield@lancaster.ac.uk

Keywords: China, Anthropocene, digital technology, infrastructure, futures

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Energy

28. Commodifying environmental data: markets, materiality, knowledge

Aguiton Angeli Sara, EHESS CAK Centre Alexandre Koyré; Sylvain Brunier, CNRS – Centre de Sociologie des Organisations; Jeanne Oui, EHESS

As digital tools promise to resolve environmental problems by leveraging new sources of data and by creating new services, this panel calls for papers focusing on the market logics involved in these processes. STS research on informational infrastructures warned us not to dissociate data production and circulation, we aim to enrich this approach by considering that market and economic dimensions are not processed downstream, but that they are already at stake when environmental data are produced. In many cases, the manufacturing of environmental data and their markets is simultaneous. The panel proposes to study both the production of environmental data and services, the role of public and corporate actors, the uses of natural sciences and market knowledge, the invention of new measurement tools and their economic valuation.

Case studies could include a variety of objects such as predictive maintenance applied to water distribution networks; index insurance based on the integration of climate parameters; customized services based on global infrastructures and low-cost sensors measuring air quality or crop development; forest certification schemes by remote sensing for ecological compensation or biomass valuation; etc. We aim to grasp a broad range of questions: using infrastructures that are often fragile and labor-intensive, how do various actors develop profitable models? What are the links between the trade and circulation of data on one hand, and the associated service market on the other hand? Which types of knowledge are being used and what roles do they play in the valuation of environmental data? In what way is data labor shaped by its commercial use?

By exploring these various issues, we hope that the contributions of this panel will deconstruct the promises of the greening of public policies and industrial processes through the development of an environmental services economy.

Contact: sara.aguiton@ehess.fr

Keywords: Data, Environment, Infrastructure, Market, Commodification

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

32. Crafting Critical Methodologies in Computing: theories, practices and future directions

Loren Britton, University of Kassel; Claude Draude, University of Kassel, Germany; Juliane Jarke, University of Bremen; Goda Klumbyte, University of Kassel

In the past decades there has been an explosion of “critical studies”, and computing is no exception. Working to bring insights from critical theories developed in the humanities and social sciences, the diverse scholarship that can be located under “critical computing” is engaged in the laborious and relevant project of translational work between disciplines, and generative avenues for knowledge developed in the “subtle” sciences to bear implication to how computational technologies are designed, produced and deployed.

Critical computing draws inspiration and methodological tools from fields as diverse as participatory design and design research, feminist theory and gender studies, STS, artistic research and post-/de-colonial theory, among others. In this panel we wish to investigate what are the methodological approaches that can be employed within, by and for computing, which would be capable of generating critical technical practices (Agre 1995), accurate and critical accounts of power dynamics and processes of marginalization, and craft space for alternative modes and methods of doing computing.

Specifically, we encourage contributions that address questions, including, but not limited to:

– How can critical thought/theory inform methodology building (or reflecting upon) in computing?

– How can interactions between (feminist, postcolonial) STS and computing establish new methodological considerations?

– How do we decolonize computing and its methodologies?

– Where do we locate artistic research, arts practice and design in regards to questions of methodology in computing?

– How can feminist and other critical epistemological knowledges generate knowledge about and in computing that from an STS perspective challenge well worn power dynamics?

Contact: claude.draude@uni-kassel.de

Keywords: critical computing, feminist STS, methodologies, postcolonial studies, artistic research

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

34. Decentralized and Distributed Systems: Technologies of Resistance

Victoria Neumann, Lancaster University; Anna Adamowicz, Institute of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University

The internet has been called the “largest experiment involving anarchy in history” (Schmidt & Cohen, 2013) and is characterized by decentral and distributed network technologies which disseminate information. However, there is a tension as these (infra-)structures incorporate dialectic contradictions of “radically distributes control into autonomous locales” and protocological “control into rigidly defined hierarchies”(Galloway, 2004).

Politically, control in and over cyberspaces is often fought along the lines of (1) governments expanding surveillance and automated, algorithmic decision-making that reinforce traditional hierarchies (Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018; Zuboff, 2019); (2) neoliberal and libertarian tech enthusiast reconfiguring capitalism based on cybernetic logics (Kelly, 1994; Marks, 2006); and (3) (h)activist movements striving for emancipation and create spaces for sovereignty, autonomy, and withdraw from censorship/repression (Barlow, 1996).

In this panel, we are interested in works around distributed and decentralized systems as technologies of resistance. We invite contributions from a wide range of areas in which technologies are used to build infrastructures that foster counter hegemonies or highlight social and political power struggles. These contributions may be theoretical, practical, and/or empirical cases such as scientific studies, manifestos, declarations, or practical reports on collectives’ work.

Examples include, but are not limited to:

• Cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and distributed ledger technologies
• Decentralized or distributed social media outlets (e.g. privacy-preserving projects like Fediverse’s Mastodon, Riot.im, Diaspora)
• Alternative communication tools, infrastructures and protocols (e.g. Tor, local ISPs, Matrix)
• Protest, communities and movements using tech such decentralized server networks (e.g. Mesh, Police Tracking apps)
• Hacker and knowledge-sharing cooperatives, and non-centralized collaboration (e.g. open/free software developments)

Contact: v.neumann@lancaster.ac.uk

Keywords: Decentralization, Distributed Systems, Resistance, Information Technologies, Agency

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

38. Digital Experiments in the Making: Methods, Tools, and Platforms in the Infrastructuring of STS

Lina Franken, University of Hamburg; Kim Fortun, University of California Irvine; Mike Fortun, University of California, Irvine; Gertraud Koch, University of Hamburg

Digital infrastructures are ubiquitous in the technosciences and in everyday life, and have become crucial objects of analysis for diverse STS researchers and their arrays of approaches. Digital infrastructures are also emerging as instruments for STS research itself, composed of an expanding array of methods, modules, data tools, visualizations, and platforms that create new possibilities and places for experiments in how we “do STS”, and for academic knowledge production writ large. At the same time, our new sociotechnical research infrastructures raise their own technical, epistemological, and ethical questions and difficulties, asking us to re-visit and re-invent some of our own methodological assumptions, analytic habits, and goals, scholarly and political.

This open panel invites contributions from researchers engaged in fresh ways of developing and using digital technologies for ethnographic and other kinds of qualitative research on the technosciences. We are especially interested in presentations from researchers developing or using new digital technologies and media in their own research, experimenting with new approaches to data sharing and analysis, and to open access publishing and other forms of scholarly communication with engaged publics. We encourage epistemological and ethical analyses and reflections on these digital modes of knowledge production in STS, including presentations that explore new tools and concepts pertaining to privacy and related issues in the digital realm.

Contact: lina.franken@uni-hamburg.de

Keywords: digital infrastructures, methods, digital knowledge production, tools, qualitative research

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

Knowledge, Theory and Method

40. Digital Platforms, Knowledge Democracies and the Remaking of Expertise

Warren Pearce, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield

Traditional forms of expertise appear in crisis. Digital platforms such as YouTube, Wikipedia and Zhihu increasingly shape the knowledge and expertise that constitute the infrastructure of modern knowledge-based democracies. Techno-optimism about the democratisation of knowledge has given way to dismay that the internet has eroded the shared truths that enable rational discourse. Digital platforms’ business models incentivise audience over accuracy, with publics increasingly concerned about the resulting online misinformation. Meanwhile, a new wave of right-wing ‘populist’ politicians in the US, Brazil and elsewhere have come to power by fostering an anti-expert culture. Yet within this bleak picture, new kinds of experts and expertise, particular to digital platforms, are emerging in domains as diverse as finance, science and culture.

This panel brings together researchers investigating the nexus of experts, publics and platforms across a range of topics, and employing a range of methods. Potential questions include: How are experts establishing credibility on digital platforms? How do digital platforms shape the production and communication of expertise? What are publics demanding from experts on digital platforms? How is epistemological power being reinforced or disrupted by platformisation? Are there potential futures for experts, digital platforms and democracy beyond the dystopian imaginary of the post-truth society?  This panel will contribute to STS by assessing the impact of platformisation on existing, canonical theories of expertise, and provides opportunity for reflection on the conference themes of changing digital identities and the challenge of public engagement in democracies teeming with ‘alternative facts’.

Contact: warren.pearce@sheffield.ac.uk

Keywords: expertise, digital platforms, knowledge democracies,

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Science Communication/Public Engagement

41. Digital pollutions: resource consumption, waste and environmental problems in information societies

clement marquet, IFRIS, Costech

While digital technologies are often presented as tools that could foster energetic and ecological transitions, little studies have paid attention to the environmental consequences of the digital growth of our societies. The proliferation of data and the multiplication of digital systems in homes, offices, factories and infrastructures have yet increased the production of digital devices, relying on extractive industries, intensifying electricity consumption and multiplying digital waste. What kind of pollutions does digital development produce? What difficulties do actors face when trying to make visible digital pollutions and deal with it? This panel intends to address these questions through empirical studies investigating three lines of research. The first one focuses on the environments produced by the materiality of digital activities, exploring, for example, the pollutions generated by digital industries, through production, extraction or mining; the growing need of power for computer facilities and the production of new energy infrastructures; the local effects of the material organization of networks; the local and globalized production and management of electronic waste. The second axe is interested in the question of knowledge and ignorance production and environmental metrics, investigating the practices of actors who try to measure and make visible digital pollutions, tackling the difficult emergence of digital pollutions as public problems. The third axe welcomes studies investigating with a critical glance the various initiatives of the digital industry to prove its efforts to develop “green” activities (like the investments in non-carbon energy, the improvement of data centers and electronic devices energy efficiency, etc.).

Contact: clement.marquet@meandres.me

Keywords: environment, digital infrastructures, pollution, waste, ignorance

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

42. Digital Technologies in Policing and Security

Simon Egbert, Technische Universität Berlin; Nikolaus Pöchhacker, MCTS, Technical University of Munich

Recent and globally disseminated technologies and processes of data analysis and computational science – mainly in reference to terms (and myths) like big data, algorithmic decision making and artificial intelligence – have transformed many processes of knowledge production in the field of domestic security practices. With predictive policing as one of its currently most prominent representatives, the data-driven production of (prospective) knowledge has now also affected the security systems at every level – from policing to criminal justice, from border control to counterterrorism policies. Different predictive models include generating risky spaces – like PredPol; risky individuals – like Chicago’s ‘strategic subject list’, EU-border risk assessment system EUROSUR and US’ Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System; or calculating the recidivism risk of convicted offenders in order to inform the sentence decision – like COMPAS. Thus, regardless of whether suspects or spaces are objects of (predictive) knowledge production, or if recidivism risk scores for convicted offenders are generated, in the end, these practices are increasingly characterized by a socio-technical interwovenness with digital data production and algorithmic technologies. This calls for an exploration of the sociotechnical dynamics involved in the co-construction of risks, (in)justice, (in)security and technological development. Correspondingly, this panel seeks to ask how STS can provide analytical tools for grasping the entanglement of technology and society involved in the development and implementation of digitally mediated knowledge production in policing, criminal justice, border control and other fields of security by presenting globally disseminated case examples as well as theoretical approaches on the digitalization and datafication of policing and security practices.

Contact: simon.egbert@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: policing, criminal justice, security, legal technologies, digitalization

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

Governance and Public Policy

43. Digital technologies shaping the politics of science and the science of politics

Florian Eyert, Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society; Hannes Wuensche, Fraunhofer FOKUS

In the wake of the #DigitalTransformation we observe a multiplicity of new practices emerging in science. Digital technologies like #BigDataAnalytics, #MachineLearning or #Crowdworking tools gain importance as scientific instruments, ousting established #EpistemicPractices. On the one hand, this reconfigures the politics of science, setting new epistemic norms for the organization, evaluation and communication of science. On the other hand, the science of politics incorporates new paradigms, assumptions and epistemic affordances into the ways in which scholars perceive and analyze the political and social world, thus producing new political epistemologies.

The panel aims to explore the dialogue between these two perspectives and the presentations in it will address one or more of the following questions: 

1. How do digital technologies affect the making and doing of science and the ways in which the politics and negotiation of scientific knowledge unfolds? How, for instance, are new distributed arrangements in science, like #OpenScience or #CitizenScience, shaped or enabled by digital instruments?
2. How do digital technologies affect the production and perception of scientific knowledge about the political? How do, for instance, the #ComputationalSocialSciences and #DigitalHumanities challenge and transform the science of politics? How does #ComputationalModeling impact the premises of political advice?
3. How do these two aspects affect each other and how are they intertwined?
4. What do these shifts imply for our own epistemic practices within the STS community?

The panel invites contributions that offer theoretical perspectives on digital technologies as epistemic practices as well as empirical studies of relevant cases.

Contact: florian.eyert@wzb.eu

Keywords: digitalization, epistemic practices, computational social science, citizen science

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

44. Digitalizing Cities and Infrastructures

Sulfikar Amir, Nanyang Technological University

This panel focuses on urban digitalization defined as a techno-institutional transformation of cities in which information technology and digital platforms become the principal infrastructure and the basis for providing essential services to residents. In many cities around the world, urban digitalization is taking place through projects initiated by both city governments and private companies. It is manifested in the organized utilization of various digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Internet of Things that transform a wide range of public sectors, including transportation, finance, security, food, and healthcare. The increasingly adopted concept of “Smart City” exemplifies how city governments across Asia are taking the efforts to digitalize their governing operation. This is coupled with a rapid growth of digital-platform companies such as Uber, Lyft, Alibaba, Grab, Gojek, Ola, DiDi, etc. that provide vital services in ride hailing, food delivery, and electronic payment. While it signifies progress, the growing trend of urban digitalization raises a compelling question: What are the impacts of digitalization on citi resilience and vulnerability? This question is highly relevant in times when cities are growing more vulnerable than ever to disaster and crisis. The panel aims to critically examine the impact of urban digitalization on city resilience. Specifically, it probes how digitalization of public services affects city capacity to respond to crisis and disturbance. This panel invites scholarly works, which shed light on the ways urban digitalization turns into a new structure shaping social life in the city.

Contact: sulfikar@ntu.edu.sg

Keywords: Urban Digitalization, Cities, Resilience, Vulnerability

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

Governance and Public Policy

54. Emerging Worlds of Eating: Interrogating the logics of digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of food

Tanja Schneider, University of St Gallen; Jeremy Brice, London School of Economics and Political Science; Karin Eli, University of Warwick

Food is increasingly caught up in processes of digitalisation, datafication and platformisation which are rapidly (if unevenly) reshaping exchange and interaction among those who produce, prepare, consume, (re)distribute and review it. These processes appeal to numerous values and logics: Food delivery services emphasize speed and convenience; surplus food redistribution apps promote sustainability by redirecting and revaluing the excess of conventional food commerce; and social dining platforms encourage unconventional socialities and economies around shared acts of cooking and eating. Meanwhile, platforms and devices promise consumer empowerment through knowledge: supply chain transparency platforms promise to demystify the provenance of food through aggregating data sourced from across the globe, while dietary tracking devices afford novel forms of digitised (self-)knowledge and modes of dietary intervention.

Elaborate socio-technical assemblages of people, capital, software and devices are thus engaged in reinventing foodstuffs and eating practices, along with the knowledges, affects and values which accompany them. In this session we aim to interrogate the diverse and intersecting logics which underpin, guide and govern the digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of food. In particular, we invite researchers working in critical innovation studies, food studies, studies of financialisation and capitalisation, and digital ethnography to join us in tracing the varied worlds of eating emerging around these socio-technical assemblages. In so doing, we hope to explore how the conventions, constraints and accumulation strategies of digital platforms, of data-driven innovation and of those invested in them both enact food futures and participate in ordering present day food cultures, materialities and practices.

Contact: j.brice@lse.ac.uk

Keywords: Food, digital, financialisation, data, eating

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

58. Envisioning a Decentered Academic Knowledge System Online

Gareth A. F. Edel, New Jersey Institute of Technology; Nathan Fisk, University of South Florida

With increasing attention paid to exploitative labor practices in scholarship, marginalization of non-dominant scholars, and exclusionary pricing of access to knowledge, this panel asks what alternatives exist or could exist to the  online version of traditional paper journals.

Scientific norms focusing on access and sharing information have been fundamentally at odds with the idea of intellectual property in recent decades. However, science, and technoscientific society broadly, depend on sharing information among scholars, and communities. With ownership at issue we ask- are the current systems matching or failing aspirational norms, such as Mertonian Communalism (1942) or the more radical public or communitarian access imagined in DIY movements and Citizen Science (Cluck 2015, Ottinger 2010). We ask, what would happen if we did not assume scientific “journals” as the core method of knowledge sharing? What would an open public and expert community reviewed information system look like? Can we look at online communities and technically enabled information systems outside of the sciences and see analogues or affordances?  Many practices and technological models present options, but how can we consider an alternative to, or an adjunct to, traditional journals and peer review?

Presenters and discussants are invited to contribute case studies of knowledge development and distribution outside of the ‘online paper journal’ model, or to offer theoretical or developmental models for considerations contributing to a collaborative discussion of the possibilities and practicalities of an alternative forms of “journals,” or Shared open and public expert community reviewed information system.

Contact: garethedel@gmail.com

Keywords: Open Journals, Open Access, Knowledge Systems, Peer Review, Expertise

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Science Communication/Public Engagement

64. Feeding Food Futures: From Techno-solutionism to Inclusive Human-Food Collaborations

Marketa Dolejsova, Charles University In Prague; Danielle Wilde, University of Southern Denmark; Hilary Davis, Swinburne University of Technology; Ferran Altarriba Bertran, UC Santa Cruz; Denisa Reshef Kera, University of Salamanca

Human-food practices are key drivers of personal and planetary health and have the potential to nurture both. However, current modes of food production and consumption are causing ill health and amplifying climate change (Willet et al., 2019). A burgeoning realm of food-tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists propose solutions for healthier, more sustainable and more efficient food practices—from smart kitchenware and diet personalization services to digital farming platforms. Yet, such techno-solutions offer uncertain food futures. The ‘disruptive potential’ of food-tech products and associated celebratory narratives of the next food revolution are, to a large extent, exhausted by techno-solutionism. Many such products are problematic in their impacts on food cultures. Scholars from STS and elsewhere have discussed the negative role of food-tech innovation: for instance, in deepening socio-economic inequalities on global food markets, disturbing social food traditions, and jeopardizing consumers’ privacy (Biltekoff & Guthman, 2019; Choi, Foth & Hearn, 2014; Lewis & Phillipov, 2018; Lupton & Feldman, 2020). This panel will address the challenges of food-tech innovation through a diversity of post-disciplinary and intersectional contributions from food-oriented researchers, designers, and other practitioners. We call for a wide range of empirical explorations, theoretical reflections, critical speculations, and experimental inquiries into uncertain food-tech futures to be presented as traditional paper formats or participatory interventions and walk-shops around the local Prague foodscape. We aim to support a productive exchange among authors of diverse geographical and professional backgrounds to collectively unpack our troubling global and local food conditions, and feed food futures that are inclusive, safe, and just.

Contact: marketa.dolejsova@gmail.com

Keywords: food cultures, human-food interaction, food technology, food-tech innovation, inclusive food futures

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Information, Computing and Media Technology

71. Grassroots Innovation: Hacking, Making, Hobby, Entrepreneurship

Chen-Pang Yeang, University of Toronto; Wen-Ching Sung, University of Toronto

A hallmark of our emerging world is that the general public obtains not only access to modern technologies but also the knowledge, means, and incentives to generate new products and applications from them.  While self-made inventors populated history, do-it-yourself and technological explorations outside big companies, government, and academia nonetheless become a social movement with conspicuous collectives, information channels, and media coverage.  Today, hackers work on open-source, free-access software and firmware for fun and profit.  Makerspaces spread everywhere for the cause of sharing manufacturing, participatory design, recycling and reuse, nurturing start-ups, or community building.  Made-in-garage is a common myth in high-tech.  “Mass innovation” or “STEM for everyone” is promoted by the states around the globe.  In this panel, we welcome various approaches and perspectives to make sense of this phenomenon of grassroots innovation.  We ask: What are its connections to the longstanding traditions of technical hobbies?  Which organizational and managerial platforms do grassroots innovators introduce that influence the development of new technologies?  What is the nature of the tension between non-profit and commercial, between amateur and professional, in these activities?  How do the hackers’ and makers’ political actions intertwine with their technical innovation?  While hacking and making are seemingly global, what are their major differences in different countries and regions, especially between the affluent North and poor South?  How does grassroots innovation reconfigure the current technological landscape?  What are the roles of the state and capital in shaping grassroots innovation, and how is such shaping grappled from below?

Contact: chenpang.yeang@utoronto.ca

Keywords: innovation, hacking, makerspace, technical hobby, entrepreneurship

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

74. Hacker Cultures: Understanding the actors behind our software

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

The spiraling 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.

Contact: bialski@leuphana.de

Keywords: software, hackers, culture, agency, data collection, ethnography, computing

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Big Data

Engineering and Infrastructure

75. Health Made Digital

Hined A Rafeh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Danya Glabau, The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

With the rise of digital information technologies, the work of aggregating and exchanging data about our health and habits has become faster and easier. From genetic screening to self-tracking apps, and from electronic medical records to digital data archives, digital technologies are reconfiguring healthcare systems and our notions of health. Following from pioneering STS work on genetic health data (Nelson 2016), precision medicine (Ferryman and Pitcan 2018), and self-tracking devices (Lupton 2016, Schull 2016, Nafus and Neff 2016) on the one hand, and recent work on the “bioeconomy” (Birch 2017, 2018) and speculative bioeconomic futures (Benjamin 2016) on the other, this panel aims to stage generative exploration of what counts as health data in the digital age and how it impacts individuals, patient communities, and practices of public health. In a variety of professional and geographic contexts, we hope to consider questions like: What gets considered health data by regulators, and how does that shape its governance and exchange? How do information systems adapt to the introduction of new forms of “health” data, like social media use or purchasing habits? And what publics and expert communities will, or should, have a say in defining, collecting, and governing new forms of health data? By framing these questions in STS literatures, this panel will illustrate how the discipline’s approach to defining slippery objects like “digital health” and “health information” contributes to understanding health and biomedicine as deeply political matters.

Contact: danya.glabau@gmail.com

Keywords: digital health, health information, bioeconomy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

77. ‘Highs’ and ‘Lows’ of the Emerging Automated-Vehicles-Worlds: Location, Visibility & Alternative Futures

Nikolay Ivanovich Rudenko, European University at Saint Petersburg; Liliia Zemnukhova, European Univeristy at St. Petersburg; Andrei Kuznetsov, European Univeristy at St. Petersburg

An international media hype surrounding autonomous vehicles’ (AV) developments and tests conducted by multinational giants like Google and Tesla seem to obscure the whole world of small and scarcely visible actors. There is a variety of enterprises located at the periphery of the emerging world of AVs. Their marginal position may be construed as ‘backwardness’ without any hope to catch up with the ‘leaders’. However, it could be understood as a source of alternative sociotechnical imageries and designs of AVs. The ‘lows’ of the emerging AV-world are usually located in places and/or countries with the lack of access to global markets and investments. Their testing venues either too artificial or too harsh and messy. Though, AV projects proliferate in companies and countries that are not at the top of this world. They may bring about alternative designs and algorithms able to reshape and alter the futures of the AV-worlds technologically, socially, ethically.

Session suggests a comparative discussion on AV projects both at the center and periphery of this emerging world. How territorial and network locations of AV makers, planners, entrepreneurs, and visioners matter? How multiple are techno-socio-eco-legal AV designs? What (in)compatible sociotechnical imaginaries we can find here? Do they reproduce existing divides and inequalities? What challenges AV multiplicities pose to existing practices and images of mobilities, urbanity, governance, digitalization, energy use?

We invite papers from STS as well as neighboring fields (mobilities, human geography, user anthropology, etc.). We particularly welcome scholars who study AV projects beyond Euro-American world.

Contact: nckrd@mail.ru

Keywords: automated vehicles, sociotechnical imageries, technical designs, visibility, centre and periphery

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

83. Identification, Datafication, Citizenship

Richard Rottenburg, University of the Witwatersrand; Alena Thiel, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

The proliferation of (biometric) identification technologies across the globe – especially in Africa, South Asia and Latin America – is nested in profoundly new aspirations for the rationalization and even automation of political decision making in public-private governance. Building on interoperability-based data infrastructures, states and financial institutions, among many other organisations concerned with the surveillance of individual behaviour, subscribe to the idea that digital “data doubles” (Bouk 2017) circulate between previously disconnected registers, allowing thus the “datafication” (von Oertzen 2017) of new, previously unobserved areas of life, and thus ultimately the creation of new “human kinds” (Hacking 1995). The panel explores continuities and discontinuities of socio-technical configurations that have led to connecting recent innovations in identification technologies with the production of quantitative knowledge for decision making. While this happens in conventional state administrations and “global administrative apparatuses” (Eriksen 2012), the panel pays particular attention to the merging and blurring of these realms in largely privatized epistemic centres where tech giants radically transform quantitative data collection and the production of statistics through the development of learning algorithms. The by now classical analysis of statistical knowledge production as in “governance by numbers” (Rottenburg 2015) and the implications for “digital citizenship” (Isin and Ruppert 2015) needs to be revisited in the light this transformations. The panel seeks empirical contributions that examine how these developments play out in concrete settings in the Global South.

Contact: alena.thiel@ethnologie.uni-halle.de

Keywords: Biometrics, identification, quantification, digital citizenship

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Big Data

85. In-formed Architecture: Futures, projects and practices of digital architecture and construction

Kathrin Braun, University of Stuttgart; Cordula Kropp, University of Stuttgart

A paradigm shift is emerging in architecture and construction. Cyber-physical approaches such as build¬ing information modelling (BIM), robotic pre-fabrication and assembly or additive manufacturing are being explored or already employed in the planning and constructing of buildings or even city districts and urban landscapes. Yet, the future of in-formed architecture is still under (co-)construction, with different visions competing with each other: a vision of increased productivity, efficiency and speed, a vision of reduced waste production and resource and energy consumption, a darker vision of excessive standardization, architectural monotony and a loss of autonomy and creativity to software systems, technology platforms and multinationals, and a more sanguine vision of unbounded creativity and inspiration and a new reconciliation between in-formation and materiality, and between technoscientific rationality and respect for the non-human environment.

The panel seeks to explore the past(s) and future(s) of in-formed architecture, its historical lineages, present practices and manifestations, its aesthetic and political projects, and the relations of power and control they are embedded it.

We welcome contributions from all disciplinary perspectives on questions including but not restricted to:

What is new and distinct about digital architecture and construction today? What are the driving forces behind it? How does it reconfigure human-machine interactions, stakeholder relations, relations between mind and matter, standardization and singularization? What implicit or explicit political projects are at stake? How is digital architecture and construction shaped by relations of power, property and control? And how are these contested through struggles on social and environmental justice?

Contact: kathrin.braun@sowi.uni-stuttgart.de

Keywords: digital architecture and construction, computerization, futures, social and environmental justice

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

Other

89. Innovating and regenerating the migrant-technology boundary

Olga Usachova

With a current trend in technological development and contemporary migration context the conceptual innovation in STS in order to address the needs of all actors involved need to have a sustained discussion. Technology can be seen as a useful instrument through which to examine the practices imposed by the state and accountability. However, it also can be used to justify certain way of treatment based on the criteria of citizenship. While emerging research is beginning to highlight how new technologies are used in the management of migration, the cutting-edge research is needed on the impact of technological experimentation on migrants. In this regard following session welcomes interdisciplinary research from STS perspective that critically concentrated and involved in studies of embedded technologies in a domain of migration research. In a wider perspective the contributions regarding the societal effects of various technologies, for example sensors, communication, robots, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, applied in a field of migration studies with focus on refugee/ asylum seekers well-being and integration practices are encouraged. This session will explore the ways how embedded technology are shaping the way of refugee/ asylum seekers behaviour compare with non-technological environment. What is a role of technology in construction of social bonds and social organizations among refugee/ asylum seekers community in host societies? What are the privacy and security implications of the use of technology by refugees/ asylum seekers? We endorse critical perspectives of the relationship between migrants (refugees/ asylum seekers) and technology at the persistence of contemporary forms of orders.

Contact: olga.usachova@phd.unipd.it

Keywords: Migrant, technology, assemblage, actors, social organization

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

Information, Computing and Media Technology

118. Networks, platforms and the form of the socio-technical

Lizzie Richardson; James Ash, Newcastle University

The relationship between society and technology has long been approached through networks. Networks have been used variously as a method, as a rhetorical device for understanding the form of social relations and as an analytic of social form. In STS, the study of the materialisations of networks has been a key focus, where the network functions as a metaphor that enables the tracing of material socio-technical relations. As the metaphor of the network has grown in popularity, particularly with the rise of digitalised ICTs, network language and representation have been increasingly used by people to articulate their relationships with one another, such that analysis and phenomenon of networks can become indistinguishable.

How do platforms and their social relations sit with this complex history of networks? To date, platforms have mainly been approached as a phenomenon, rather than as a metaphor or an analytic for social form. Yet, formally platforms build upon but also are, in important ways, distinct from networks, most notably through their “programmable space” that can be made to perform differently according to how external networks engage. So just as networks indicate the importance of form for understanding the socio-technical, the platform must also be approached as a device that describes social forms or heuristic for understanding the form of social relations. How can platforms be approached as material and social organisational arrangements beyond the platform as a company? This might incorporate empirical investigation of named platforms, but also includes broader materialisations of the social forms of platforms.

Contact: e.richardson@sheffield.ac.uk

Keywords: Networks, platforms, social form, ICTs

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Information, Computing and Media Technology

121. No Time to Not Know. Bottom-up Expertise, Grass-root Authorities, and Agency in the Age of Digital Knowledge

Magdalena Halina Góralska, Koźmiński University in Warsaw; Ane Kathrine Gammelby, Aarhus University

Recent developments and the widespread adoption of various ICTs across societies, predominantly the Internet, have significantly contributed to both sustaining and augmenting the visibility of various forms of knowledge as well as various forms of knowledge production practices. The Web engages millions of users world-wide every day, and they all take part in its co-creation, making the Internet a bricolage of their agency and creativity. Whatever their social and cultural capital, everyone contributes, even just “by sharing anything to anyone” – to paraphrase Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. As a result, the Web is polyphonic, ever-changing, and extremely diverse, offering contemporary information consumers (seemingly) fast and easy access to a somewhat infinite number of information coming from countless sources. The Internet caries a promise of empowerment, presupposing that more information means more (situated) agency, that can challenge and reconfigure traditional areas and historically hegemonic knowledge hierarchies.
This panel aims to inquire into how the Internet influences the status quo. We ask, how do users navigate the Web for knowledge in various contexts? Does the Internet make them feel more empowered? How do they “do their research”, self-educate, become bottom-up “experts” or “authorities”? With an aim to answer the above questions, we invite papers that provide empirical insights into knowledge-related practices in relation to ICTs, touching upon the relationship between knowledge and agency, focusing on issues such as:
– knowledge seeking, production, and exchange,
– bottom-up expertise,
– collaboration, knowledge activism,
– online truth-making and trust-building.

Contact: maniagoralska@gmail.com

Keywords: knowledge, expertise, authority, internet, information and communication technologies

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Information, Computing and Media Technology

123. Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense

Adam Fish, University of New South Wales; Michael Richardson; Edgar Gomez Cruz, University of New South Wales

Seeing—and the sense making that follows—is usually conceived as something humans alone do. Anthropocentric vision has been radically decentered by both computer vision and by multispecies ontologies, even if all-too-human biases stain the former and the latter is anything but surprising to indigenous people. And yet nonhuman vision remains under-examined and under-theorised in disciplines cognate to STS, where image and sense-making often remain the privilege of the human. This panel offers a corrective by advancing vivid case studies in non-human vision that center technologies and animals as agents of meaning-making.

From analogue photography to computer vision, technologies of vision see in nonhuman ways (Mackenzie and Munster 2019, Zylinska 2017). Photons are processed into computer readable code, filtered by algorithms, and correlated by machine learning to build so-called artificial intelligence. Animals, too, can see beyond, differently, and better than RGB, the human visual light spectrum (Barad 2007). While the chasm separating human vision from other animal vision is vast, efforts towards remembering and forging inter-species companionship are essential to responding to the species extinction and climate crisis (Haraway 2016). Seeing as non-human–technological or animal–uniquely challenges key concepts in media studies: who or what makes sense of symbols.

Across the assembled papers, this panel explores some of the crucial technical, affective, multi-species and multi-modal ways in which nonhuman vision figures in the contemporary moment. In doing so, it brings expertise in STS, new materialism, visual culture, media arts, and cultural studies to the study of communication and technology. Collectively, we question the politics of vision: who or what sees who? What, how, and when? What or who can avoid being seen, provide consent, and avoid the gaze? Awareness of how vision technologies and non-human animals see and sense–or avoid such efforts–in uncanny and alien ways not only challenges but should transform human relationships to others, both technical and animal.

Contact: mediacultures@protonmail.ch

Keywords: vision, animal, drone, visual, seeing, gaze

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

127. Online Campaigns and Digital Personhood in the Age of Datafication

Christian Ritter, Tallinn University; Rajesh Sharma, Senior Researcher, Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu

This panel examines how influencers construct their identities on digital platforms. By posting selfies, memes, vlogs, emojis, and textual messages on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, influencers create complex online personas. For instance, diaspora activists, gamers, lifestyle vloggers, gender activists, leaders of religious communities, minority representatives, and political populists engage in large-scale campaigns on platforms to grow their following. Such campaign strategies are increasingly based on comprehensive expertise in platform metrics and exploit data analytics. Drawing on recent STS scholarship on technologies of the self, new materialist approaches, and intersectionality theory, this panel reassesses the rise of datafication in contemporary society. In the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, access to the APIs of popular platforms has been increasingly restricted for academic researchers, requiring new research methodologies.

The overall aim of the panel is to bring together STS scholars who explore the multiple entanglements of influencers with big data in their everyday lives. The panel thus invites papers assessing the datafication of online activities through the lenses of data ethnography or data analytics solutions, such as social network analysis and natural language processing (text analytics, sentiment analysis, topic modeling). Contributions to this panel could address the following questions: What strategies do influencers pursue for platform campaigns? How is agency distributed in the platform worlds of influencers? What understandings of algorithmic mediation do influencers cultivate? What epistemological practices do influencers develop to understand platform metrics?

Contact: christian.ritter@tlu.ee

Keywords: big data, campaign, identity, influencer, platform

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

128. ‘Openness’ In Software, Hardware And Wetware: Materialities, Collectives, Values

Luis Felipe Murillo, University of Virginia; Morgan Meyer

A wide array of forms and sites of collaborative development has emerged in the past two decades with the goal of promoting “openness” as a technoscientific practice, including, but not limited to maker and hackerspaces, digital fabrication labs, citizen and community science projects of variable scope. In this panel, we propose the examination of their genealogies and material work for the purpose of rendering science and technology “open.” Questions we ask include: how is “openness” enacted across projects and technical affordances? What are the differences and disputes with respect to political projects and modes of ethical problematization they engage? How are existing moral economies in “Free and Open Source” technology development or “Open Innovation” mobilized, extended, problematized, and transformed with new projects? How is open source enacted in fields like ecology, architecture, agriculture, medicine, or biology? How are values such as openness and decentralisation translated into technical objects, codes, and blueprints? We welcome papers that propose an engagement and extension of existing theoretical and methodological frameworks in STS to examine the debate regarding “openness” in science and technology across ethical, material, political, and legal practices and expert domains with a focus on how technical objects materialize technopolitical alignments. The goal is to respond to the research agenda set by Madeleine Akrich at the 2016 4S/EASST conference to study the practices of science and technology done otherwise, as well as to engage the challenges and possibilities set forth by Isabelle Stengers of experimenting with alternative technosciences.

Contact: morgan.meyer@mines-paristech.fr

Keywords: openness, open source, values, materiality, collaboration/collectivity

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Information, Computing and Media Technology

131. Other Indigenous “Knowledge Engineering” Systems: Designing and operating knowledge technologies at scale in emerging worlds

Yoehan Oh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Some scholars in digital humanities and critical internet and digital technologies studies have asked for bringing critical concerns about race, gender, postcoloniality, and other inequal power structures to their field (Nakamura 2013; Noble et al. 2016; McPherson 2013; Posner 2016; Risam 2018; Benjamin 2019). One way to address those concerns is illuminating technically-inventive subjectivities, by appreciating and thus empowering them through conceptualizations they deserve. STSers have conceptualized them and their artifacts as “Black vernacular technological creativity,” “techno-vernacular creativity,” (Fouché 2006; Gaskins 2019), “innovation from below” (Williams 2018), “ethnocomputing,” (Petrillo 1994; Tedre et-al. 2006; Eglash 1999), “postcolonial computing,” (Irani et-al. 2010; cf. Burrell 2012), and “black software” (McIlwain 2019); historians of computing have studied information architectures, hardware, and software in the Middle East, Latin America, East Asia, Midwestern U.S., and (post-)communist contexts (Bowker 1994; Medina 2011; Tinn 2018; Rankin 2018; Švelch 2018; Biagioli et-al. 2019). To further these conceptualizations, this panel will focus on less resourceful worlds’ captures of knowledge technologies, predominated by a few resourceful countries’ R&D communities like U.S., Canada, some Western Europe countries, China, and Japan: Knowledge discovery by data, Data engineering, Semantic technologies, and Search engines, etc (Collins 1987; Forsythe 1993). Questions to be addressed are: How indigenous, aboriginal, vernacular, decolonial, de-ColdWar, or less capitalistically/settler-colonially exploitative the knowledge engineering practices at scales by technical actors in the underrecognized/emerging worlds can be? Which speculative, experimental, or empirical cases can we dig into as the Indigenous “Knowledge engineering” Systems (Watson-Verran et al. 1995; Brereton et-al. 2015; Chamunorwa et-al. 2018)?

REFERENCES

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* Aouragh, Miriyam, and Paula Chakravartty. 2016. “Infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies.” Media, Culture & Society 38(4): 559-575.

* Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons.

* Biagioli, Mario, and Vincent Antonin Lépinay, eds. 2019. From Russia with Code: Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

* Bowker, Geoffrey C. 1994. Science on the Run: Information management and industrial geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940. MIT press.

* Brereton, Margot, Paul Roe, Ronald Schroeter, and A. Lee Hong. 2015. “Indigenous knowledge technologies: Moving from knowledge capture to engagement, reciprocity and use.” In At the Intersection of Indigenous and Traditional Knowledge and Technology Design, edited by Nicola Bidwell and Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, 239-258. Informing Science.

* Burrell, Jenna. 2012. Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet cafés of urban Ghana. MIT Press.

* Chamunorwa, Michael Bosomefi, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, and Tariq Zaman. 2018. “An Intermediary Database Node in the Namibian Communities Indigenous Knowledge Management System.” In Digitisation of Culture: Namibian and International Perspectives, edited by Dharm Singh Jat, Jürgen Sieck, Hippolyte N’Sung-Nza Muyingi, Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, Anicia Peters, and Shawulu Nggada, 99-117. Singapore: Springer,

* Collins, Harry M. 1987. “Expert systems and the science of knowledge.” In The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, Trevor Pinch, 329-348. MIT Press.

* Ebner, Susanne. 2019. “Hierarchies of Knowledge: Usage of a Chinese Media App in Rural Tamil Nadu” presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, New Orleans, U.S.

* Eglash, Ron. 1999. African fractals: Modern computing and indigenous design. Rutgers University Press.

* Forsythe, Diana E. 1993. “Engineering knowledge: The construction of knowledge in artificial intelligence.” Social studies of science 23(3): 445-477.

* Fouché, Rayvon. 2006. “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud: African Americans, American artifactual culture, and black vernacular technological creativity.” American Quarterly 58(3): 639-661.

* Gaskins, Nettrice R. 2019. “Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation across the African Diaspora and Global South.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, 252-274. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

* Irani, Lilly, Janet Vertesi, Paul Dourish, Kavita Philip, and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2010. “Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, ACM. 1311-1320.

* Kita, Chigusa, and Hyungsub Choi. 2016. “History of computing in East Asia.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38(2): 8-10.

* McIlwain, Charlton. 2019. Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter. Oxford University Press, USA.

* McPherson, Tara. 2013. “US operating systems at mid-century: The intertwining of race and UNIX.” In Race after the Internet, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, 27-43. Routledge.

* Medina, Eden. 2011. Cybernetic revolutionaries: Technology and politics in Allende’s Chile. MIT Press.

* Nakamura, Lisa, and Peter Chow-White, eds. 2013. Race after the Internet. Routledge.

* Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press.

* Noble, Safiya Umoja, and Brendesha M. Tynes. 2016. The intersectional internet: Race, sex, class, and culture online. Peter Lang International Academic Publishers.

* Petrillo, Anthony. 1994. “Ethnocomputers in Nigerian Computer Education.” Paper presented at the 31st Annual Conference of the Mathematical Association of Nigeria (March 1994).

* Philip, Kavita, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish. 2012. “Postcolonial computing: A tactical survey.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(1): 3-29.

* Posner, Miriam. 2016. “What’s Next: The Radical Unrealised Potential of Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the digital humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 32-41. University of Minnesota Press.

* Risam, Roopika. 2018. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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* Stöckelová, Tereza, and Jaroslav Klepal. 2018. “Chinese Medicine on the Move into Central Europe: A Contribution to the Debate on Correlativity and Decentering STS.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society. 12(1): 57-79.

* Rankin, Joy Lisi. 2018. A People’s History of Computing in the United States. Harvard University Press.

* Stevens, Hallam. 2019. “Digital Infrastructure in the Chinese Register.” Made in China Journal. 4(2):  84-89.

* Švelch, Jaroslav. 2018. Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. MIT Press.

* Tedre, Matti, Erkki Sutinen, Esko Kähkönen, and Piet Kommers. 2006. “Ethnocomputing: ICT in cultural and social context.” Communications of the ACM 49(1): 126-130.

* Tinn, Honghong. 2018. “Modeling Computers and Computer Models: Manufacturing Economic-Planning Projects in Cold War Taiwan, 1959–1968.” Technology and culture 59(5): S66-S99.

* Watson-Verran, Helen, and David Turnbull. 1995. “Science and other indigenous knowledge systems.” In Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 2nd edition, edited by Jasanoff, S., G. E. Markle, J. Peterson, and T. Pinch, 115-139. Sage.

* Williams, Logan D. A. 2018. Eradicating Blindness: Global Health Innovation from South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan.

Contact: ohy@rpi.edu

Keywords: knowledge engineering, knowledge technologies, technological agency, indigenous knowledge systems, emerging worlds

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

137. Proliferation, dispersal and (in)security: towards new vocabularies for the debate between STS and critical security studies

Annalisa Pelizza, University of Bologna and University of Twente; Claudia Aradau, King’s College London

In recent years, an emerging debate between the social studies of technology and critical security studies has interrogated the materiality of security artefacts, questioned identification techniques for (in)security production, investigated how data systems shape legal expertise and regulatory dynamics. This debate has focused attention on the entanglements between the performativity of infrastructures – especially infrastructures for data production and body tracking – and the alleged obduracy of institutionalized agency.

Yet the debate seems to have reached a halt in questioning the material and institutional legacies of modernity. We suggest that such halt is due to the need to revisit our analytical vocabularies. On the one hand, the interplay between data infrastructures and institutionalized actors has received ambivalent consideration in STS. However, the current crisis of socio-technical infrastructures for population management, alterity processing and border controlling highlight the need to engage with long-term continuities and discontinuities. On the other hand, critical security studies have limited their conceptualization to security devices and paid less attention to infrastructural entanglements and the ontological boundaries of security actors.

In order to overcome these limits, we propose to introduce two terms in the debate: proliferation and dispersal. “Proliferation” is here conceived specifically in relation to the chains of action and mediators that intervene in the security relationship. “Dispersal” captures the spatio-temporal distribution of things and people and the partial connections and dis-connections that reproduce (in)security. These two terms prompt us to re-engage questions of multiplicity, heterogeneity and performativity at the intersection of STS and critical security studies.

Contact: annalisa.pelizza2@unibo.it

Keywords: security studies, population management, alterity processing, proliferation, dispersal

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

Governance and Public Policy

161. Socializing the automation of flexible residential energy use

Sophie Adams, University of New South Wales; Declan Liam Kuch, UNSW; Sophie Nyborg, Technical University of Denmark – DTU; Marianne Ryghaug, Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU); Roger Andre Søraa, NTNU

As renewable energy generation becomes more integrated and embedded in communities, users are increasingly called upon to participate in the active planning, ownership and management of smart energy systems. A key vector of this participation is the automation of home batteries and of significant loads such as air conditioners, heat pumps, water boilers and electric vehicles, which is seen as essential to relieve pressure on the grid during high-demand events such as evening peaks and particularly hot or cold weather. Automation and digitalisation are also facilitating the emergence of new ‘energy communities’ and peer-to-peer trading of energy generated by prosumers at distributed sites. In this session we ask: How are residential energy users and prosumers imagined by incumbent energy providers, policy makers and regulators as agents of automation? What new valuations of the forms of energy use that inhibit or support load flexibility are being created through markets, regulations, technology and policy? How is automation invoking new collectives, as well as reconfiguring and diminishing current ones? What does automation mean for the increasing focus on empowering citizens and ‘energy communities’ in Europe and other parts of the world? In posing these questions we seek to move energy planning discourses beyond the terrain of atomistic economic actors operating within markets by insisting on the socio-technical character of energy systems and mapping indiscernible actors in these automated systems.

Contact: s.m.adams@unsw.edu.au

Keywords: Energy, automation, public engagement, transitions

Categories: Energy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

170. Studying data/natures: between arts, academia and administration

Ingmar Lippert, IT University of Copenhagen; Tahani Nadim, Museum fuer Naturkunde; Filippo Bertoni, Aarhus University

Recently, nature’s increasing datafication and the politics of the resulting data/natures’ emergent sociotechnical orderings have received much attention in STS (Bowker, Edwards, Lippert, Nadim, Sullivan, Turnhout, Waterton). But, how do we engage with data/natures? And how does the answer to this question inform our understanding of these politics of nature? While all agree that the formation of data/natures clearly relies on specific kinds of digital infrastructures, different approaches have variously engaged with those involved (from natural, environmental, or data scientists, to policy makers, from technocrats, to artists, and capitalist actors) – often in implicit ways.

This panel invites papers that reflexively and critically take these different approaches as their explicit focus. What can we learn from different ways of engaging various publics, audiences, or communities that produce, handle, and populate data/natures? In attempting to respond to this question, our panel considers what kinds of politics STS analytics afford, and – in turn – suggests alternative ways to not only study, but also actively transform, repurpose, prototype, and sabotage data/natures.

Contact: 

Keywords: datafication, data/natures, environmental STS, engagement

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Science Communication/Public Engagement

172. Taking Data Into Account

Burcu Baykurt, University Of Massachusetts Amherst

As ubiquitous data technologies seep into public services, news feeds, schools, workplaces, political campaigns, and urban living around the world, the effort to hold them accountable has become a topic of public concern. From computational audits to citizen activism, from public shaming of companies to policy proposals, activists, academics, journalists, technologists, and lawmakers have been trying to account for these emergent systems that appear to be inscrutable. Using the analytical tools of STS, this panel seeks to unpack how these automated, data-driven technologies become “accountabilia – objects mobilized to enact relations of accountability” (Sugden 2010; Ziewitz 2011). How does computational legibility inform the politics of government accountability? What work does the concept of accountability perform in popular and expert conversations? What are the new devices that mobilize, shift, and maintain existing processes of accounting and accountability? What would creative methods of mapping the distribution of accountability look like in emergent data-driven organizations? This panel invites both theoretical and empirical papers that examine the ways in which accountability is forged and put in practice through automated, data-driven systems. Of particular interest are practices and perceptions from the global south; those that attend to the racialized, gendered, and socioeconomic consequences of accountability regimes; and explorations of new possibilities that are invested in critical race theory, queer-feminist, postcolonial and social-justice based perspectives.

Contact: bbaykurt@umass.edu

Keywords: accountability, governance, algorithms, big data, policy

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Governance and Public Policy

Big Data

176. The ‘elsewhere’ of sociotechnical life at night

Casper Laing Ebbensgaard

If our desires to lead certain forms of life on earth that ultimately threaten our ability to do so in socially, politically, and environmentally just ways (Berlant, 2011; Povinelli, 2016), we must, as commentators suggest, rethink, reimagine and rework modes of ‘planetary inhabitation’ (Gabrys, 2018). As an analytical category for exploring intersecting processes of technological innovation, biological change and geological shifts, the night – and in particular the urban night – is claimed to offer alternative, multi-modal ways of conceptualising and imagining life on earth (Crary, 2013; Ekirch, 2005; Melbin, 1987; Shaw, 2018). The techno-fixation that drives a global urban shift towards ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’ lighting infrastructures, simultaneously puts the conditions for life under threat ‘elsewhere.’ This session demands critical attention towards the ‘elsewheres’ of sociotechnical life at night, to address and undo present ways of living in un/desired ways. By turning towards the socio-technological infrastructures of light the session addresses the question: how can configurations of planetary life and ways of being human be rethought, reimagined and reworked through ‘light’? In addressing this question, the session invites papers that engage with historical and contemporary processes of ‘light’ extraction, production, design, consumption, inhabitation, and distribution to address their impacts on social (Ebbensgaard, 2019; Meier, Hasenöhrl, Krause, & Pottharst, 2015), biological (Rich & Longcore, 2006) and geologic (Gandy, 2017) ‘life’-forms. With an interest in developing a more hopeful, contestatory or radical future for ‘planetary inhabitation,’ the session welcomes contributions that develop alternative ways of imagining, representing, practicing and performing sociotechnical life at night.

Contact: c.l.ebbensgaard@qmul.ac.uk

Keywords: night, lighting, environmental justice, inhabitation, planetary life

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Information, Computing and Media Technology

182. The Future of Quantifying Humanity: Reflections on Artificial Intelligence

Yu-cheng Liu, Nanhua University

The idea of algorithm constitutes almost every aspect of AI technology. Likewise, the development of AI technology and what goals AI can accomplish also depend on the advancement of algorithm. There are at least two implications when applying algorithm, one is simplification, and the other is quantification. Neither are the two concepts, simplification and quantification, completely equal to each other, nor are they contradictory with each other. As a function of algorithm, the aim of simplification is to know what it simplifies. In doing so, it applies various methods of quantification to assist and to accomplish its function of simplification. Furthermore, the two implications and their related technologies attempt at fixing, enhancing, improving or even replacing some – almost every – aspects of humanity. For example, the feeling of love can be generated through algorithms simulating the operational mechanisms of neocortex of human brain. Other qualities of humanity such like creativity, compassion, or rationality may also be quantified with AI-featured algorithms in the near future. It is possible to think that the boundary between humans and non-humans, or between nature and culture, may have a dramatic change or even will be completely canceled. What if those aspects of humanity, to some extent making humans a unique species, can be quantified, how do we think of ourselves what makes us human? The panel welcomes manuscripts that focus on reflection of quantifying humanity and related researches. It will be a platform for participants to discuss the near future of quantifying humanity.

Contact: ycliu15@gmail.com

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, quantification, humanity, algorithm, simplification

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

189. The Politics of Uncertainty; Visualizing, Quantifying, and Fact-Checking Truth Claims in an Era of Polarized Politics

Christopher Anderson, University of Leeds

“The Politics of Uncertainty; Visualizing, Quantifying, and Fact-Checking Truth Claims in an Era of Polarized Politics.”

In various public-facing media genres (such as journalism, scientific blogs, and fact-checking outlets), knowledge claims are more nuanced, robust, and methodologically sophisticated than they have been at any point in modern history. And yet, across social life, “the truth” seems more of a political weapon than ever. Large technology platforms debate the validity of fact-checking political advertisements, while the progressive left has doubled down on “the truth” as a cudgel to wield against populist authoritarians of allstrips. Certainty seems more important and yet further away than ever.

Within Science and Technology Studies, the analysis of how facts are constructed and made robust has been one of the dominant areas of scholarship since the invention of the field. In communication and media studies, research increasingly looks at how journalists visualize and mediate public facts. This panel proposal draws inspiration from the recent disciplinary intersection between these two fields to ask the question: how is uncertainty constructed, both in science and in journalism? How is “a lack of exactitude” made robust and visualized for a public audience? Is uncertainty always politically debilitating? Does it lend itself to being manipulated and exploited by populist politicians? The panel will draw on a range of STS and STS adjacent disciplines in order to understand the politics of the construction of uncertainty in the present moment.

Contact: heychanders@gmail.com

Keywords: certainty, facts, data visualization, public communication

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

194. They’re Just Guidelines: Operationalizing AI Ethics

Anna Lenhart, University Of Maryland College Park / IBM Public Sector

2018 & 2019  have seen a surge of frameworks or guidelines that lay out principles of how Automated Decision Systems (ADS) can be developed and implemented ethically. The Private Sector, Multistakeholder Groups and Government Agencies have published guidelines covering principles of transparency/explainability, fairness/non-discrimination, accountability, safety/security and privacy (Algorithm Watch, 2019). Occasionally, these guidelines include the demand for AI be socially beneficial and protect human rights. Few include recommendations or examples of how to operationalise these principles.

Today, most major technology companies using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have agreed to comply with these guidelines. But has the development of ADS changed? What challenges still remain? This panel seeks to convene scholars from multiple disciplines who are interested in the operationalization of AI ethics and welcomes submissions exploring themes such as:

*Are AI ethics guidelines changing the way companies and universities educate/train their data scientists and AI developers?

*How are factsheets, fairness toolkits, scenario planning exercises, etc being used within industry? (Stories of success and barriers)

*How does corporate culture influence the oversight and enforcement of AI ethics guidelines?

*What responsibilities fall on executives compared to data scientists?

*How are traditional approaches to risk management being applied to AI & ML?

*How do AI ethics guidelines vary across sectors, domains and cultures? How do these variations influence guideline implementation?

Contact: alenhart@terpmail.umd.edu

Keywords: AI Ethics, Guidelines, Culture, Operations, Implementation

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

215. Whose Dream House?

Tamara Kneese, University of San Francisco; Hannah Zeavin, UC Berkeley

The home has long been figured as a site of tension between the outside world and its most intimate interior. Historically, smart homes are associated not only with a more leisurely future, but nostalgia for a comfortable middle-class existence and gendered division of labor (Schwartz Cowan 1985). Smart appliances perform the duties of a housewife, optimized according to the owner’s wishes. But they also rely on specific protocols and physical systems to work their magic. People must perform manual and digital housekeeping within the smart home, or what Lynn Spigel (2005) calls “posthuman domesticity.” Despite the maintenance work they require (Strengers and Nicholls 2018), smart homes have a ghostly aura. Alexa’s creepy laugh is the virtual housewife gone rogue. Moving beyond the built environment, families using smart tech track one another as they enter and leave the domicile. The domestication of smart technologies theoretically gives consumers control over their environment and family. The flip side of the security supposedly afforded by the smart home is the system’s hackability, which subjects the home’s inhabitants, including children, to surveillance (Barassi 2017) while fostering domestic abuse, as the smart home is often designed and controlled by men (Bowles 2018).

This panel traces the gendered impacts of technological labor as the home becomes imbricated with new forms of surveillance, security, and spookiness. Following STS explorations of automation and gender— from dishwashers to Siri— papers may consider the history of domesticated technology from the 1950s forward and/or the sociological impacts of current smart technology usage.

Contact: tkneese@usfca.edu

Keywords: labor, gender, domesticity, surveillance, automation

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Information, Computing and Media Technology

217. Workshop on Experiments with Algo-governance and Future-Making: STS Scholars as Designers

Denisa Reshef Kera, University of Salamanca; Judith Christine Igelsböck, MCTS, Technical University of Munich; Galina Mihaleva, Nanyang Technological University; Tincuta Heinzel, Loughborough University; Hannah Perner-Wilson, Kobakant collective; Josef Ho

Participants will offer their algo-governance prototypes, scenarios & projects to the group for experiencing, modifying, experiment with and reflecting. We will create a Github page and a small booklet with examples of algo-governance experiments and prototypes that try to embed regulations into code and algorithms or show attempts to define standards, specifications, constraints for design, auditing, testing or certifying emerging infrastructures (blockchain, DLTs, machine learning, AIs, autonomous robots). The main problem with code-centered, rule-based systems promising automated and blockchain or AI-driven futures is their democratic deficit and ahistorical narrative of some deep structures (of human or social behavior and politics) behind the code that remains a black box even if it is “open source”. We would like to respond to this by experimenting and testing with alternatives to the algo-governance attempts to reduce the political and historical processes of deliberation and consensus-building into decontextualized game theory concepts or various proposals to crowdsource data and attitudes. Can we make the actual code of our future infrastructures more historical and contextual, open to political deliberation and engagement?  How to connect the conceptual and historical depths of the governance concepts and ideas with the flexible and experimental approaches of prototyping and testing?

Contact: denisa.kera@usal.es

Keywords: prototypes, design, blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, AIs, machine learning, governance-by-design, technological governance, algorithmic governance

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method