STS-workshops at RUC

During the fall, RUC will host a series of STS-workshops in the seminar room at Department of Philosophy & Philosophy of Science, 3.1.3, 13.00-15.00, followed by a reception. Everybody is welcome to join.

Schedule:

17. september
Emmanuel Didier (Centre national de la recherche scientifique / École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris): ’What is America About? Statistics, the New Deal, and Democracy’.

1. oktober
Matthias Heymann (Aarhus Universitet): ’Constructing evidence and trust: How did climate scientists’ confidence in their models and simulations emerge?’

15. oktober
Kirsten Simonsen (Roskilde Universitet): ’Practice, Spatiality and Embodied Emotions: An Outline of a Geography of Practice’.

29. oktober
Mats Fridlund (Københavns Universitet): ’The Terror and Security of Things: Recovering a Material and Phenomenological History of a Lost Fear’.

12. november
Fernando Flores (Lunds Universitet): ’Broken Technologies: The Humanist as Engineer’.

26. november
Thomas Söderqvist (Københavns Universitet): ’Cultures of Meaning and Cultures of Presence: The Use of Material Objects in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology’.

10. december
Gert Goeminne (Vrije Universiteit Brussel / Universiteit Gent): ’Does the climate need consensus? Rethinking science as politics’.

Add comment August 16th, 2010

PhD Course (5 ETCS): Framing Screens: Knowledge, Interaction and Practice

The PhD course is hosted by the Technologies in Practice Faculty Group (f.k.a. Design of Organizational IT), IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark and takes place 27-30 September 2010. The broken link to registration has been fixed.

Lecturers: Lucy Suchman (Lancaster University); Helen Verran (University of Melbourne); Christopher Gad (IT University of Copenhagen)

This PhD course aims to unfold empirically and analytically how computer screens and other displays help ‘project’ or otherwise ‘perform’ knowledge, interaction and practice. Screens are increasingly ubiquitous, for example as part of personal computers, televisions, cameras, surveillance equipment, ticketing equipment, mobile phones and other handheld devices. Simultaneously screens play an increasingly important role in a wide range of human practices relating to work, play, travel, care, learning, planning, monitoring, designing, coordinating, modelling, policing and much else. At the same time screens are curious entities. They may stretch human interactions nearby to globally-distributed locations. They seem to multiply the world around us while simultaneously constructing very specific fields of vision. Thus, screens perform cuts between displayed worlds and human knowledge about the world. Screens also mediate human action in particular ways by actively participating in new visions that define and situate action. With their capacity to organize human attention elsewhere screens may enact viewer displacement, as viewers becomes screened off. Thus boundaries may shift between screens, the knowledge they present, the interactions they facilitate and the practices they engender. For these reasons, screens are objects of interest for contemporary social scientific research into technologically mediated environments, including anthropology, cultural/media studies, design studies, and science and technology studies (STS) . Drawing on a range of theoretical traditions the course aims to frame screens by exploring their implications for knowledge, interaction and practice. This includes but is not limited to analytical topics such as:

Add comment July 30th, 2010

ANT: from methodological principles to concrete strategies for managing the in-between

A PhD-course hosted by the Department of Organization (Ursula Plesner & Maja Horst) at CBS
Guest faculty: Anne Beaulieu, Virtual Knowledge Studio, Amsterdam, Mike Michael, Goldsmiths, University of London, Barbara Czarniawska, University of Gothenburg. Guest Faculty, texts and course description has been updated
The aim this course is to interrogate how we might devise concrete research strategies based on Actor-Network-Theory’s material semiotic approach, in particular the principles of symmetry and agnosticism. A premise underlying the concept of actor-networks is that we should not strive for the reconciliation of dualities (between, for instance, subject/object, material/symbolic, virtual/real), but completely dissolve them and follow how heterogeneous actants are interwoven in complex assemblages that both comprise and transcend such categories. Now, while ANT scholars have argued theoretically for the dissolution of dualities and offered countless empirical stories of heterogeneous networks, the ANT literature is rarely particularly articulate about what we could call middle-range methodological issues regarding, for instance, casing, delineation, etc. Hence, although theoretical discussions and empirical examples are part of this course, it will give priority to discussions about challenges arising from concrete research designs. If we consider ANT a methodology of the in-between of ‘the virtual and the real’, ‘the immaterial and the material’, ‘the social and the technical’, we might ask how we turn this type of methodological sensibility into concrete strategies.
More information about the course can be found here.
Event information: September 20-23, 2010 Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School

Add comment July 30th, 2010