[JoPP-Public] CfP: Winter Symposium: "Appropriating Technology For Societal Change"

[Johan Söderberg]

CfP: Winter Symposium: "Appropriating Technology For Societal Change"
4-6th of March, 2016

Study Circle 6 of the Nordic Summer University (NSU) holds its winter symposium on:


Do-It-Yourself in Anthropocene: New Political Imaginaries
A planetary, ecological collapse threatens to end the world as we know it. International negotiations are being held without results. Both in the engineering community and in the ecology movement , attempts are made to develop alternatives from below. The training of technophile engineers and technophobic environmentalists places them in opposite camps on most issues. What these two communities have in common, however, is a shared problematic (i.e. technology) and a Do-it-yourself attitude towards societal problems. Under the pressure of a perpetual, ecological crisis, a hybrid imaginary is emerging. A case in point is the establishment of 'open source ecology villages' in the countryside in the US, in Ireland and in Spain. Another example is initiatives to secure food sovereignty through open sourced, automated greenhouses, tailored for the needs of urban dwellers. In either case, the universalistic aspiration of the engineering culture meets the particularism and the small-is-beautiful philosophy of the environmentalists. This nascent movement articulates a new cultural imaginary, utopic and apocalyptic at the same time. The winter session of study circle no. 6 will explore this new imaginary, its promises and pitfalls.

In order to participate at the winter symposium, submit your proposal to one of the coordinators of the circle before November 15, 2015. We accept applications for presentations of papers and workshops as well as just participation. Please submit a short description (a few hundred words) of the paper or workshop you intend to present at the seminar together with a short bio. We welcome a range of topics and presentations, from engineering and the social sciences to more experience-based and practically oriented interventions. We strive for a mixture of participants, including academics, students, practitioners and activists, as well as in disciplinary background.

The symposium will be held in the extended Göteborg area in Sweden, from Friday 4th till Sunday 6th of March. Participation fee is 500 SEK (50 euro). It covers food and accommodation. It might also be possible to apply for travel subventions, conditioned on available funds. For more information about the circle, please contact the coordinators.


Johan Söderberg: johan [dot] soderberg [at] sts [dot] gu [dot] se
Gustav Eek: gustav [dot] eek [at] fripost [dot] org

Website: http://nordic.university/study-circles/appropriating-science-and-technology-for-societal-change/

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