[JoPP-Public] CFP: DIGITAL FABRICATIONS AMONGST HACKERS, MAKERS AND MANUFACTURERS: WHOSE ̔INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION̓? (4S Barcelona)

Wed Jan 6 18:27:54 CET 2016

Hi Maxigas,
How are you and where are you?
Jakob
>>> maxigas <maxigas at anargeek.net> 12/21/15 16:37 PM >>>

CFP: DIGITAL FABRICATIONS AMONGST HACKERS, MAKERS AND MANUFACTURERS:
WHOSE ‘INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION’? (4S Barcelona)

We invite abstracts for a track we are organising on the theme of
digital fabrications amongst hackers, makers and manufacturers, and
which will take place in Barcelona over August 31 to September 3 as part
of the international conference of the European Association for the
Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social
Studies of Science (4S).

Abstracts can be submitted at this link:

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst_4s2016/panels.php5?PanelID=3870

More details below.

Thanks,

Johan Söderberg, Maxigas, Adrian Smith

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Our track brings critical analysis to the plurality of collectives,
spaces and futures that are assembling around increasingly accessible
digital design and fabrication technologies. Computer integrated tools
hold particular  historical ironies and contradictions: early
introduction threatened skills, livelihoods and identities amongst
manufacturing communities – while they are celebrated today as enabling
agency, identities and communities for makers. Both processes has been
promoted as ’Industrial Revolutions’. STS has much to contribute to
understanding, engaging and bridging digital fabrications. Conversely,
apparent historical turnarounds in digital fabrication, with tools
spilling into new collectives and spaces, offers an opportunity to
interrogate STS theory and methodology.

Fifty years ago, social ecologist Murray Bookchin, like other
commentators welcomed a future in which collectives would own tools and
organise production non-hierarchically around ‘liberatory technologies’.
Does grassroots appropriation of digital fabrication in hackerspaces,
makerspaces and amongst user groups online, mean his future for
egalitarian tool-based creativity arrived? Or do digital fabrication
futures reinforce the automation, flexible specialisation, and
globalised outsourcing documented by David Noble in the 1980s, and that
has been a driver for the technology amongst manufacturing strategists
since then? How do the collectives and spaces pursuing these different
futures intersect, contest, and co-exist?

In analysing digital fabrications, we are particularly interested in the
critical voices posing unsettling questions:

* Who controls the platforms underpinning these activities and their
connections, and how does this influence the spaces for peer production,
and the terms for private appropriation?

* What senses of humanity are invigorated, and which excluded, from the
political imaginaries, utopias, dystopias, and ideologies embodied in
digital fabrication technologies?

* How does the materiality of digital fabrications connect to the values
of sustainable developments?

* Where does the figure of the hacker – forever opening-up technologies –
lurk in these collectives and spaces; and what has hacker culture
mobilised and been appropriated by these collectives?

* When and where will future industrial conflicts arise: what are the
political and economic relations at stake between these collectives,
spaces and futures?

We welcome papers that provide critical reviews, original empirical
study, and theoretical development relevant to digital fabrications.

--
maxigas, kiberpunk
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