Dates: 30 August - 2 September 2017
Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Website: 4S
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 March 2017
Open Panel #127 — ‘Make Do and Mend’: How to Prepare for a “Post-Solar Flare Future” with and by Collaborative Practices
Organizers: Yana Boeva, York University; Leo Matteo Bachinger, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Discussant: Max Liboiron, Memorial University of Newfoundland
The technological promises and desires to cure and solve instabilities in societies and systems recur with every new development. Nonetheless, contemporary techno-societies become ever more fragile in their dependency on global, techno-scientific infrastructures of information and communication, transportation and logistics, medicine, food production and distribution, etc. This panel assumes a highly speculative scenario: A solar flare triggering a geomagnetic storm, wiping out global(ized) electrical and communications networks on a large scale without a chance to recover it. With this narrative intervention serving as starting point, we seek to inspire questioning of globalized techno-social foundations, and their political and social dimensions. Confronted with a troubling future, this panel invites ideas for preparation, making do and mending. Extreme scenarios serve to reveal humanity’s inescapable reliance on technology in daily life, at the same time rendering us vulnerable. Narrative strategies such as this are not new to STS, related academic disciplines, or the realm of speculative fiction, and have produced a large array of countercultural ideas, guides and movements, from Steward Brand’s ‘Whole Earth Catalog’ (1968) and Buckminster Fuller’s unconventional constructions to contemporary collaborative technologies and practices involving non-experts and users. Starting from this proposition, the panel invites theoretical, empirical, artistic and speculative contributions that address everyday issues of our global techno-society implementing practices of self-sustainment such as do-it-yourself, tinkering, and care, and consider how these can generate theory through practice.
Please submit abstract of max. 250 words through the conference website. If you want to submit to this panel, please select panel #127 in the submission form.
More details about the conference here: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting/.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Website: 4S
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 March 2017
Organizers: Yana Boeva, York University; Leo Matteo Bachinger, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Discussant: Max Liboiron, Memorial University of Newfoundland
The technological promises and desires to cure and solve instabilities in societies and systems recur with every new development. Nonetheless, contemporary techno-societies become ever more fragile in their dependency on global, techno-scientific infrastructures of information and communication, transportation and logistics, medicine, food production and distribution, etc. This panel assumes a highly speculative scenario: A solar flare triggering a geomagnetic storm, wiping out global(ized) electrical and communications networks on a large scale without a chance to recover it. With this narrative intervention serving as starting point, we seek to inspire questioning of globalized techno-social foundations, and their political and social dimensions. Confronted with a troubling future, this panel invites ideas for preparation, making do and mending. Extreme scenarios serve to reveal humanity’s inescapable reliance on technology in daily life, at the same time rendering us vulnerable. Narrative strategies such as this are not new to STS, related academic disciplines, or the realm of speculative fiction, and have produced a large array of countercultural ideas, guides and movements, from Steward Brand’s ‘Whole Earth Catalog’ (1968) and Buckminster Fuller’s unconventional constructions to contemporary collaborative technologies and practices involving non-experts and users. Starting from this proposition, the panel invites theoretical, empirical, artistic and speculative contributions that address everyday issues of our global techno-society implementing practices of self-sustainment such as do-it-yourself, tinkering, and care, and consider how these can generate theory through practice.
Please submit abstract of max. 250 words through the conference website. If you want to submit to this panel, please select panel #127 in the submission form.
More details about the conference here: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting/.
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