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Dear colleagues,
Apologies for cross-posting. Stefan Laube, Thomas Scheffer and I are
organising a special panel for the next IAS-STS conference in Graz, to
be held on the 5th and 6th May 2014. The panel is titled 'Inside the
Parliament', and it could be read as a call for symmetrical,
STS-inspired analyses of democratic politics.
Below is the panel description - the deadline for submitting an abstract
(max. 250 words) is the 31st January 2014. Please note that the abstract
should be sent to Stefan Laube, Thomas Scheffer or me _and_ Thomas
Berger [log in to unmask]
More information about the conference is available here:
http://www.ifz.tugraz.at/ias/IAS-STS/Upcoming-Activities/STS-Conference-Graz-2014
If you have any questions about the panel, do not hesitate to get in touch.
With best wishes,
Endre
Call for submissions for Special Session 8: Inside the Parliament
(Endre Dányi, Stefan Laube & Thomas Scheffer, Department of Sociology,
Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main)
Parliaments are among the least likely research sites in STS. Science
studies scholars tend to assume that if one is interested in politics,
one needs to go to unconventional sites, such as labs, hospitals,
innovation centres, markets, and museums, because that’s where the
really important decisions are being made about our technoscientific
future. Ironically, while this assumption has greatly helped to produce
a range of exciting studies that show how scientific, economic and
artistic practices are always already political, it has also contributed
to the strengthening of a rather simple understanding of politics. To
put it bluntly, more often than not, STS conceives of politics as
clashes of arguments and discrete acts of decision making, dictated by
ideology and interest.
The aim of this session is to problematise this understanding by taking
STS inside parliaments, where politics – or so we claim – is already
being done differently. We’re particularly interested in bringing
together studies that address politics as being more than ‘just talk’ or
public debate. Such studies may show the embedded and embodied,
sequential, contingent, and tactical character of the work that goes
into making things political. They may also examine how the parliament
incorporates logics, orderings, and practices associated with other
places (like labs and markets), and, conversely, how parliamentary modes
of doing politics reach out, travel to and show up in other places.
Therefore, presentations in our proposed session should address one or
more of the following themes:
- Materiality: Assuming that politics is a compound of praxis, what
practical roles do material infrastructures and media equipment play?
How do architectures, bodies, documents, archives, etc. enact certain
political realities, and how do they make others impossible, at least
for the time being?
- Politics as political work: How are political issues actively made,
remade and connected to other issues? How are political issues
collectively fabricated at various sites associated with the parliament,
e.g. in offices, meetings, etc.? What divisions of labour do we find and
how do different divisions matter?
- Incorporating different logics: How does the parliament nexus of
practices exclude, incorporate, or modify logics from other contexts
like science or markets? In what respect does parliamentary politics
involve versions of experimentation, trade, entertainment, etc.? How
does it perform its uniqueness and distinctiveness vis-ŕ-vis other logics?
--
Endre Dányi
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Sociology
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University
Grüneburgplatz 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main
Web: http://www.fb03.uni-frankfurt.de/46226207/edanyi
Email: [log in to unmask]
Office: PEG building, 3.G 043
Telephone: +49 69 798 36534
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