Confirmed speakers include Orit Halpern of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945 (Duke, 2014)

Abstract Deadline

Feb. 21, 2016

Submit abstracts online at: http://www.sts2016bcn.org/

Monitoring Circulation

4S/EASST Barcelona Aug. 31 – Sept. 3, 2016

Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) and European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST)

Organizers

Willem Schinkel 

Jess Bier

Erasmus University Rotterdam

http://monitoringmodernity.eu/

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Summary

This track will analyze the politics of counting and visualizing in efforts to monitor the global circulation of people, practices, and data. The goal is to further examine the relationships between global circulation infrastructure and supranational efforts at regulation and surveillance.

Abstract

The papers in this track will analyze the politics of counting and visualizing in the monitoring of the global circulation of people, practices, and data. Researchers are increasingly examining the circulation of technoscience and its spread into non-traditional domains like governance and finance. However, the agents, targets, infrastructures, visions, and techniques of governmentality also circulate beyond local borders. Thus it is necessary to further examine the relationships between global circulation infrastructure and supranational efforts at regulation and surveillance.

How do visualization practices perform and produce international flows, and vice versa? Which forms of social imagination are reinforced, and which erased, through circulation infrastructure? How do histories of circulation and stasis, including colonial legacies, help set the conditions of possibility for the circulation of technoscience? How are auditing, evaluation, and big data reshaping scientific practices? How do we studymonitoring and circulation, and which methods fail to grasp them? Topics include:

--standardization and quality assurance in shaping the circulation of science

--ways of distributing vision in the routinized work of the quantitative assessments of populations

--surveillance technologies and the shaping of migrant and refugee flows

--auditing and evaluation in institutional governance, including corporations and universities

--ways of rethinking methods, including ANT (Latour), spider (Ingold), and notions of ‘multisitedness’

--quantification and erasure in the circulation of science across the global South and North

--ways that infrastructures of circulation, including the internet, produce stability and flow

--the role of international technical expertise in the evaluation and valuation of knowledge