We warmly invite your participation in our transdisciplinary conference entitled Changing Worlds: Ideologies, Utopias and Ambitions in Science and Technology.
With this conference, we wish to provide a metaphorical petri dish for researchers regardless of affiliation or chosen career path to meet and share their work and experiences concerning the interactions between science, technology, society and politics. We expressly encourage contributions by early-stage researchers, including advanced and PhD students. Our aim is to create an environment in which participants from diverse disciplinary backgrounds can collectively develop and engage with issues of science, technology, power and social justice.
We set our focus on Changing Worlds.We are asking how the worlds we inhabit change and change us, and how we as their inhabitants, researchers, and activists change them in turn. In doing so, we hold the understanding that neither we nor others are ever neutral, but necessarily ‘biased’ in our positions in and towards the world as well as in our interpretations of and engagements with the world. We are interested in facing and dealing with emergences, r-/evolutions, intentional or unintentional deviations and dynamics as well as mutual constitutions that make up the world. With Changing Worlds, we therefore wish to make explicit (some of) the ideologies that help shape worlds and are being shaped by them, utopias that may or may not be achieved or strived for by different groups, and the personal, political, professional, etc. ambitions that factor into these frameworks. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
– sciences, technologies and identities
– categories, boundaries and frontiers
– axes, nodes, sites and avenues for agency within dynamics of power
– activist/militant/participatory research in science and technology
– queer, feminist and postcolonial as well as intersectional approaches (e.g. covering gender, sexuality, race, class, dis-/ability, religion, etc.)
– methodological considerations (e.g. the performativity of research methods, institutional/individual ethics, the feasibility of conducting research, etc.)
– political climates, scientific change and their interactions
– temporal and spatial engagements with(in) the world (for example as visions of the past and memories of the future) and how they mediate social and political values
– (self-)governance and self-exploitation in academia
– responsible research and innovation and its discontents
– environmental worlds and human-technological involvement
– information and communication technologies in society
– surveillance and statehood/citizenship
– perspectives on war and anti-/terrorism
Please send your abstracts (300–400 words), a few lines about yourselves
Contact details: changingworlds.sts@univie.ac.at
You can find more details about the conference on our website at http://changingworlds.univie.ac.at
The conference language is English.
Deadline: Friday, 15 August 2014
We will inform you whether your paper has been accepted by 15 September 2014.
In addition to conventional academic papers, we welcome other formats such as short films or artistic performances. If you want to submit a non-traditional contribution, please include information about its implementation and technical requirements in addition to the description of the submission and its relevance to the conference (300–400 words).
We aim to publish a special issue of an open-access journal based on the conference and its themes. In order to facilitate this, we plan to provide a workshop on writing for publication for interested contributors.
If possible, we will provide financial support to contributors if required (e.g. for travel costs and accommodation).
Conference organisers: Angela Prendl, Boka En, Jasmin Engelhart, Katharina Simma, Leo Matteo Bachinger, Marlene Altenhofer, Mercedes Pöll, Nikolaus Pöchhacker, Victoria Neumann, Zabrina Khan, as well as the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna