{"id":8648,"date":"2012-02-28T19:38:38","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T23:38:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=8648"},"modified":"2012-02-29T10:31:14","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T14:31:14","slug":"technoscience-as-activism-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2012\/02\/28\/technoscience-as-activism-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Technoscience As Activism Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

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From June 27-29 I will be hosting (throwing?) the Technoscience as Activism Conference in Troy, NY. We are currently accepting abstracts for conference presentations and workshop proposals through March 15th. The conference is sponsored, in part, through Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s 3Helix Program<\/a>\u00a0funded through the National Science Foundation’s GK-12 fellowship.<\/a>\u00a0The conference will focus on community-situated design and look for new approaches that interweave social justice and science\/technology. Participants are also encouraged to submit full papers for potential inclusion in a special theme issue of the open-access journal\u00a0PscyhNology<\/a>. Conference participants will be expected to participate in both moderated panel sessions on the PRI campus as well as hands-on workshops held throughout the Troy community. There are two goals of this conference: 1) To facilitate the free exchange of ideas across multiple boundaries on the topic of technoscience as activism and; 2) offer an experimental alternative to the traditional role\/format of academic conferences. This new experimental format includes active collaboration with<\/em>\u00a0the geographically-defined community that hosts the conference.<\/p>\n

Back in October, after attending the\u00a0annual meeting for the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), \u00a0I posted a\u00a0critique of the traditional conference format<\/a>. I was frustrated with the apparent\u00a0hypocrisy\u00a0of expensive, closed-door conferences full of people that want to democratize science. Industry-backed pundits and authors have been much more successful in shaping society’s relationship to science and technology. Where are academics? Where are all of the public\u00a0intellectuals?<\/a> While I acknowledge that specialists need a place to exchange ideas amongst themselves, there are ways of making academic conferences more transparent and the products of collaboration more accessible. Panels can be recorded and posted on the web, and proceedings can be made available for free or by donation online. It might not hurt to host the conferences in less expensive venues as well. But smaller, more focused conferences like TAA need to go even further. Holding them on campus can reduce the costs, but organizers should consider the possibility of collaboration with\u00a0community groups. Is a community garden building a new\u00a0cistern? Are there free schools interested in search of new pedagogical tools? These are the sorts of community relationships that not only help community groups, but also improve the work of academics.<\/p>\n

It is essential to work with <\/em>and not for<\/em>\u00a0community institutions and organizations. No one wants a flock of academics to descend from their ivory tower onto a 30-year-old community institution and tell everyone what to do. A reflexive approach to\u00a0privilege\u00a0and authority within the academy is necessary for effective and generative collaborations between academics and community organizations. <\/strong>Scientists do not have all the answers, but they frequently hold most of the power. A generative collaboration between professionals and communities requires strong ties and mutually understood\u00a0commitments\u00a0to the projects at hand. Civic science means more than “add community involvement and stir.” Such superficial approaches can actually lead to worse outcomes and less accountability<\/a>\u00a0[Pertinent information comes at 7:44 in the video.].<\/p>\n

This is no simple task. Overreaches in authority by scientists are, unfortunately, almost inevitable. But there are good examples of how to do it right. A couple of examples include the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS)\u00a0<\/a>and the work to restore New Orleans communities destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, as documented by Barbara Allen and Isabelle Maret <\/a>[PDF]. In both cases, the role of academic scientists are problemitized and subsequently redefined as (among other roles) support personel for citizens-led work. The mission statement for PLOTS says it this way:<\/p>\n

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Our goal is\u00a0to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and\u00a0accountability around environmental concerns. PLOTS achieves this by providing online and offline training,\u00a0education and support, and by focusing on locally-relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and\u00a0understanding.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Technoscience as Activism Conference is deeply rooted in the sociological\/pedagogical\/conceptual array of DIY and hacker culture. The conference serves as a medium for the exchange of ideas, but the medium itself is also up for review, criticism, appropriation, and alteration. As the conference gets closer, and more people begin to propose workshops and presentations, the medium will become more tangible. This is where you come in. I hope academics and nonacademics alike are inspired to make this conference useful to them.<\/p>\n

The call for papers and the submission forms can be found on the 3Helix Program website<\/a>, but are reproduced here:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This conference seeks new approaches to interweaving social justice and science\/technology. Some that are already known include DIY and \u201cmaker\u201d communities, Open Source Science, \u201cTechnologies for Non-violent Social Change,\u201d and other new hybrid forms of collaboration that put technoscience in the hands of non-experts, local communities, indigenous groups and the less powerful.\u00a0Typical approaches to \u201cethics in science\u201d treat ethics as a police officer that operates at the borders, slapping science on the wrist when it over-steps. How can we treat ethics instead as a pro-active force, integrated from the start? Social scientists studying scientific controversy may know very little about the particulars of the science, and the scientist embroiled within the controversy may not know very much about the dynamics of communities or the relations of power between experts and the public.\u00a0This conference will highlight ways to provoke engineers, social scientists, and the educators of future thinkers into considering new and innovative methods of merging social and technical dimensions of science and engineering research, teaching and practice.\u00a0It will contribute to the possibilities for a \u201ctwo way bridge\u201d\u00a0across the lay\/expert divide; one in which social justice is informed by technoscience and not just technoscience informed by social justice. To this end, we are looking for papers and proposed panels that can discuss transformative possibilities for every level of making science, scientists, technology, engineers, and knowledge. Existing categories in which pertinent (and important) discussions are taking place are, but is not limited to, K-12 STEM education, advanced pedagogy in the natural\/physical\/life sciences, ethics, public engagement\/understanding of science, theoretical and social studies on information and communication technology, political sociology of science, Science and Technology Studies, appropriating technology, feminist studies, emerging nanotechnology, postcolonial studies, engineering education, urban studies, and experimental art.<\/em><\/p>\n

Individual presentations can be submitted here<\/a><\/p>\n

Workshop presentations can be submitted here<\/a><\/p>\n

Facebook Event Page<\/a><\/p>\n

See you in June!<\/p>\n

Follow me on Twitter! @da_banks<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  From June 27-29 I will be hosting (throwing?) the Technoscience as Activism Conference in Troy, NY. We are currently accepting abstracts for conference presentations and workshop proposals through March 15th. The conference is sponsored, in part, through Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s 3Helix Program\u00a0funded through the National Science Foundation’s GK-12 fellowship.\u00a0The conference will focus on community-situated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1512,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9549],"tags":[46,1025,10602,14121,14128,3497],"class_list":["post-8648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-announcements","tag-activism","tag-collective-action","tag-conferences","tag-public-academics","tag-situated-knowledge","tag-social-justice"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8648"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8675,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8648\/revisions\/8675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}