Call for Participation: Lost in Translation? People, technologies, practices and concepts across boundaries
Lost in translation? People, technologies, practices and concepts across boundaries
First Joint Meeting, Red esCTS and Portuguese STS Network, Lisbon 7-9 June 2017
Call For Participation
We are pleased to
announce the first joint meeting of the Red EsCTS and the Portuguese STS
network. The meeting will take place in Lisbon, Instituto de Ciências
Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa (Av. Prof. Aníbal
de Bettencourt, 9, 1600-189 Lisboa; www.ics.ulisboa.pt)
from the 7th to 9th of June with the following title: Lost in
Translation? People, Technologies
for Practices and Concepts Across Boundaries. We welcome proposals for
papers, communications, audiovisual presentations and alternative
formats.
Portugal and Spain share
many things but they are also divided by several boundaries – political,
linguistic, historical, technological. Part of a same peninsula, they
are nonetheless entities on their own right:
two countries, two political systems, several languages, and,
furthermore, two academic systems, two STS communities. In a way, they
represent two sides of a border. And yet, as Science and Technology
Studies (STS) have taught us, borders and boundaries are
far from being self-evident.
An STS perspective shows
that boundaries are continuously traversed, continuously challenged,
continuously re-made. It also shows that maintaining boundaries is a
performative practice, which requires separation
and integration, difference and translation as well as interdiction and
transgression. In fact, maintaining borders forcefully requires
objects, people and information that can pass through such borders.
The idea of ‘boundary
objects’, first suggested in 1989 by Susan Leigh-Star and James
Griesemer, refers to those entities that are “plastic enough to adapt to
local needs and constraints of the several parties employing
them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites”
(Leigh-Star and Griesemer, 1989:393). Boundary objects are part of
multiple social worlds at once, therefore facilitating communication and
translation between them; at the same time, they
reside in the borderlands where two or more social worlds overlap,
without fully belonging to any of them, like monsters or cyborgs (Bowker
and Star, 1999).
Are STS meetings a kind of
‘boundary object’? We somehow think so, and indeed reflections on
boundaries and borders are not new to us. Former meetings of the Spanish
Red esCTS have explicitly posed the challenge
of opening up the boundaries of STS and speaking to concerned publics
and collectives beyond academia. The dynamics and paradoxes of academic
diasporas have also figured prominently in previous meetings, as many
Spanish (and also Portuguese) researchers have
been forced to migrate due to lack of funding or other issues related
to the economic crisis that has so harshly hit our countries. And we
feel that this first joint meeting between the Portuguese and Spanish
STS communities offers a privileged opportunity
to continue thinking about boundary crossing, identities in the making
and remaking, translation between social worlds, and technological,
political or academic practices beyond borders.
This meeting aims to be an
opportunity for STS scholars in Spain, Portugal and elsewhere to meet
and share their social, academic, epistemological and political
experiences generated by the difficulties and opportunities
arising from crossing territorial, linguistic, disciplinary, and
professional boundaries. We invite individual or joint papers, but also
short communications, audiovisual presentations and alternative format
proposals that reflect upon the following themes:
- Practices, technologies and objects involved in dismantling/constituting boundaries, in particular geographic, linguistic, disciplinary, technological, and political boundaries.
- Research practices that work within, and expand, the interstitial spaces between conceptual boundaries.
- STS views and theories on trends of academic mobility specifically, and migration more generally.
- The sociotechnical constitution/mapping out of diasporas.
- The establishment of hierarchies of academic mobility (“centers” and “peripheries”).
- What do borders mean and who are they designed to keep out? What is their role in current EU politics of technoscience?
- The return (or dislocation) to one’s original country/institution and the transformation of individuals and communities who remain.
- The naturalization of foreign nationals living in Spain and Portugal.
- Challenges in translating/adapting generic (Anglophone, French) STS concepts into other languages and local contexts.
- Hybridisation of academic identities and careers.
While these suggestions
are an opportunity to reflect upon specific themes that the organizing
committee wanted to draw attention on, we are happy to consider
proposals and papers that do not directly address these
topics but fit into an STS conference and may still enrich and
stimulate our meeting.
We welcome presentations,
activities, performances and contributions in English, any of the
official languages of the Spanish state, and Portuguese. Please send
your proposal (max. 250 words) to es.cts.es@gmail.com,
including contact data (name, email address, institution if present).
Deadline for sending proposals: Friday 10th of February 2017.
Attendance to the meeting will be open and free of charge.