CfP: Contours of the future: technology and innovation in cultural context, St Petersburg, Russia, 1-3 November 2017
CALL FOR PAPERS International Conference (deadline for submissions 1 July 2017)
CONTOURS OF THE FUTURE: TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION IN CULTURAL CONTEXT
1 – 3 November 2017, Saint-Petersburg, Russia
For
postindustrial societies the future has turned into a space of risk and
construction of expectations. The future exists in the present as a
discourse and rhetoric, as a competition
of visions and agendas that shape the potential of future innovations.
Scenarios of the future are transformative since they direct scientific
practices, influence political and economical decisions, and focus
stakeholders’ interests.
The
conference will highlight processes of knowledge production about
technologies of the future as a central sociocultural aspect of
technological development. The participants
are invited to consider the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries
(Sheila Jasanoff) as a set of cultural practices applied by communities
in order to construct shared meanings of desired futures - and to
reflect on the role of technology in them. These practices
involve not only experts such as scientists and engineers, but also
politicians, public intellectuals, writers, journalists, artists.
Success of innovations and the design of particular technologies depend
on the cultural legacy shared by these people, as
well as detailed consideration of social, legal, ethical and aesthetic
aspects. This perspective emphasizes the ways through which technologies
and societies are co-constructed, and how cultural meanings and power
relations are embedded in science and technology.
To
discuss these questions we invite theorists and practitioners whose
work touches upon sociocultural aspects of technological change,
including the fields of media and arts,
foresight and policy, philosophy and cultural studies, history and
sociology, linguistics and communication.
The conference welcomes papers that address the following topics:
• Philosophy of science and technology: The future as an epistemological problem, philosophy of technological utopias
•
Methods of future studies: STS (Science and Technology Studies),
sociology of expectations, sociotechnical imaginaries; forms of “working
with the future” through
foresight, strategic
planning, scenarios analysis, role playing
• The language of technical change and futurology, history of concepts, descriptions of the unknown
•
Sociology of innovation: The politics of the production of novelty and
relevance; social and psychological aspects of information and
communication technologies as
sites for imagined
interactions
• Ethical aspects of emerging technologies: Bioethics, roboethics, information ethics
•
Aesthetic dimensions of technological change: Science art, news media;
representations of science and technology in literature and art, visual
images of the future
•
Cultural history of technology: Technology and national identity;
technologies as media of cultural transfer; sociocultural aspects of
users’ interaction with technology;
appropriation and
domestication of novel technologies
• Digital Humanities: Making the human past fit for future generations
•
Archives of the future: Historical experience of forecasting and
designing the future, museum exhibits, industrial heritage, industrial
archaeology, buried and forgotten
futures
Publication: Conference materials (short papers and extended abstracts) will be published prior to the conference.
Working languages of the conference are English and Russian.
Participation in the conference is free of charge.
Organizer: Peter the Great Saint-Petersburg Polytechnic University http://english.spbstu.ru/
Co-organizer: Society for the History of Technology http://www.
To apply:
•
o Send an application to
futurecontour@gmail.com
containing the title of the paper, your personal data (name, surname,
institutional affiliation, telephone, and e-mail) and a short abstract
up to 150 words by 1 July 2017. Participants will
be notified on the status of their application by 15 July 2017.
•
o
Full text (10000 to 20000 printed characters) should be sent before 10
September 2017, tables and illustrations may be attached if needed.