CFP for SHOT Open Session - Singapore, June 2016
Open
Session: “Histories, Poverties, Technologies”
The Special Interest Group on Exploring Diversity in
Technology's History (EDITH) proposes an Open Session panel exploring the
relationships between technology and poverty for the upcoming Society for the
History of Technology Annual Meeting in Singapore (22-26 June 2016).
Narratives in the history of technology are often
built on armatures of progress and situated among historical actors who, if
they happen not to eat well and sleep comfortably, are likely engaged in heroic
tales of exploration and innovation. In such narratives innovative
technologies, invariably modern, new, sophisticated, or scientific, enable
heroism and progress. Technology is a terrain of many meanings implicated in
the multitude of human experiences not only through its innovation but also
through use, consumption, production, and as a producer. Yet when
technology enters these fields of exploration, the consuming and producing
historical actors tend to earn and spend "enough” - the poor and
socio-economically deprived remain understudied in relation to technology and
in our histories of things. This is even though poverty is as salient a feature
of the world today as in the past, and the poor inhabit these technological
worlds too. Through this open session call we seek to capture and understand
these experiences and the multitudes of connections between technologies and
poverties. We seek to include analysis of scarcities and deprivations in
histories of making and doing, adding new rubrics from class stratification to
hunger, inaccessible infrastructures to techniques of survival, work regimes to
family strategies, nodes of consumption to networks of production.
Topics to be addressed might include:
·
technological responses to scarcity, whether as large plans for
amelioration or small strategies for survival
·
scarcities and marginalization as unintended outcomes of technological
change or as deliberate technologies of control
·
responses to, and relationships with things, amongst the poor and on the
margins of society
·
economies of production and systemic inequalities
·
the role of things in the geographies and environments of class,
poverty, and power
·
ideologies and ideas of poverty, progress, and technology
To propose a paper for this panel, please send an
abstract and CV (according to SHOT’s submission requirements) to the session
organizers. Themes will be refined based on submissions received by Dec 8,
2015. For more information on the upcoming SHOT meeting see: http://www.historyoftechnology.org/call_for_papers/index.html
Session organizers: