CFP: Mediated Practice - Insights from STS, Critical Theory and Media Theory (due March 11)

The aim of this EASST panel is to explore how ideas approaches and perspectives might travel more effectively across science and technological studies, media studies and cultural studies.

Abstracts due March 11, 2012.

Joint meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2012: October 17-20, 2012, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark.

Work in STS, media theory and critical theory intersects through a focus on mediated practices. Furthermore, science and technology studies and humanities based studies of media and culture (including film, art, literature, music) have common interests in representations, meaning systems, social and institutional aspects of science, media and culture, and the politics and ethics of interventions in these domains. We often draw upon overlapping perspectives and theories, which are however deployed in different ways by scholars of science, and scholars of media and culture. The aim of this panel is to build on precedents (Thacker’s Biomedia, van Dijck’s ImagEnation, etc.) and to further explore these overlaps and divergences, and the ways in which concepts, ideas approaches and perspectives might travel more effectively across science and technological studies, media studies and cultural studies.

We invite papers that show how a notion developed in one field can be used in the other, either via analysis of examples, by adopting a hybrid approach, or by theoretical reflection.

Papers for the panel could broach the topics:

• Relations between ideas of medium and technologies in STS and media/critical theory.
• Analyses of visual, textual, and audio objects that use acombined approach from STS and media/critical theory.
• Different ideas of agency (for example, in the context of authors and artists as well as social actors).
• Different understandings of interpretation as an act, practice and process.
• The relation between local and situated meanings on the one hand and general and abstract terms on the other, and issues of circulation of meaning in mediated settings.
• Approaches to contextualised ethics and socio-political responsibility or intervention that draw on STS and media/critical theory.

Please submit your abstract electronically via http://www.4sonline.org/meeting, and make sure to suggest that your paper will fit into open panel no 46: Mediated practices.

The deadline for abstract submissions is March 11.

Panel organisers:
Anne Beaulieu (University of Groninghen)
Annamaria Carusi (University of Oxford / NTNU)
Aud Sissel Hoel (Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU))
Sarah de Rijcke (University of Leiden)