Copenhagen 2012: Call for Participation

Dear Colleagues,

We invite your participation at a workshop on Digital STS on October 16, 2012, in advance of 4S in Copenhagen, Denmark. Our goal is to attract a range of scholars and practitioners, and to develop a community dialog and prospective publication around STS focused on digital, information and networked technologies.

Practitioners in the field of Science and Technology Studies have made significant contributions to the study of, for example, virtual environments, human computer interface and information infrastructure. Our approaches support research across a variety of disciplinary homes, from information studies to anthropology. STS’s position at the center of so many conversations makes us especially well-placed to build and sustain a coherent community of digital and information researchers and practitioners who sit at this intersection, enabling our new research and theories to impact our field and others around us.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together scholars in science and technology studies and sociotechnical studies from varying theoretical and methodological perspectives and career stages who work in the domain of digital studies in STS, broadly construed.  The workshop will set the stage for an interactive and vibrant discussion of promising research trajectories, implications for STS theory, and the development of appropriate research and pedagogical tools for digital scholarship in STS. Questions we will explore include: what is the role of critical building or making within STS scholarship? How can digital infrastructures support our STS practice? And with its emphasis on scientific practice and the social shaping of technologies tools, what can STS contribute to Digital Studies more broadly? We will use these questions to move towards shaping an edited volume: a Handbook of Digital Studies in STS.

The workshop will take place on October 16th at the IT University of Copenhagen, and is all day.  To attend, please submit a brief application including 1- a *short* (1 paragraph) biography, 2- a *short* (1-2 paragraph) statement of interest on your approach to the intersection of the digital and STS, and 3- a link to your online presence, emailed to digitalsts@zoho.com. The application deadline is *SEPTEMBER 7, 2012*: participants will be notified within a few days of this deadline as to the status of their application.

We encourage submissions by ‘makers’ and/or ‘thinkers’ in our field: studies of digital practices, virtual ethnographies, demo’s of critical technologies and digital tools to support STS research are welcome. This workshop is hosted in cooperation with the Center for Network Culture at the IT University of Copenhagen, and supported by funds from the NSF’s Digital Societies and Technologies Research Coordination Network.   More information is available at: http://digitalsts.net.

Please feel free to pass this e-mail on to other scholars, scientists, writers, bloggers, museum curators, researchers, journalists, short filmmakers, colleagues, graduate students, faculty administrators, departments, and other similar professionals who might be interested.

Kind regards,
Janet Vertesi and David Ribes
Princeton University & Georgetown University
www.janetvertesi.com  www.davidribes.com