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#sts

3 posts3 participants0 posts today
Public *
Tomás Criado

We warmly invite you to the "Contested Futures: Unsettling ageing, ecological, and digital transitions" workshop, organized by CareNet

March 31 - April 1, 2025 in Barcelona @ Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
(on site)

Free registration needed

+info: symposium.uoc.edu/131218/progr

Universitat Oberta de CatalunyaWorkshop: "Contested Futures: Unsettling ageing, ecological, and digital transitions"IN3’s Care and Preparedness in the Network Society (CareNet) research group is pleased to invite you to the Workshop «Contested Futures: Unsettling ageing, ecological, and digital transitions».   What is this workshop about?   We aim to create an interdisciplinary space for exchange and reflection on the role of the future in research on ageing, climate crisis, and digitalization. These three domains are deeply shaped by imaginaries, narratives, and prospective practices in which the futures of modern societies are constantly negotiated and contested.   Across these research fields, we observe a recurring invocation of potential futures – futures that have not yet materialized and remain uncertain, but still, are already shaping the present. These futures often appear in dystopian terms, as threats and risks: ageing, framed as a “demographic bomb” or “grey tsunami” that will overwhelm healthcare and social systems; a world becoming increasingly uninhabitable and unequal due to global warming and extreme weather; and the strangeness of artificial intelligence, as the boundaries between truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, get blurred.   Public policy frames these futures as “challenges”, threats that are also presented as opportunities. They imply an obligation to transform the present in preparation for the future. Anticipating these futures acts as a call to action in the present, shaping life in advance and directing it toward specific horizons. For this reason, these “challenges” are often linked to various transitions –demographic, eco-social and digital– that require the continuous production of new knowledge and innovations.   To mitigate the so-called “demographic bomb”, policies on healthy ageing, ageing biomedicine, and gerontechnology seek to build a future in which people live longer without falling ill, maintain their independence, and defy the effects of ageing. To reconcile the climate crisis with capitalist progress, new technological solutions are emerging: space colonization, geoengineering, urban adaptation, sustainable infrastructures, green energy. Responding to the risk of losing the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, between knowing and not knowing, new initiatives are being developed to promote responsible, ethical and inclusive artificial intelligence.   All of this shows how the future, far from being settled, is an object of contestation. We are concerned with how futures are not only imagined, anticipated, and enacted, but also cancelled, ignored, destroyed, and even colonized.   A space for reflection and practice   In this workshop, we invite scholars working in these three areas to explore questions such as: What futures guide research on ageing, climate change, and digitization? To whom do these futures belong? Who is empowered to imagine, to narrate, and to generate future-oriented practices-and who is not? Which futures prevail? Which are silenced? In what ways are futures being brought into the present and presents brought into the future? By what means, by what practices, by what methods? What are the effects of power that their anticipation generates, and on whom?   We do not wish to approach these questions solely through theoretical reflection or through the empirical analysis of practices and narratives of the future — although both of these remain essential. Rather, we seek to foster an exchange of practices, methods, and techniques that enable us to think, analyse, transform, reimagine, and reconstruct futures. Thus, this is an invitation to explore the potential of participatory methods, speculative design, arts-based methodologies (visual, performative, etc.), and game-based approaches, among others. We want to create a space not only for analysing futures, but also for experimenting with and constructing new ways of imagining and inhabiting futures.
#sts#futures#methdos
Public
Jan D

Peer-to-Peer and the Promise of Internet Equality, Phil Agre, 2003

"The peer-to-peer movement understands that architecture is politics, but it should not assume that architecture is a substitute for politics. Radically improved information and communication technologies do open new possibilities for institutional change. To explore those possibilities, though, technologists will need better ideas about institutions."

pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/a

pages.gseis.ucla.eduPeer-to-Peer and the Promise of Internet Equality
#p2p#STS
Public
César Pallares :damnified:

Nature reports: "Postdocs and PhD students hit hard by Trump's crackdown on science"

The international academic community is already starting to feel the consequences of Trump's administration This is a really bad sign that society should contrarrest

nature.com/articles/d41586-025

www.nature.comPostdocs and PhD students hit hard by Trump’s crackdown on scienceAs US federal grants remain frozen and budget cuts loom, anxiety and fear grip early-career researchers.
#SciencePolicy#STS#ResearchGovernance
Public *
Emma Stamm

one of my more idealistic beliefs: #STS can have a unifying, de-radicalizing effect since it takes critiques of science seriously instead of chalking them up to bad education, low aptitude, etc. it's the academic field where a sincere conversation about e.g. #RFK would be most welcome. at its best, it's implicitly anti-shame and pro-civic -- good STS educators don't condescend to 'alternative' thinkers

#uspol#academic#education
Public
pseudometa

There are strong indications that attempts to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 may have in fact slowed down research on the virus.

That is the core insight of a peer-reviewed paper I wrote that just got published in Minerva. The pandemic may be over, but I hope that this paper will prove useful in case of a (not very unlikely) future pandemic.

#covid #COVID19 #sts #sociology #ScienceMastodon

doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-095

SpringerLinkLimits and Paradoxes of Accelerating Research. A Retrospective on the Attempts to Accelerate Medical Research on COVID-19 - MinervaThe COVID-19 pandemic led to a historically unprecedented effort to accelerate medical research on the novel coronavirus. At the same time, researchers have raised concerns that the attempts to expedite research had negative side effects, such as information overload or adverse impacts on research quality. This paper thus explores the question whether attempts to increase the pace of research do more harm than good and to what extent the acceleration of scientific knowledge production is even possible. To address these questions, this article proposes a multi-level perspective on research speed consisting of four interrelated dimensions: the speed of individual research activities, the number of concurrent research activities, the speed of knowledge circulation, and the usefulness of knowledge contributions for peers. A closer examination of medical research on COVID-19 reveals that attempts to accelerate research were inherently precarious: On the one hand, there are hard limits to the speed of research, while on the other, several measures intended to expedite research have side effects that can actually decelerate research. This ambiguous character of research acceleration creates difficult trade-offs that require careful consideration in science policy.
Public
Thomas Barrio

Billet d’étape : Donna Haraway – Repenser notre relation au monde à travers les naturecultures

🧵 Explorez la pensée révolutionnaire d'Haraway 🌿🤖 : Chthulucène et parentés dépareillées Sympoïèse et holobionte Objectivité située et hybridation Naturecultures et acteur-réseau Cyborgs et technologie Activisme repensé Une invitation à repenser notre relation au monde de manière inclusive et interconnectée. Donna…

homohortus31.wordpress.com/202

Homo Hortus · Billet d’étape : Donna Haraway – Repenser notre relation au monde à travers les naturecultures🧵 Explorez la pensée révolutionnaire d’Haraway 🌿🤖 : Chthulucène et parentés dépareillées Sympoïèse et holobionte Objectivité située et hybridation Naturecultures et acteur-réseau Cyborgs et t…
Public *
Josh Wells

Had my social informatics students read work @pluralistic did with Consumer Reports about social media federation and user rights. Also considering what we can learn about society, technology, and ethics from science fiction.

If anybody is interested in reusing, here's the text of the module. Comments welcome if you plan to use or have used.

/* ACTIVITY BEGINS

SETUP: Students work with this material in collaborative file space

As a group, read these two connected pieces:

1. “Inside the Clock Tower: An Interoperability Story,” a short story by Cory Doctorow, commissioned by Consumer Reports regarding user experiences on social media and how regulatory legislation might affect those experiences - innovation.consumerreports.org

2. “An Interview with Tech Activist and Author Cory Doctorow,” about the ACCESS Act by Consumer Reports - consumerreports.org/digital-ri

Answer these questions as a group in the space below:

1. How can you use our class science fiction readings to connect Doctorow’s assessment of the real social media landscape with his portrayal of a social media landscape in science fiction?

2. How can you use lessons from Kling, Hanson, and Coleman to explain how Doctorow’s actions here are a kind of folksy social informatics?

3. How can you connect Doctorow’s work in both pieces to your understanding of the Mastodon social network?

ACTIVITY ENDS */

Innovation at Consumer Reports · Inside the Clock Tower: An Interoperability Story - Innovation at Consumer ReportsEditor’s note: Last week, the House Judiciary Committee introduced a package of bills to address concerns with the market power exerted by large online platforms. One of these is the ACCESS Act. It would mandate interoperability for large online platforms, meaning, in part, that a consumer could still connect with her friends through Facebook even if
#scifi#sts#compsci
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Gauthier Roussilhe

📰 [New publication]: A Tale of Twin Transitions: How did we come to think that digitization and sustainability go hand in hand.

A chapter I wrote for a Palgrave Handbook is finally out. This is also a modified version in one of my incoming PhD thesis. From 60' economics to today's European taxonomy, I try to trace back the genealogy of ideas that assumed that digitalisation will result in a more sustainable economy.

Link: link.springer.com/referencewor

Screenshot of the chapter entitled 'A tale of twin transitions: How Did We Come to Think That Digitization and Sustainability Go Hand in Hand' Abstract: Since the 1990s, the question of the contribution of digitalization to the ecological transition has been raised again and again, without any clear conclusion being reached. This initial link between digitalization and sustainability could stem from a transfer of the economic concept of dematerialization to the emerging concept of the information society. However, the first institutional studies, even if they point to a clear potential, are much more cautious about the concretization of emission reductions. At the start of the new millennium, industry players took up the issue, based on the optimistic principle that digitalization was by default more part of the solution than the problem, and produced numerous reports with extravagant estimates of potential avoided emissions. This rhetoric found its way into political institutions such as the European Union, which has institutionalized the concept of twin transitions: that the digital and ecological transitions must go hand in hand. Recently, a major effort led to the production of new methodologies for assessing the net environmental effects of digital solutions. This impetus accompanies a more profound movement in Europe toward the financialization of sustainable economic activities, of which the digital sector is determined to be a part.
#sts#sustainability#digitisation
Public
Ingmar Lippert

#STS Scholars for Remote Access and Financial Fair Play!

We call on #ScienceAndTechnologyStudies (@sts) scholars advocating for #RemoteAccess and #Financial #FairPlay to sign this petition.

We demand STS communities to
1. provide remote access, ensure hybrid participation possibilities
2. make costs of future STS conferences& associations transparent.

change.org/p/sts-scholars-for-

Change.orgSign the PetitionSTS Scholars for Remote Access and Financial Fair Play!
Public
Programme OCAPI

📢 Offre de post-doctorat de 18 mois au @leesu, au sein de l'équipe interdisciplinaire du programme OCAPI.

« Les excrétats humains, des matières (pas) comme les autres ? Transformations sociotechniques et prise en charge des flux de matières organiques urbaines »

Ce postdoc se fera dans le cadre du projet ANR TANGO (Transition de l’assainissement urbain vers une nouvelle gestion de la matière organique).

Plus de détails ici : leesu.fr/ocapi/wp-content/uplo

#jeRecrute#postdoc#ESR
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