Category: CFP

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CFP> Moral Machines? The ethics and politics of the digital world, Helsinki, March 2019

Man with a colander on his head attached to electrodes

This looks like an interesting event, though I’m not entirely sure what Stielger would/will say about “the machine’s capability of non-embodied and non-conscious cognition” ?. Via Twitter.

Moral Machines? The ethics and politics of the digital world

6–8 March 2019, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki

With confirmed keynotes from N. Katherine Hayles (Duke University, USA) and Bernard Stiegler (IRI: Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation at the Centre Pompidou de Paris)

As our visible and invisible social reality is getting increasingly digital, the question of the ethical, moral and political consequences of digitalization is ever more pressing. Such issue is too complex to be met only with instinctive digiphilia or digiphobia. No technology is just a tool, all technologies mark their users and environments. Digital technologies, however, mark them much more intimately than any previous ones have done since they promise to think in our place – so that they do not only enhance the homo sapiens’ most distinctive feature but also relieve them from it. We entrust computers with more and more functions, and their help is indeed invaluable especially in science and technology. Some fear or dream that in the end, they become so invaluable that a huge Artificial Intelligence or Singularity will take control of the whole affair that humans deal with so messily.

The symposium “Moral Machines? The Ethics and Politics of the Digital World” welcomes contributions addressing the various aspects of the contemporary digital world. We are especially interested in the idea that despite everything they can do, the machines do not really think, at least not like us. So, what is thinking in the digital world? How does the digital machine “think”? Our both confirmed keynote speakers, N. Katherine Hayles and Bernard Stiegler, have approached these fundamental questions in their work, and one of our aims within this symposium is to bring their approaches together for a lively discussion. Hayles has shown that, for a long time, computers were built with the assumption that they imitate human thought – while in fact, the machine’s capability of non-embodied and non-conscious cognition sets it apart from everything we call thinking. For his part, Bernard Stiegler has shown how technics in general and digital technologies in particular are specific forms of memory that is externalized and made public – and that, at the same time, becomes very different from and alien to individual human consciousness.

We are seeking submissions from scholars studying different aspects of these issues. Prominent work is done in many fields ranging from philosophy and literary studies to political science and sociology, not forgetting the wide umbrella of digital humanities. We hope that the symposium can bring together researchers from the hitherto disconnected fields and thus address the ethics and politics of the digital world in a new and inspiring setting. In addition to the keynotes, our confirmed participants already include Erich Hörl, Fréderic Neyrat and François Sebbah, for instance.

We encourage approaching our possible list of topics (see below) from numerous angles, from philosophical and theoretical to more practical ones. For example, the topics could be approached from the viewpoint of how they have been addressed within the realm of fiction, journalism, law or politics, and how these discourses possibly frame or reflect our understanding of the digital world.

The possible list of topics, here assembled under three main headings, includes but is not limited to:

  • Thinking in the digital world
    • What kind of materiality conditions the digital cognition?
    • How does nonhuman and nonconscious digital world differ from the embodied human thought?
    • How do the digital technologies function as technologies of memory and thought? What kind of consequences might their usage in this capacity have in the long run?
  • The morality and ethics of machines
    • Is a moral machine possible?
    • Have thinking machines made invalid the old argument according to which a technology is only as truthful and moral as its human user? Or can truthfulness and morals be programmed (as the constructors of self-driving cars apparently try to do)?
    • How is war affected by new technologies?
  • The ways of controlling and manipulating the digital world
    • Can and should the digital world be politically controlled, as digital technologies are efficient means of both emancipation and manipulation?
    • How can we control our digital traces and data gathered of us?
    • On what assumptions are the national and global systems (e.g., financial system, global commerce, national systems of administration, health and defense) designed and do we trust them?
    • What does it mean that public space is increasingly administered by technical equipment made by very few private companies whose copyrights are secret?

“Moral Machines? The Ethics and Politics of the Digital World” is a symposium organized by two research fellows, Susanna Lindberg and Hanna-Riikka Roine at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. The symposium is free of charge, and there will also be a public evening programme with artists engaging the digital world. Our aim is to bring together researchers from all fields addressing the many issues and problems of the digitalization of our social reality, and possibly contribute towards the creation of a research network. It is also possible that some of the papers will be invited to be further developed for publication either in a special journal issue or an edited book.

The papers to be presented will be selected based on abstracts which should not exceed 300 words (plus references). Add a bio note (max. 150 words) that includes your affiliation and email address. Name your file [firstname lastname] and submit it as a pdf. If you which to propose a panel of 3–4 papers, include a description of the panel (max. 300 words), papers (max. 200 words each), and bio notes (max. 150 words each).

Please submit your proposal to moralmachines2019[at]gmail.com by 31 August 2018. Decisions on the proposals will be made by 31 October 2018.

For further information about the symposium, feel free to contact the organizers Susanna Lindberg (susanna.e.lindberg[at]gmail.com) and Hanna-Riikka Roine (hanna.roine[at]helsinki.fi).

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CFP> International Labour Process Conference STREAM Artifical Intelligence, Technology and Work

Industrial factory robot arms

Via Phoebe Moore.

ILPC STREAM Artifical Intelligence, Technology and Work

INTERNATIONAL LABOUR PROCESS CONFERENCE

Artifical Intelligence, Technology and Work 

ILPC 2019 Special Stream No. 5

Please submit abstracts via the International Labour Process Conference website (ilpc.org.uk) by the deadline of 26 October 2018.

Of all the social changes occurring over the past six or seven decades, perhaps most fascinating is the integration of computers and machines into the fabric of our lives and organizations. Machines are rapidly becoming direct competitors with humans for intelligence and decision-making powers. This is important for research in international labour process because artificial intelligence (AI) brings about challenges and questions for how organizations, globally, are designed and established with respective human resources planning and execution and industrial relations negotiations. We start with John McCarthy’s term, who both invented and defined AI as processes that are ‘making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if humans were so behaving’ in 1955. At the origin of the term, AI aligned humans directly with machines, expecting machines to behave symbolically like humans. Over time, programmers working on neural networks and machine learning have emphasised the cognitive rather than symbolic. Now, AI is seen to have comparable capabilities to humans in both routine and non-routine ways, leading to new possibilities for automation. This draws on huge amounts of data often produced originally by humans. In fact, every time we enter a search term on a computer we add to and train machinic ‘intelligence.’ Every day, billions of actions are captured as part of this process, contributing to the development of AI. In doing so, people provide under-recognised cognitive and immaterial labour.
Therefore, this streams looks at the conditions and circumstances whereby machines begin to have the capacity to influence and become integrated in to humans’ ways of thinking, decision-making, working. It also considers the possibilities of AI in resistance against neoliberal and even authoritarian capitalism in the global north and south. AI is a broad term that identifies the pinnacle of machine capabilities that have recently become possible based on the amount of a) extensive big data that has become available in organisations, b) data analytical tools where programmers can identify what to track based on this data and what algorithms will allow one to gain the insights of interest, c) machine learning, where patterns across data sets can be identified and d) AI, where the final frontier has become the ability of pattern recognition across myriad data sets that have already identified their own patterns. When applied to work and work design, the primary goals are efficiency, market capture, and control over workers.
The rise of autonomous machines leads to philosophical questions that Marx engaged with in theories of objectification and alienation. Later, critical theorists have dealt with these questions in labour process research, where technologies and digitalization have created unprecedented concerns for how workplaces and work design are structured and control and resistance are pursued. In particular, the gig economy has become the frontline of these new changes. Workers here are now facing automation of the management function, supervised and even fired (or “deactivated”) without human intervention nor interaction. This is creating intensified and precarious working conditions, leading to fragmentation over digital platforms and platform management methods (Moore and Joyce 2018), as well as new forms of resistance and solidarities. These are all happening while their own work is under the threat of digitalization, where control and resistance have taken new forms and humans are in danger of becoming resources for tools (see Moore 2018a, 2018b; Woodcock, 2017; Waters and Woodcock, 2017).
Ultimately, across the economy, technology and its integration may be leading to organisations that take on a life of their own. Human resource decisions are increasingly taken by algorithms, where new human resources techniques integrate machine learning to achieve a new technique called ‘people analytics’ where data patterns are used to make workplace decisions for hiring/firing/talent predictions, creating significant threats to the possibilities of workplace organising and social justice. Sometimes, AI-based decisions lead to automating aspects of the workplace, for example, in the case of wearable devices in factories that allow human resource calculations based on AI and location-management by GPS and RFID systems. In these ways and others, AI processes inform a number of decision-making processes and digitalized management methods that have led to significant changes to workplaces and working conditions. If machines can deal with ethically based questions and begin to mimic the nuances of experiences and human judgement, will they become participants in humans’ already manifest ‘learned helplessness’? While currently, humans train AI with the use of big data, could machines begin to train humans to be helpless?

This call builds upon the ‘Artificial Intelligence. A service revolution?’ stream that featured at the 36th ILPC conference in Buenos Aires. This year’s stream is intended as a forum to bring together researchers engaged with the topics of labour process, political economy, technology, and AI to discuss this topic. We invite submissions on the following topics (not limited to, but also considering the need not to overlap with other streams):
-The effect of AI on the labour process where control and resistance rub against debates about exploitation Vs empowerment
-The implication of algorithmic management and control on the labour process, work replacement, and/or intensification from the factory to the office
-The “black box” of AI and related practices, algorithmic decision support, people analytics, performance management
-The impact of AI on the Global South: geographies and variegation of AI implementation, direct and indirect impact on jobs and differential effects of diverse socio-political setups
-Resistance and organising against/with AI and social media

Special Issue: We are also considering a submission for a journal special issue (though contributions may be requested before the conference). Please email Phoebe Moore pm358@leicester.ac.uk immediately if this is of interest.

Stream Organisers:

  • Juan Grigera (CONICET, Universidad de Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina),
  • Lydia Hughes (Ruskin College, Oxford, UK),
  • Phoebe Moore (University of Leicester, School of Business, UK),
  • Jamie Woodcock (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK)

Please feel free to contact the stream organisers with any informal inquiries.

For information on the ILPC 2019 and the Calls for Papers for the General Conference and the other Special Streams please go to https://www.ilpc.org.uk/

References
Moore, P. (2018a): The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts, Advances in Sociology series (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge).
Moore, P. (2018b): ‘The Threat of Physical and Psychosocial Violence and Harassment in Digitalized Work’ International Labour Organization, ACTRAV, Geneva: Switzerland.
Woodcock, J. (2017): Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres, London: Pluto.
Waters, F. and Woodcock, J. (2017): ‘Far From Seamless: a Workers’ Inquiry at Deliveroo’, Viewpoint Magazine.

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CFP The Body Productive

Gilbreth motion studies light painting

Saw this via Twitter. Looks good.

Call for Papers

How are bodies produced under capitalism?

How, in turn, does capitalism make bodies productive?

How is the body (and knowledge of the body) shaped by demands of production, consumption and exchange, and how can these logics be resisted, challenged and overcome?

These are the questions at the heart of François Guéry and Didier Deleule’s Productive Body. First published in French in 1972, The Productive Body asks how the human body and its labour have been expropriated and re-engineered through successive stages of capitalism. The Productive Body challenges us to rethink the relationships between the biological and the social; the body and the mind; power and knowledge; discipline and control. Finally, it invites us to think about the body as a site of resistance and revolutionary potential.

corpsbody

At this one-day, interdisciplinary conference, we invite scholars and activists to assess the contribution of The Productive Body, and to address its relevance as a theoretical tool for understanding and challenging contemporary ideologies of bodily health, efficiency and productivity.

We invite submissions from scholars, activists and artists for 20-minute papers, or 10-minute provocations on the relationships – past and present – between capitalism, work and the body. Collaborative papers are welcome, and proposals for longer workshops and panel discussions will also be considered. Please contact the organisers if you are unsure. Proposals that explore or are inspired by any of the following areas are welcome:

  • Critical responses to Guéry and Deleule – the biological, the social, and the productive
  • Materialist vs. discursive approaches to the history of the body
  • Conceptualising discipline in Marx and Foucault
  • The body as an object of discipline vs. the body as a site of dissent
  • The psychology and corporeality of activism, organising and resistance
  • Hierarchies of gender and race in the division of labour
  • (Re)productive bodies; intimate and emotional labour, sex work, body work
  • How are ideas of health and disability shaped by the demands of wage labour?
  • How do queer bodies disrupt or challenge logics of productivity? How are queer bodies in turn, commodified or appropriated by capital?
  • How do the demands of productivity complicate/interact with the body as a site of intimacy?
  • Biopolitics and neoliberalism
  • Body-machines – technology and automation; robotics, cybernetics and transhumanism; digital surveillance, ‘lifelogging’ and the ‘quantified self’
  • Counterproductive bodies: pre-capitalist, non-capitalist, and post-capitalist bodies

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to thebodyproductive@gmail.com by 24th August 2018. Submissions are especially encouraged from graduate students, early-career researchers, and groups typically underrepresented in the academy.

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CFP > Memories of the future, London 2019

the character Doc Brown in the film Back to the Future

Via Temporal Belongings.

Memories of the Future

International conference. Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Dates: 29-30 March 2019
Confirmed speakers: Stephen Bann (Bristol); Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths); Paolo Jedlowski (Calabria); Anna Reading (KCL); Michael Rothberg (UCLA)

Proposals for panels or papers by 31 July 2018 to memories.future@sas.ac.uk.

Call for papers
What does it mean to remember the future? What roles do memory, history, the past play in our consciousness as citizens of the early twenty-first century?

David Lowenthal (2015) reminds us that ‘commands to forget coexist with zeal to commemorate’, which raises the very important yet often overlooked questions of: what to remember and what to forget, who is well positioned to lead on or judge in that process, with whose legacies in mind, and with what consequences for future and past generations. In the 1980s, a significant body of scholarship on cultural memory emerged to protect the past from ‘time’s corrosive energy’, leading to ‘collective future thought’ (J. Assmann, 2011; Szpunar and Szpunar, 2016). Cultural memory acted as a moral imperative, a prerequisite to overcome not merely violent pasts but the violence inherent in linear temporality. As such, cultural memory has been seen as redemptive, enabling a more productive relation between past, present and future.

More recently, ‘thinking forward through the past’ has been central to a number of AHRC-funded projects in the UK examining environmental change, postcolonial disaster, gender and colonialism, heritage futures, ruins and more. Climate change, big data and the crisis of democracy are challenging our future in ways that may suggest a misalignment of temporal scales. One way of responding to this is through what Reinhart Koselleck (2000) called horizons of expectations and spaces of experience, namely, the horizons implicit in our anticipations of the future and the degree to which our experience of these have changed and will change over time. Utopian imaginaries and deploying utopia as a method (Levitas, 2013) invite us to think about hope, empathy, and solidarity, each contributing to create different places from which to imagine a future outside crises, fears and risk.

The past and the future constitute our cultural horizons in ways which are neither neutral nor solely technical, but, as Appadurai (2013) has suggested, ‘shot through with affect and sensation’. One of the key challenges of our time is how to study and create futures we truly care for and which are more social (Adam and Groves 2007; Urry, 2016).

Memories of the Future invites contributions to articulate the future in relation to cultural memory, and interrogate the precise and diverse manners in which the past, the present and the future are intertwined and dialogical, complicating our understanding of temporalities in an age saturated with memory and ‘past futures’.

Suggested themes and areas of inquiry include:

  • The future of memory
  • Temporal multi-directionalities
  • Memories of the future
  • Utopias and dystopias
  • Past, present and future mobilities
  • Smart cities and future/ist metropolises
  • Science-fiction and other subsets of utopia
  • Housing, cohousing and the future of habitation
  • Futurisms, modernisms, afro-futurisms
  • The future in/and the Anthropocene
  • Post-humanism and the non-human
  • Intentions, expectations, anticipations
  • Counterfactuals
  • Trauma, violence and conflict
  • Tangible and intangible heritage

Please submit proposals for panels or papers (max 20 minutes) by 31 July 2018 to memories.future@sas.ac.uk, including a 150-250 words abstract.

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CFP > Critically Queer – 20/21 Sept. Bristol.

Queer Activists in South Africa

Saw this CFP via twitter. Looks like an interesting conference… may be of interest, see tweet below. More information about the working group organising the conference is on their website.

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Workshop on feminist philosophy of technology – Vienna 25-26 Oct ’18

Donna Harraway

Via Mark Coeckelbergh.

Workshop on feminist philosophy of technology

Organizers: Dr. Janina Loh, Prof. Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh
Date: October 25-26, 2018
Venue: University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy, Universitätsstr. 7 (NIG), 1010 Vienna

There has been little attention to feminism and gender issues in mainstream philosophy of technology and vice versa: many feminists have focused on societal matters and relationships without taking into account how technics (i.e. technologies and techniques) shape those societies and relationships. However, since the beginning of the second-wave feminism by the mid 20th century, a growing awareness of the gravity and urgency for a critical reflection of technology and the sciences within feminist discourses can be observed. But feminist thinkers have not throughout interpreted technology and science as potentially emancipatory and liberating in every respect. In the same breath, the inherent structures of dominance, marginalization, and oppression have been confronted and disqualified within the feminist paradigm. The question of defining and ascribing responsibility in science and technics – regarding for instance the technological transformation of labor, the life in the information society, and the relationship between humans and machines – is essential for this workshop. Critical posthumanism and new feminist materialism define promising examples for a reformulation of known challenges such as essentialism and relativism, a transformation of hypostatized perspectives on traditional categories and dichotomies, as well as the claim to think off the beaten paths of socialist, liberal, and radical feminism. Confirmed keynote speakers are Corinna Bath, Rick Dolphijn, Nina Lykke, Kathleen Richardson, Lucy Suchman, and Judy Wajcman. The workshop Feminist Philosophy of Technology has two main aims: It shall present and spark a dialogue between the prominent approaches within feminist philosophy of technology (first day). On the second day we would like to explore and discuss potential challenges and perspectives within current movements of feminist philosophy of technology. We welcome submissions on any – but not limited to – the following issues:

  • critical posthumanism
  • new materialist feminism
  • feminist philosophy of technology
  • technofeminism
  • cyberfeminism
  • xenofeminism
  • human-machine-interaction
  • relationships with machines
  • sexrobotics
  • the future of work (industry 4.0, automatization, digitalization)
  • women, technics, and education
  • women, technics, and arts.

Please submit abstracts of around 500 words to janina.loh@univie.ac.at, by July 30. Acceptance notifications will be sent out by the end of August.

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7th European Colloquium on Culture, Creativity and Economy 4-5 Oct ’18

Glitched 1980s pepsi advert

May be of interest to people that follow this blog… Via Brian Hracs:

7th European Colloquium on Culture, Creativity and Economy

October 4-5, 2018 – Stockholm, Sweden

The myriad links between culture, creativity and economic practice are major topics of intellectual discussion. Culture and creativity are collaboratively practiced by a range of workers and communities — from artists to entrepreneurs— and in a range of occupational, organizational, institutional and spatial settings. Indeed, far from being restricted to global cities and urban settings, a growing body of research highlights the presence and uniqueness of cultural and creative activities in suburban and rural settings. Moreover, digital technologies and processes of globalization continue to create, destroy, and restructure the markets and conditions under which cultural creation, production, intermediation, dissemination and consumption are undertaken and experienced. These are in turn underpinned by a plurality of micro-spatialities and micro-processes through which the dynamics and spaces of culture and creativity emerge. More than ever perhaps there is a need for critical and radical debate that addresses questions about the value and values inherent in culture and creativity; questions surrounding the ownership and marketization of culture and creativity; and the dynamics of cultural and creative spaces, institutions, production and work.

The European Colloquium on Culture, Creativity and Economy is a European network of excellence and CCE Stockholm 2018 is the 7th annual meeting of the Colloquium. The Colloquium aims at bringing together junior and senior scholars from different disciplines (e.g. sociology, cultural and urban studies, geography) and locations around the world in an exciting, intense and dynamic meeting aimed at generating not only new networks but new knowledge, approaches, and practices. The Colloquium will be based for one day at Sweden’s arts grants agency and for one day at Stockholm’s largest modern and contemporary art museum. Each day the program will partly reflect discussion themes related to and inspired by the institution and space we are in; and will involve dialogue with people from these institutions. Day 1 will be, at least partly, focused on the dynamics of contemporary creative practice and work, and work organization in arts and cultural production. Day 2 will focus partly on cultural exhibition, public-private interactions, and cultural consumption. These issues will form a background agenda but as in previous years the Colloquium welcomes a variety of perspectives and aims to reflect participants interests and research on the multiple intersections between culture, creativity and economy. The event will give participants the chance to share ideas, receive feedback on current research and to preview cutting-edge research in the field.

[…]

Applying

The conference organizers will select up to 30 individuals to attend. To be considered you must send the following to Taylor Brydges (taylor.brydges@humangeo.su.se) by Friday, June 8, 2018. Late applications will not be considered. Participants will be informed of their acceptance late June. Please include the following information in a word document: – A short bio of approximately 200 words – A personal photo of sufficient quality to be included in the program – A 250 word statement of current interests or what you consider the most important research issue to address in the coming years

Once Accepted

By September 16, 2018, please send Taylor Brydges (taylor.brydges@humangeo.su.se) a paper for review and discussion. The choice of your contribution is open – it could be your latest published paper, a draft paper, a grant proposal, or an outline of an idea.

More information is available from the CFP.

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Reblog> CFP: The platformization of cultural production

Facebook logo reflected in a human eye

Meant to post last week but, y’know – stuff happens to get in the way…

This looks really interesting from Brooke Erin Duffy. Deadline for abstracts is TOMORROW.

THE PLATFORMIZATION OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION

Special collection of Social Media + Society (Open Access Journal)
Abstract submission deadline: May 15, 2018

Full paper submission deadline: September 15, 2018

Editors: Brooke Erin Duffy (Cornell University), David Nieborg (University of Toronto), Thomas Poell (University of Amsterdam)

This thematic issue explores the “platformization of cultural production” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018)  against the backdrop of wider transformations in the technologies, cultures, and political economies of digital media. Platformization describes the process by which major tech companies—GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) in the West, and the so-called “three kingdoms” of the Chinese internet (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) in Asia—are reconfiguring the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural products and services. The logic of platformization is impacting traditional cultural industries (e.g., music, news, museums, games, and fashion), as well as emergent digital sectors and communities of practice, such as livestreaming, podcasting, and “Instagramming.” Accordingly, new industrial formations and partnerships are constantly being wrought; for example, newspapers increasingly host their content on Facebook, and game developers offer their products in app stores operated by Apple and Google.

Given the acceleration and intensification of digital platforms in the cultural circuit, there is a pressing need to interrogate the stakes of platformization for content producers and for the cultural commodities they circulate among digitally networked audiences. We invite theoretical and/or empirical contributions addressing platform power and political economies vis-à-vis cultural production. Owing to the relative recency of research on platformization, this topic warrants an interdisciplinary focus including scholarship from such fields as media and communication studies, platform studies, software studies, political economy of communication, (media) production studies, and business studies. Platformization exacts widely variable costs across different spheres of life, and regional and sectoral boundaries. We therefore invite scholars to contribute papers which advance our understanding of how the platformization of particular sectors and practices takes shape within specific geo-national contexts, as well as how this involves new modes of content moderation and algorithmic curation, evolving forms of labour exploitation, and app-based systems of distribution and monetization.

We are especially interested in articles that shed new light across these themes:

*Theoretical approaches to platformization and the social, cultural and technological contexts of platform-dependent modes of cultural production.

*Intersectional approaches that are sensitive to the gendered, classed, and racial specificity of platform-dependent modes of cultural production.

*Political economic approaches to platformization, including the implications for cultural producers and labor relations, as well as relationships among different institutional actors in platform ecosystems.

*Regional approaches to platformization. For example, the impact of the platformization of cultural industries in particular countries, or regions, such as the European Union.

*Sectoral studies of specific industry sectors and modes of cultural production and circulation such as journalism, game and music production, museums, or emerging ‘platform-native’ practices such streaming and vlogging.

*Historical approaches to platformization. Contributions that investigate the transformation of specific production practices as they become integrated with, or dependent on digital platforms.

*The policy implications of platformization on a local, national or regional level, or studies of policy interventions.

*Formal and informal efforts to resist platformization, such as the development of platform independent subscription-based distribution and monetization models.

*Infrastructural approaches that are sensitive to the material dimensions of platform-based modes of cultural production.

*Methodological interventions, which reflect on the methodologies employed when researching cultural production in platform ecosystems.

Timeline

750-word abstracts should be emailed to cfp@platformization.net by May 15, 2018. The abstract should articulate: 1) the issue or research question to be discussed, 2) the methodological or critical framework used, and 3) indicate the expected findings or conclusions. Decisions will be communicated to the authors by June 1, 2017.

Full papers of the selected abstracts should be submitted by September 15, 2018 to be discussed in the Toronto workshop.

On October 8-9, 2018 (right before AoIR 2018-Montreal), the special collection editors will organise a 2-day event hosted by the University of Toronto. Day 1 will feature a workshop hosted by the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. Workshop participation is not a condition for being included in the special collection. The workshop provides all thematic issue contributors an opportunity for debate and an initial round of feedback on the papers. Accommodation and catering during the event will be covered for accepted contributors. There is limited travel support for junior scholars.

The deadline for submitting the revised paper for double blind peer-review is December 1, 2018.

The planned publication date of this special collection of Social Media + Society is in the second half of 2019

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CFP> ‘The Spectre of Artificial Intelligence’

Still from George Lucas' THX1138

An interesting CFP for Spheres: Journal of Digital Culture. Heard through CDC Leuphana:

‘The Spectre of Artificial Intelligence‘

Over the last years we have been witnessing a shift in the conception of artificial intelligence, in particular with the explosion in machine learning technologies. These largely hidden systems determine how data is gathered, analyzed, and presented or used for decision-making. The data and how it is handled are not neutral, but full of ambiguity and presumptions, which implies that machine learning algorithms are constantly fed with biases that mirror our everyday culture; what we teach these algorithms ultimately reflects back on us and it is therefore no surprise when artificial neural networks start to classify and discriminate on the basis of race, class and gender. (Blockbuster news regarding that women are being less likely to get well paid job offers shown through recommendation systems, a algorithm which was marking pictures of people of color as gorillas, or the delivery service automatically cutting out neighborhoods in big US cities where mainly African Americans and Hispanics live, show how trends of algorithmic classification can relate to the restructuring of the life chances of individuals and groups in society.) However, classification is an essential component of artificial intelligence, insofar as the whole point of machine learning is to distinguish ‘valuable’ information from a given set of data. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter, that is to differentiate signals from noise, machine learning algorithms become a highly political issue. The crucial question in relation to machine learning therefore is: how can we systematically classify without being discriminatory?In the next issue of spheres, we want to focus on current discussions around automation, robotics and machine learning, from an explicitly political perspective. Instead of invoking once more the spectre of artificial intelligence – both in its euphoric as well as apocalyptic form – we are interested in tracing human and non-human agency within automated processes, discussing the ethical implications of machine learning, and exploring the ideologies behind the imaginaries of AI. We ask for contributions that deal with new developments in artificial intelligence beyond the idiosyncratic description of specific features (e.g. symbolic versus connectionist AI, supervised versus unsupervised learning) by employing diverse perspectives from around the world, particularly the Global South. To fulfil this objective, we would like to arrange the upcoming issue around three focal points:

  1. Reflections dealing with theoretical (re-)conceptualisations of what artificial intelligence is and should be. What history do the terms artificiality, intelligence, learning, teaching and training have and what are their hidden assumptions? How can human intelligence and machine intelligence be understood and how is intelligence operationalised within AI? Is machine intelligence merely an enhanced form of pattern recognition? Why do ’human’ prejudices re-emerge in machine learning algorithms, allegedly devised to be blind to them?
  2. Implications focusing on the making of artificial intelligence. What kind of data analysis and algorithmic classification is being developed and what are its parameters? How do these decisions get made and by whom? How can we hold algorithms accountable? How can we integrate diversity, novelty and serendipity into the machines? How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs? How is data defined in the context of specific geographies? Who becomes classified as threat according to algorithmic calculations and why?
  3. Imaginaries revealing the ideas shaping artificial intelligence. How do pop-cultural phenomena reflect the current reconfiguration of human-machine-relations? What can they tell us about the techno-capitalist unconscious? In which way can artistic practices address the current situation? What can we learn from historical examples (e.g. in computer art, gaming, music)? What would a different aesthetic of artificial intelligence look like? How can we make the largely hidden processes of algorithmic filtering visible? How to think of machine learning algorithms beyond accuracy, efficiency, and homophily?

Deadlines

If you would like to submit an article or other, in particular artistic contribution (music, sound, video, etc.) to the issue, please get in touch with the editorial collective (contact details below) as soon as possible. We would be grateful if you would submit a provisional title and short abstract (250 words, max) by 15 May, 2018. We may have questions or suggestions that we raise at this point. Otherwise, final versions of articles and other contributions should please be submitted by 31 August, 2018. They will undergo review in accordance with the peer review process (s. About spheres). Any revisions requested will need to be completed so that the issue can be published in Winter 2018.

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CFP – Beyond measure, ephemera journal

Generative Artwork Forkbomb, by Alex McLean, glitched

This looks interesting…

Beyond measure

submission deadline 1 March 2018

PDF icon CfP Beyond measure.pdf

Issue editors: Nick Butler, Helen Delaney, Emilie Hesselbo and Sverre Spoelstra

Measurement is a central task of capitalist organization. From the days of the industrial factory, when labour first came to be measured in hours, through to the time-motion studies under Taylorist regimes, measurement has involved the optimization of surplus value extraction from labour. During the 20th century, these techniques of measurement were complemented by more intrusive forms of quantification such as the use of psychological testing in the human relations school.

The will to quantify continues today with balanced scorecards and activity-based costing (Power, 2004), the discourse of employability (Chertkovskaya, et al., 2013), the monitoring of work in the service economy (Dowling, 2007), and the performativity of economics (Callon, 1998). At the same time, others point to the impossibility of measuring affective work and immaterial labour (Hardt and Negri, 2000). More generally, ‘trust in numbers’ (Porter, 1995) – based on a longstanding infatuation with the ideal of objectivity (Stengers, 2000) – is becoming characteristic of a totally quantified society in which we keep track of our diet, fitness, sleeping habits, and menstrual cycles via digital tracking technologies (Charitsis, 2016).

Quantification also lies at the heart of knowledge production in the business school (Zyphur et al., 2016). Ever since the early influence of Paul Lazarsfeld (1993) in the post-war years, management science has been preoccupied with the measurement of ‘objects’, ranging from things that are straightforwardly measurable (e.g. the height of employees in leadership positions) to things that are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify (e.g. charisma, authenticity, ethics). Despite a half-century of criticism directed at the positivist tradition in the social sciences, management science still holds to the McNamara fallacy: ‘If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist’. The politics of measurement in management theory and practice – and its link to the logic of capitalist exploitation – therefore deserve sustained critical scrutiny.

For this ephemera special issue, we invite papers that explore the stakes of measuring organizations and their members – especially in contested zones of quantification. For instance, what happens when employees are measured not just in terms of productivity but also their health and well-being (Cederström and Spicer, 2015)? What happens when leaders are measured not just in terms of bottom-line performance but also their authenticity or spirituality (Ford and Harding, 2011)? Closer to home, what happens when academics are measured not just in terms of the quality of their scholarship but also their citation rate and H-index (Nkomo, 2009)?

But we are also interested in what is beyond measure – that is, the relation between organizing and the immeasurable. Here, religion and spirituality come into view. One may think of themes such as the call for a ‘higher purpose’ in work, the role of faith and spirituality in business, and the presence of organizational figures who defy measurement (idols, spirits, ghosts, monsters, etc.). Deleuze (1995: 181) famously said that the idea that organizations have a soul is ‘the most terrifying news in the world’. For us, this is no longer news but perhaps all the more terrifying for it.

Efforts to quantify aspects of our organizational lives give rise to new and complex ethical questions around work, identity and politics. We therefore invite submissions that may include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

  • Measuring organizations, management and leadership
  • The excessive, the limitless and the infinite
  • Big data and algorithmic management
  • The quantified self and digital measurement technologies
  • The turn to ‘objectivity’ in the social sciences
  • Zero and nothingness
  • The performativity of measures
  • Value theory and the immeasurability of labour
  • The reevaluation of values
  • Faith and spirituality in business
  • Time-motion studies and their contemporary equivalents
  • Death and ‘the great beyond’ in organization
  • The use of psychometric instruments in management theory and practice
  • Commensuration and incommensurability in organizational theory and practice
  • The politics of performance audits
  • Measuring the immeasurable

Deadline and further information

The deadline for submissions is 1st March 2018. All submissions should be sent to one of the special issue editors: Nick Butler (nick.butler@sbs.su.se), Helen Delaney (h.delaney@auckland.ac.nz), Emilie Hesselbo (emilie.hesselbo@fek.lu.se) or Sverre Spoelstra (sverre.spoelstra@fek.lu.se). ephemeraencourages contributions in a variety of formats including articles, notes, interviews, book reviews, photo essays and other experimental modes of representation. The submissions will undergo a double-blind review process. All submissions should follow ephemera’s submission guidelines, which are available at: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/how-submit (see ‘Abc of formatting’ guide). For further information, please contact one of the special issue editors.