Researchers from the SHAPE project ‘Digital Citizenship’ are organisers of a panel on ‘Socio-Technical Data Studies’ at the 6th Nordic Science and Technology Studies conference in Oslo on June 7-9, 2023. The conference is hosted by Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo.

With the theme Disruption and Repair in and beyond STS, this year’s Nordic STS conference will focus on how disciplines across STS (Science and Technology Studies) can contribute with perspectives and tools to understand ongoing crises – including the climate crisis, pandemics, war in Europe, terrorism in the Nordics, and rising social inequalities – as well as their historical, technical, and political contexts.

The open panel, ‘Socio-Technical Data Studies’, wants to investigate what sociotechnical data studies might entail and welcomes presentations concerned with data and digitization from a sociotechnical perspective (more information on paper abstracts below):

Socio-Technical Data Studies

Panel organisers: Peter Danholt, Peter Lauritsen, Patrick Heiberg Kapsch, and Antoinette Fage-Butler

Sociotechnical as in actor-network theory or material-semiotic as in feminist STS, implies an ontology in which facts, technology, organizations, infrastructures - ‘worlds’ broadly speaking, are thought of and studied as heterogenous assemblages. It implies an ontology in which things are comprised of various elements and forces. An ontology that knows no boundaries. Or at least no boundaries should be assumed, only empirically found. In this panel we want to investigate what sociotechnical data studies might entail. In widespread and prevalent technology optimist discourses, data is endowed with huge potential. For instance, in the two recent reports issued by the Danish Agency of Digital Government, data is presented as a “resource” – in Danish “råstof” - that will make welfare services more effective, better and more cost effective. Data is articulated as a driver for innovation and growth in businesses; it will decrease energy consumption and solve the climate crisis and so on. Characteristic of the discourse are ideas about data as universal, transcendent, neutral, objective etc. In the field of critical data studies such conceptions have been rightfully challenged. But in the field of critical data studies and also in current public discourses, data is articulated as means for surveillance, exploitation, disciplining and manipulation, most famously expressed in the work of Shoshana Zuboff. The promises as well as the dark sides of data thus live side by side. Shared by both the optimistic and pessimistic discourses are ideas about the force and agency of data, but in shifting ways. In one instance, data seems to hold tremendous power, while in the next that very power is ridiculed. Ironically, in critical data studies one finds such asymmetrical discourses that first ridicule ideas about data ‘as the new oil’, yet in the next, grant data the role as being a forceful perpetrator of malicious acts. The obvious response in STS to such ‘inconsistencies’ is to ‘get empirical’ and closer to the practice and subject matter and approach it as a sociotechnical problem. Sociotechnical approaches to data thus seem pertinent. Yet how do we study and research these complex digital infrastructures in other than rudimentary ways? Opening the ‘black box’ of data and digital infrastructures seems to be a wholly different challenge than unpacking speedbumps, door-closers, guns and hotel keys… or is it? Have the tools of STS become feeble and weak in an arms race against the digital? And what are the ontological politics of data and digital infrastructures? How do data weave together new ontologies and thus novel ontological problems? In short, how do we go about doing sociotechnical data studies? This panel invites presentations that:

• Theorize and conceptualize data and digitalization as sociotechnical
• Propose ways and methods of studying data as sociotechnical
• Present empirical sociotechnical studies of data and the digital
• Investigate the relation between data, democracy and digital citizenship as a sociotechnical problem
• Other…

Submit your abstract here

Deadline for submitting abstracts: March 1, 2023

See all open panels at the Nordic STS Conference 2023