Forskere fra SHAPE-projektet ’Den digitale borger’ organiserer et åbent panel med titlen ’Socio-Technical Data Studies’ ved den sjette nordiske Science and Technology Studies-konference i Oslo d. 7.-9. juni 2023. Konferencen afholdes af Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture ved Universitetet i Oslo.

Med temaet Disruption and Repair in and beyond STS vil dette års nordiske STS-konference sætte fokus på, hvordan fagligheder på tværs af STS (Science and Technology Studies) kan bidrage med perspektiver og værktøjer til at forstå aktuelle kriser – heriblandt klimakrisen, pandemier, krig i Europa, terrorisme i Norden og stigende social ulighed - såvel som deres historiske, tekniske og politiske kontekster.

Det åbne panel, ’Socio-Technical Data Studies’, ønsker at undersøge, hvad sociotekniske datastudier kan indebære og byder præsentationer, som beskæftiger sig med data og digitalisering fra et socioteknisk perspektiv, velkomne (mere information om konference-abstracts nedenfor):

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