Over the last years, we have seen an increasing interest in the
overlapping areas of STS and Media Studies towards examining the multifaceted
vulnerabilities of technical objects. Within STS, research on maintenance and
repair practices has been attracting growing attention since the works of Susan
Leigh Star (1999) and Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol (2000), which set the
ground for the study of the vulnerability of sociotechnical networks. A number
of contributions have then addressed issues relating to obsolescence and
fragility, durability and tinkering, adaptation and re-use, to the extent that
a distinctive interdisciplinary field of inquiry – Maintenance and repair
studies (MRS) – has emerged. Among the valuable insights offered by this field
of inquiry is the transformative power of moments of vulnerability, which
becomes evident when we consider how innovation emerges from obsolescence,
maintenance and repair, and how new sociomaterial, ethical and political
orders, as well as new geographies of responsibility are established through
the practices that deal with technical vulnerability.
Similarly, in Media Studies, growing attention has been paid to the to
the ever-shifting relations between “old” and “new” media, to the suppressed,
the outmoded and the technological dead ends in media history – see, for
instance, Huhtamo and Parikka’s Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications,
and Implications (2011) - to how “old” media may survive in residual conditions
and be reactivated or reinvented in multiple ways (see Acland’s Residual Media
[2007]), and to how allegedly “dead media” can be materially revived by a
politically infomed art method which Jussi Parikka and Garnet Hertz notoriously
described as “hardware hacking” (2012).
Way beyond the strictly historiographic level, the discussion on these
topics raised new social concerns, problematising the effects of the planned
obsolescence pursued by commercial industry as well as the material aspects of
mass-produced technology – which enhanced a focus on the conditions of hardware
circulation, accumulation, disposal, decomposition, recycling and renewal also
from an ecological angle. This growing awareness that the study of media change
should include their life cycles as material objects, reflects a more general
interest in taking into account the moments of transformation in the social
biographies of media technologies which often correspond to their critical
moments of vulnerability.
We aim to enable a fruitful discussion between exponents from the fields
of STS and Media Studies concerning the manifold processes of transformation
fostered by or related to the vulnerabilities of technical objects over the
course of their biographies. Thus, we call for papers which address, among
others, questions about differences in understandings and vocabularies as well
as explorations of empirical, methodological, and theoretical overlappings.
Track 13:
- Disappearance, maintenance and reinvention in the biographies of technical objects.
- Perspectives on the transformative vulnerabilities of technology at the intersection between STS and Media Studies.
Abstracts submission
Submission (to the conference email address stsitaliaconf@gmail.com and
to the emails of convernors' selected track) should include:
- Author's name and surname, affiliation and email address
- Presentation title
- Abstract (less than 300 words)
Deadline for submission: 9 February 2020
Convenors:
Sergio Minniti, University of Padova, sergio.minniti@unipd.it
Diego Cavallotti, University of Cagliari, diego.cavallotti@unica.it
Simone Dotto, University of Udine, simone.dotto@uniud.it
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