[Bigdatasur] Fwd: Computing in/from the South --- call for contributors

[Stefania Milan]

Dear friends and colleagues, this call for contributions might be of interest to some of you..
Have a great weekend, Stefania

> "Computing in/from the South"
> 
> Edited by Sareeta Amrute and Luis Felipe R. Murillo
> Afterword by Kavita Philip and Anusuya Sengupta
> 
> A Special Section of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
> 
> Computer expertise involves technical competence, infrastructures,
> interdependent economies, and distinctive political projects. Yet, most
> often, computing is examined from Silicon Valley outwards. In this
> special issue, we reverse this polarity by asking, what does computing
> expertise as political action look like from the South? Following on
> John and Jean’s Comaroff’s Theory from the South (2014), the emergent
> literature on the "Globalization from below" (Alba, Lins Ribeiro,
> Matthews, Vega, 2015), and feminist approaches to technoscience that
> stress entanglements between bodies and materials (Barad 2007, Haraway
> 1991, Chun 2013) and the political and economic formations such
> entanglements may yield (Suchman 2015, Atanasoski and Vora 2015,
> McGlotten 2016), these articles investigate what it means to
> re-territorialize and prefigure technopolitical projects outside the
> main axes of digital work.
> 
> Journalistic and other professional accounts of computing have helped to
> create a reified depiction of an undifferentiated expert community along
> class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and other socioeconomic dimensions.
> Ethnographic work has contributed a different picture through the
> examination of the liberal roots of various Free and Open Source
> communities (Coleman 2012; Kelty 2008; Leach 2009) and by looking at the
> labor of "other" experts beyond the metropolitan centers (Philip, Irani,
> and Dourish 2012; Takhteyev 2012; Chan 2013; Amrute 2016). This special
> section explores distinctive manifestations of technical politics in the
> Global South, understood as a position in unfolding sociotechnical
> relationships as much as a geopolitical location. Through computer
> experts' work and technopolitical imaginaries we ask, how might new
> political forms incorporate the market logics of competitiveness,
> agility, autonomy, and risk while contending with non-liberal and, at
> times, anti-capitalistic dispositions? How does shifting the dominant
> perspectives on computing afford an alternate view of progress and
> future societies? How do models of technical innovation become tied to
> state practices, public policies, expert community-building, and the
> everyday labor of embodied technical work? How do practitioners ‘of the
> South’ pursue feminist and queer, anti-gentrification and
> free/open-source projects that might both yield viable substitute models
> and intensify relations of debt and inequality for, and crucially,
> within, the South?
> 
> We welcome articles that investigate computing from the standpoint of
> the South — that is, from a standpoint that begins with conditions of
> life outside the presumed model of computing in Silicon Valley and other
> hegemonic Euro-American centers of IT development— to bring into the
> purview of sociotechnical analyses computing problems of innovation and
> extraction, expertise and labor, development and precarity across race,
> ethnicity, gender, ability, cultural capital, and class.
> 
> Contributors might use this opportunity to examine how practices of
> computing are linked to nation-making through promissory strategies
> (Patel 2015), how computing from the South re-configures expert models
> and infrastructures across political locations, and how practices of
> refusal make their way into current imaginaries of computing (Pilar
> 2016, cardenas 2015). Drawing from varied modes of technical and
> political engagement, articles may engage phenomena ordinarily broken up
> into disciplinary topics (moral and political economy, labor, gender,
> virtuality, data infrastructures, finance, discourse, political
> institutions, space and place-making, globalization, embodiment, and so
> on) and consider how they are held together, bracketed, obscured and
> transformed in computing practices. For our purposes, we seek to
> maintain a critical and transdisciplinary approach to the study of
> informational capitalism that can be amplified precisely by starting
> with an analysis of, and from, the South.
> 
> 
> HOW TO CONTRIBUTE
> 
> We welcome abstracts (max. 500 words) by June 15th. By September 30th,
> we will request a complete submission (max. 8.000 words) to be sent for
> peer-review. The volume has no disciplinary focus: we welcome
> contributions from anthropology, history, sociology, computer science
> (HCI, CSCW), Science and Technology Studies (STS), etc.
> 
> To send us your contribution, write to 'unixjazz at riseup.net <mailto:unixjazz at riseup.net>' and
> 'amrutes at uw.edu <mailto:amrutes at uw.edu>' with the following subject line: "Article for Catalyst:
> Computing in/from the South".
> 
> 
> REFERENCES
> 
> Alba Vega, Carlos; Gustavo Lins Ribeiro; Gordon Mathews and Mario A.
> Zamudio Vega. 2015. La globalización desde Abajo. La Otra Economía
> mundial. Cuidad de Mexico: Fondo de Cultura.
> 
> Amrute, Sareeta. 2016. Encoding Race Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers
> in Berlin. Durham: Duke University Press.
> 
> Atanasoski, Neda and Vora, Kalindi 2015. “Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman
> Networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor” Catalyst: Feminism,
> Theory, Technoscience. 1(1):1-40.
> 
> Barad, Karen Michelle. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
> Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.
> 
> cardenas, micha 2015. “Shifting Futures: Digital Trans of Color Praxis”
> Ada: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology.
> 
> Chan, Anita. 2013. Networking peripheries: technological futures and the
> myth of digital universalism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
> 
> Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2013. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory.
> Boston: The MIT Press.
> 
> Coleman, Gabriella. 2012. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of
> Hacking. Princeton University Press.
> 
> Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2014. Theory from the South, Or,
> How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. Boulder, CO: Paradigm
> Publishers.
> 
> Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
> Nature. New York: Routledge.
> 
> Kelty, Christopher. 2008. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free
> Software. Durham: Duke University Press.
> 
> Leach, James. 2009. “Freedom Imagined: Morality and Aesthetics in Open
> Source Software Design.” In: Ethnos, 74 (1): 51–71.
> 
> McGlotten, Shaka 2016. “Black Data” The Scholar and Feminist Online.
> Traversing Technologies, Special Issue. Edited by Patrick Kellty and
> Leslie Regan Shade. 13.3-14.1.
> http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/ <http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/>
> 
> Patel, Geeta 2015. “Seeding Debt: Alchemy, Death, and the Precarious
> Farming of Life-Finance in the Global South” Cultural Critique 89:1-37.
> 
> Pilar, Praba 2016. “Enigma Symbiotica” The Scholar and Feminist Online.
> Traversing Technologies, Special Issue. Edited by Patrick Kellty and
> Leslie Regan Shade. 13.3-14.1.
> http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/ <http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/>
> 
> Suchman, Lucy 2015 “Situational Awareness: Deadly Bioconvergence at the
> Boundaries of Bodies and Machines” MediaTropes 5(1):1-24.
> 
> Takhteyev, Yuri. 2012. Coding Places: Software Practice in a South
> American City. Cambridge: MIT Press.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ghserv.net/pipermail/bigdatasur/attachments/20180518/b2943518/attachment.html>