[SIGCIS-Members] CfP 4S/ESOCITE 2022 Open Panel: Technologies of Scalable Power: Big Data, Big Tech, ‘Cloud’ services, and scalable technoepistemics in global computing

Fri Apr 8 09:40:20 PDT 2022

Dear colleagues,

***Apologies for cross-posting.***

Our panel for 4S/ESOCITE 2022 (Cholula, México; 7-10 December 2022),
entitled "Technologies of Scalable Power: Big Data, Big Tech, ‘Cloud’
services, and scalable technoepistemics in global computing," is open for
submissions, which is due on Thursday, April 14, 2022. Please find the
details below.

Please also feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. I look
forward to receiving your abstracts!

Best regards,
Yoehan
----

*CONFERENCE INFORMATION*

The 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) / ESOCITE (Asociación
Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología) 2nd
Joint meeting

   - *Title: *Reunion, recuperation, reconfiguration: Knowledges and
   technosciences for living together
   - *Date*: 7-10 December 2022
   - *Location*:  Cholula, México
   - *Conference meeting website*: https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/
   - *Key dates*:  https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/key-dates/

*OPEN PANEL INFORMATION*

   - *Webpage*:
   https://www.4sonline.org/127-technologies-of-scalable-power-big-data-big-tech-cloud-services-and-scalable-technoepistemics-in-global-computing/
   - *Call for Abstract *(as below):

127. *Technologies of Scalable Power**: *
*Big Data, Big Tech, ‘Cloud’ services, and scalable technoepistemics in
global computing*

This open panel invites global scholars interested in critical studies of
scalability technologies, computing and network architectures, and their
epistemic assumptions and infrastructures, which collectively render
various computing media scalable. Empirical examples include, but are not
limited to:

   - Cloud computing’s scalable/on-demand architectures
   - Big data analysis tools (e.g. Hadoop; Stevens 2016)
   - Distributed and parallel computing systems (e.g. MapReduce, GPU)
   - microservices (vs. monolithic), Observability, DevOps, AIOps
   - Open source cloud infrastructure (e.g. OpenStack, Apache CloudStack)

Our shared consciousness is threefold. First, thematically/politically,
this open panel collectively aims at elaborating on the recent macroscale
theses interested in global extractive data practices by a few Big
platforms, such as “Data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias 2021) and “platform
capitalism” (Srnicek 2017; Birch & Cochrane 2021) by focusing on the
specificity and technicality of certain computing and media practices in
their micro/mesoscale that have provided such global platforms with various
kinds of means of scalable growth and expansion in computational, material,
operational, and logistic terms. We also interrogate how those practices
have reinforced Silicon Valley’s privilege of leading global
techno-episteme. We hope our work to contribute to the discussions as to
how decolonial and deimperial digital cultures could be conceived of (Asif
2019; Ochigame 2020).

Second, epistemologically, this panel means to contribute to works in
critical and hermeneutic understandings of computing architectures,
programming languages, and its accompanying logistical assumptions and
epistemic infrastructures (Malazita 2022) such as Ubiquitous Computing
(Dourish & Mainwaring 2012), UNIX’s modular principles with pipeline
communications (McPherson 2012), and the success of a Brazil computer
scientists-invented programming language in Silicon Valley but not in its
homecountry (Takhteyev 2015).

Third, methodologically and theoretically, this panel deepens our
meta-reflections by ethically and responsibly relying upon existing
conceptual works about scalability from ethnography (Fortun 2009; Tsing
2012), Computer supported cooperative work (Ribes 2014), critical geography
(Frickel & Kinchy 2015), and innovation policy studies (Pfotenhauer et al.
2021) among others.

REFERENCES

   - Asif, Manan Ahmed. 2019. “Technologies of Power – From Area Studies to
   Data Sciences.” *Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures*, no. #5 Spectres
   of AI (November).
   https://spheres-journal.org/contribution/technologies-of-power-from-area-studies-to-data-sciences/
   .
   - Birch, Kean, and D. T. Cochrane. 2021. “Big Tech: Four Emerging Forms
   of Digital Rentiership.” *Science as Culture*, May, 1–15.
   https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2021.1932794.
   - Couldry, Nick, and Ulises Ali Mejias. 2021. “The Decolonial Turn in
   Data and Technology Research: What Is at Stake and Where Is It
Heading?” *Information,
   Communication & Society*, November, 1–17.
   https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1986102.
   - Dourish, Paul, and Scott D. Mainwaring. 2012. “Ubicomp’s Colonial
   Impulse.” In *Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous
   Computing – UbiComp ’12*, 133–42. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: ACM Press.
   https://doi.org/10.1145/2370216.2370238.
   - Fortun, Kim. 2009. “Scaling and Visualizing Multi-Sited Ethnography,”
   in M.-A. Falzon (ed.), *Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and
   Locality in Contemporary Social Research*, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 73–85.
   - Frickel, Scott, and Abby Kinchy. 2015. “Lost in space: Geographies of
   ignorance in science and technology studies.” In *Routledge
   international handbook of ignorance studies*, pp. 174-182. Routledge.
   - Malazita, James W. 2022. “Epistemic Infrastructures, the Instrumental
   Turn, and the Digital Humanities” *People, Practice, Power: Digital
   Humanities outside the Center*, Eds. Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves,
   Siobhan Senier, University of Minnesota Press.
   - McPherson, Tara. 2012. “US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The
   Intertwining of Race and UNIX.” In *Race after the Internet*, edited by
   Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, 21–37. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New
   York: Routledge. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10535025.
   - Ochigame, Rodrigo. 2020. “Informatics of the oppressed.” *LOGIC *11:
   53-74. https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/
   - Pfotenhauer, Sebastian, Brice Laurent, Kyriaki Papageorgiou, and and
   Jack Stilgoe. 2021. “The politics of scaling.” *Social Studies of
   Science*: 03063127211048945.
   - Ribes, David. 2014. “Ethnography of scaling, or, how to fit a national
   research infrastructure in the room.” In *Proceedings of the 17th ACM
   conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing*,
   pp. 158-170. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531624
   - Srnicek, Nick. 2017. *Platform Capitalism*. John Wiley & Sons.
   - Stevens, Hallam. 2016. “Hadooping the Genome: The Impact of Big Data
   Tools on Biology.” *BioSocieties* 11 (3): 352–71.
   https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-016-0003-6.
   - Takhteyev, Yuri. 2012. *Coding places: Software practice in a South
   American city*. MIT Press.
   - Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2012) “On nonscalability: The living world is
   not amenable to precision-nested scales.” *Common Knowledge* 18(3):
   505–524.

*Contact*: yoehan.oh at gmail.com

*Keywords*: scalability, cloud computing, critical data studies, software
studies, information infrastructure studies

*Submission website*: https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/ssss22/

-- 
Yoehan Oh
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Science and Technology Studies
The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Rensselaer Polytechnic institute
110 Eighth Street
Troy, NY 12180  United States
https://hass.rpi.edu/sts-graduate-students
https://info.rpi.edu/people/yoehan-oh
e-mail: ohy at rpi.edu ; yoehan.oh at gmail.com
phone: (518) 368-1257
pronoun: he/him
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/attachments/20220408/7a3a1cc4/attachment.htm>