[SIGCIS-Members] SIGCIS 2022 CFP: UNDER CONSTRUCTION | Due June 1

Tue Mar 29 10:03:04 PDT 2022

Dear SIGCIS Community,

The SIGCIS Conference Organizing Committee is pleased to *announce the CFP
for our 2022 SIGCIS Conference, **UNDER CONSTRUCTION*. Our keynote for the
event is Lilly Irani <https://quote.ucsd.edu/lirani/>, Associate Professor
in the Department of Communication & Science Studies at the University of
California, San Diego.

The SIGCIS Conference will take place *November 13th, 2022 in New Orleans,
Louisiana, USA, *on the Sunday of the SHOT conference. *Abstracts are due
June 1.*

Below you can find the full CFP for this year's conference. The CFP can
also be viewed as a Google doc here <https://bit.ly/388L3Zk>, or at our
conference website: meetings.sigcis.org.

Please circulate widely, and we hope to see you at SIGCIS!

-Laine Nooney, Morgan G. Ames, Stephanie Dick, and Xiaochang Li

--------------------------------------------------------------

*UNDER CONSTRUCTION*

*New Orleans, LA, US | November 13, 2022*

The Special Interest Group in Computing, Information, and Society [SIGCIS]
welcomes submissions to their annual conference
meetings.sigcis.org

Proposal Due Date: June 1, 2022
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Lilly Irani
Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies
University of California, San Diego
THEME

A shovel strikes dirt in one country, and the Internet goes out in another.
Data centers are cooled by local water supplies, fiber-optic cable follows
the sightlines left by railroads and telegraph, global hardware
semiconductor supplies depend on the labor of rare earth mineral miners:
somehow computing always needs more. The past ten years, in particular,
have exhibited a perilous turn in the political economy of computing, as
software became service, programming became agile, and storage became
cloud. This new regime is driven by an accelerated mode of iterative
software development that increasingly relies on post-sales bug fixes,
security patches, and performance upgrades, producing a litany of products
and services whose endless failures aid some and threaten others. From the
communities subject to such “innovation” to the shadow workers paid to “be”
artificial intelligence to the coders pushing ambient updates by the
millions, risk hums through it all. Computation today is locked in a state
of perpetual beta testing, forever promising “improved” features—just don’t
ask when it will end, and don’t ask who’s doing the work. In the meantime,
these new standards of practice generate new labor and resource demands,
new forms of risk, and new challenges for accountability and intervention
alike.

Yet the patched and partial nature of computing isn’t new. Computing is
infrastructure, requiring its own forms of construction and maintenance
throughout its history, whether tearing up roads, detangling spaghetti
code, or hastily soldering circuits. These are metaphors for history too:
what better encapsulates the sentiment of doing history, than the feeling
that it will never be done? For historians of information and computing
itself, such anxieties are particularly acute due to the objects under
examination: constant upgrades, absent documentation, planned obsolescence,
the failure of historic hardware. For every line of code we save, hundreds,
thousands, disappear. As we work to make sense of our contemporary
conditions, how does the undone quality of history affect our ability to
tell it?

The 2022 SIGCIS Conference, convening in-person in New Orleans on November
13 following the SHOT Annual Meeting, invites scholars, museum and archive
professionals, journalists, IT practitioners, artists, and independent
researchers across the disciplinary spectrum to submit abstracts related to
the historical conditions of computing. We are especially interested in
(but not limited to) work that relates to the theme of construction,
maintenance, and labor, broadly and imaginatively construed. Areas of
engagement may include:

   -

   Maintenance and infrastructure in the history of computing and
   information tech
   -

   Historically-oriented approaches to the platform and gig economies
   -

   Computing as a site of labor struggle
   -

   Networks, borders, boundaries
   -

   Computational models of resistance: obfuscation, open-source, hacking,
   going “off grid”
   -

   Government’s historic role in the construction of computing industries
   and infrastructure
   -

   Communitarian and utopian applications of computing
   -

   Updates, upgrades, failures, and bugs
   -

   Modding, re-using, recycling, afterlives
   -

   Archival and curatorial practices and methods
   -

   Oral history, memory, forgetting
   -

   The limits of historical representation

SIGCIS is especially welcoming of new directions in scholarship. We
maintain an inclusive atmosphere for scholarly inquiry, supporting
disciplinary interventions from beyond the traditional history of
technology and promoting diversity in STEM. We welcome submissions from:
the histories of technology, computing, information, and science; science
and technology studies; oral history and archival studies; critical studies
of big data and machine learning; studies of women, gender, and sexuality;
studies of race, ethnicity, and postcoloniality; film, media, and game
studies; software and code studies; network and internet histories; music,
sound studies, and art history; and all other applicable domains.

The annual SIGCIS Conference begins immediately after the regular annual
meeting of our parent organization, the Society for the History of
Technology [SHOT]. Information about the annual SHOT conference can be found
at: https://bit.ly/3Nswik2

SUBMISSION FORMATS

SIGCIS welcomes proposals for individual 15-20 minute papers, 3-4 paper
panel proposals, and non-traditional proposals such as roundtables,
software demonstrations, art and music performances, hands-on workshops,
etc.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURES

Submissions are due June 1, 2022 via Google form:
<https://forms.gle/C8ixar9s3JsCXq8d9>https://forms.gle/sLRowEDz6QitKCfv9.

Submissions require:

   -

   300-350 word abstract, summary, or prospectus (as appropriate for the
   submission type). Full panel proposals should additionally include 200-250
   word abstracts for each paper that will be part of the panel.
   -

   100-150 word bios for each participant

If you are submitting a co-presented paper, pre-constituted panel, or other
submission involving multiple participants, please only have one person
submit for the group; contact and professional information for other
participants can be included in the Bio submission section.

Questions about the submission process should be sent to:
xiaochang.li at stanford.edu.

COSTS/REGISTRATION

While last year’s online conference was pay-what-you-can, hosting an
in-person event incurs costs related to room and A/V rental, catering, etc.
These costs are subsidized in part by our parent organization, SHOT, but
participants should expect registration fees in the range of $45-50 for
SHOT attendees and $90-120 for those only attending Sunday SIGCIS
Conference (we list these rates in good faith, but they are subject to
change). Attending SHOT has its own registration costs.

TRAVEL AND CARE GRANTS

As a new initiative, SIGCIS will be offering grants to support travel
expenses and/or expenses related to child, elder, and other forms of care
for presenters whose responsibilities at home may present a barrier to
in-person participation. The top financial priority of SIGCIS is support
for graduate students, visiting faculty without institutional travel
support, and others who would be unable to attend the meeting without
travel assistance. We understand that for some, participation is more
contingent on childcare or elder care, and as such we are opening up these
grants to provide that form of support as well.

There is no separate application form, though depending on the volume of
requests and available resources we may need to contact you for further
information before making a decision.

Any award offered is contingent on registering for and attending the SIGCIS
Conference. Please note that SHOT does not classify the SIGCIS Conference
as participation in the SHOT annual meeting, so acceptance by SIGCIS does
not imply eligibility for the SHOT travel grant program.

ACCESSIBILITY ACCOMMODATIONS REQUESTS

The submission Google form will include a field where individuals may make
requests for accessibility accommodations. Since our event is coordinated
by our parent organization, SHOT, we cannot guarantee our ability to meet
all accommodation requests. However, our intent will always be to advocate
to meet the accessibility needs of our participants.

SIGCIS MEETINGS ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Laine Nooney, New York University (SIGCIS Vice-Chair of Meetings)
Morgan Ames, University of California, Berkeley
Stephanie Dick, Simon Fraser University
Xiaochang Li, Stanford University

----

Laine Nooney <http://www.lainenooney.com/>

MCC <http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/> @ NYU <http://www.nyu.edu/>
Assistant Professor

-Need to make an appt? Click, don't email: https://bit.ly/2GIHuK0
-Probably typed by voice recognition, so please cherish typos
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