I’m writing to let you know about a deadline extension for “Maintainers II: Labor, Technology, and Social Orders,” a conference that will be held on April 6-8 2017 at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.  We previously posted a deadline of December 1, but in this season of deadline extensions, we decided to move the proposal deadline to Thursday December 15.  

The CFP is posted here: http://themaintainers.org/maintainers-ii-cfp/.  It reads, in part, "Recent scholarship on technology has too often fetishized material things and their thinginess, and excluded any consideration of the humans who make those things work. The purpose of Maintainers II is to write humans back into stories of technology, as a way to highlight social inequalities, racial and ethnic disparities, and the structural maldistribution of the fruits of technological progress.”  

I am sure people on this list will recognize themes here that connect to our collective work in the histories of computers & computerization, networks, automation, and so on.  Several SIGCIS members made terrific contributions to last year’s conference on the subjects of software/OS maintenance, PC repair, the Internet, and so on.  If you have questions, suggestions, etc., please contact me or lee.vinsel@gmail.com.

All the best,

Andy