Hi all, A colleague and I are running an open panel at this year's annual 4S meeting, called Materialities of the Digital. I've included the abstract and submission info below. If you know of anyone who might be interested, could you pass it on? Or if YOU'RE interested, send something our way. (Submission info here: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting; deadline is March 29, 2015.) Really excited about this year's 4S theme of making and doing. Lots of interesting open panels. You can check them out here: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting/open_sessions. Thanks, ~Amy Materialities of the Digital Much popular discourse positions digital technologies as either phantom or prosthetic—presence without substance, or extension that enables new experience of the world. Think: Twitter and Google Glass. This phantom/prosthetic dichotomy is a curious one, one that demands scrutiny and challenge. What are the materialities of the digital? And what do we embrace—and hide—when we position them so? We investigate materiality broadly here. We include hardware and network materialities such as data centers and undersea cables, transistors and LCD crystals. Such materialities are often transmuted by metaphor: the cloud, the highway, the screen. Why are these materialities treated as elusive? What details are visible without this obscuring/illumination? We include classic bodily materialities—bodies themselves, but also physical extension through tactile interfaces and digital sex toys like RealTouch. What are the material practices of the digital? How do the shapes of bodies—and selves?—change as digital technologies transform boundaries and surroundings? As bodies/objects cross from one material channel to another? And we include relative materialities, such as language and script, bits and pixels, avatars and alts. Materialities that arise from their use as building blocks and tools, from their use as faces and agents that speak and remember. Components that undergird everything from affective emoji play to bots that shop the darknet. What does it mean to understand materiality as relative and relational? For this panel we invite papers drawing on diverse methodologies, from media studies and digital anthropology to feminist and queer theory, biomedicine, crip theory and disability studies, critical race studies, and neuroscience and neuroeconomics. Open session list here: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting/open_sessions Submissions info here: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting (deadline: March 29, 2015) --- Amy Johnson PhD candidate<http://web.mit.edu/hasts/graduate/johnson.html>, MIT HASTS Berkman Center for Internet & Society<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/ajohnson>, Harvard Keio International Project for Internet & Society<http://kipis.sfc.keio.ac.jp/people/amy-johnson/>, Keio University @shrapnelofme<https://twitter.com/shrapnelofme>