Dear Colleagues, 

Hope everyone is doing well. Our Program Committee (see below) is pleased to announce (provide this CFP for) CBI's interdisciplinary symposium, "Automation by Design." Bearing in mind the pandemic, and its possible influence on research plans this past year, we are offering considerable advance notice--proposals are due in late April 2022. Please email me, or other committee members, with any questions or if we can be of assistance. If your research aligns with any of the wide-ranging themes of "Automation by Design," we encourage you to submit a proposal. Please share this CFP with others who might be interested. Many thanks!

Best, Jeff 

CALL FOR PAPERS: 

Automation by Design: Politics, Culture, and Landscape in an Age of Machines That Learn

(A CBI Symposium)

Automation by Design is a global, interdisciplinary, virtual CBI symposium on the politics and culture of digital automation. We welcome papers in a broad range of fields across the humanities and social sciences. These include history, STS, sociology, anthropology, media studies, policy, legal studies, geography, communication, rhetoric, information studies, and philosophy.

The platformization of society, fueled by automation and machine learning, impacts IT users in deleterious, discriminatory, democracy-threatening, and at times deadly, ways that intersect and compound. This symposium seeks papers that explore how automation—from its algorithmic and architectural design to its structuring, materiality, maintenance, and use—has developed jointly with social politics. We are especially interested in papers that address education, law, capitalism, labor, science, medicine, leisure, privacy/security, surveillance, the body, and the environment.

Automation by Design is a 1.5-day virtual symposium to be held Friday-Saturday, Feb. 17-18, 2023.  Presenting authors agree to submit a draft paper by a deadline preceding the event (to facilitate the delivery of feedback through videoconferencing workshops prior to the event), and a revised paper for consideration to an edited volume to be published with a major academic publisher.

To apply: Please send a 300 to 450-word abstract that includes discussion of research themes/questions, methods, and sources and a 2pp. CV. Please send (single PDF) to cbi@umn.edu by the deadline of April 29, 2022. (For accepted applicants, papers will be due Jan. 6, 2023).  

Program Committee:

Dr. Jeffrey Yost, CBI Dir. & Res. Prof., HSTM, Univ. of Minnesota

Dr. Gerardo Con Diaz, Assoc. Prof., STS, Univ. of California, Davis & Stanford Univ. Fellow

Dr. Honghong Tinn, Asst. Prof., HSTM & ECE, Univ. of Minnesota  

Dr. Colette Perold, Asst. Prof., Media Studies, Univ. of Colorado

[The Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) for Computing, Information, and Culture is a leading interdisciplinary research center and archives to advance the infrastructure and understanding of computing and society.] CBI Website