S.NET once stood for Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies and then the name started changing with the most recent being, Society of the Studies of New and Emerging Technologies. As I noted in my 2017 end-of-year comments (Dec. 30, 2017 posting), the nano blogosphere is also shifting as nanotechnology is being absorbed into and enables other scientific and technical efforts.
S.NET is celebrating its 10th year at their annual meeting, which will be held in Maastricht (Netherlands). Here’s their call for papers,
2018 Annual S.NET Meeting
Image: Geert Budenaerts, Wikimedia
CALL for PAPERS.
The 10th annual S.NET meeting will take place June 25-27, 2018 at the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. The theme is Anticipatory Technologies: Data and Disorientation.
Invitation
S.NET invites contributions to the tenth annual meeting of The Society for the Study of New and Emerging Technologies (S.NET), to be held at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, on June 25 – 27, 2018. The three-day conference will assemble scholars, practitioners and policy makers from around the world interested in the development and implications of emerging technologies.
About S.NET
S.NET is an international association that promotes intellectual exchange and critical inquiry about the advancement of new and emerging technologies in society. The aim of the association is to advance critical reflection from various perspectives on developments in a broad range of new and emerging fields, including, but not limited to, nanoscale science and engineering, biotechnology, synthetic biology, cognitive science, ICT and Big Data, and geo-engineering. Current S.NET board members are: Michael Bennett (chair), Marianne Boenink, Ana Delgado, Clare Shelley-Egan, Chris Toumey, Poonam Pandey, Christopher Coenen, Colin Milburn, Kornelia Konrad, Nora Vaage, Maria Belen Albornoz, and Ryan LaBar.
Conference Theme: Anticipatory technologies – data and disorientation
Any effort on new and emerging technologies unavoidably deals with the non-existing and the speculative. The future is permanently mobilized to promote decisions and policies regarding the science, technology and society nexus. Anticipatory technologies like predictive policing and preventive medicine promise to give us better epistemic access and practical control over the future. The basic irony, however, is that anticipatory technologies do not only increase data but also disorientation. Is the disorientation vis-á-vis the future in spite of the astonishing growth of data, or can it be a result of that growth? Does the growing control over future events in terms of risk make people more acutely aware of what they don’t control? Contributions are invited that explore existing ways in which the future is mobilized, technologically mediated, and economically exploited; that map the manifold ways it is contested both in discourse and in action; and that reflect on the extent to which new technologies ironically undermine our faith in the future.
Key note speakers
Prof Cyrus Mody is an historian of recent science and technology and has published on the history of nanotechnology and micro-electronics. He studies the commercialization of academic research, countercultural science and technology, and the longue durée of responsible research and innovation. He worked at Rice University, Texas, the NSF Center for Nanotechnology in Society and now has a chair at Maastricht University.
Prof Marjolein van Asselthas a strong profile on governance, risk and uncertainty in both academic and policy circles. Currently she is member of the Dutch Safety Board and was a member of the Scientific Council for Government Policy for many years. She has a Governance chair at Maastricht University.
Third key note speaker to be announced.
Themes, topics and conference strands for the 10th Annual Meeting
S.NET encompasses communities, perspectives, and methodologies from across the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences, and welcomes contributions from technology developers and other practitioners. The program committee invites contributions from the full breadth of disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives, as well as from applied, participatory, and practical approaches to studying these emerging fields. Regionally or internationally comparative perspectives are especially welcome. Possible themes and topics have been organized into one overarching conference theme and six ‘strands’. While applicants are asked to indicate the strand relevant to the topic of their paper, submissions dealing with themes or topics outside the present strands are also welcome.
R&D practices and the dynamics of new and emerging sciences and technologies
Research networks & collaborations, ways of organizing research & development, emerging research fields, practices of ‘doing’ new and emerging fields of science and technology, including historical and philosophical studies of these practices.
Innovation and the use of new and emerging sciences and technologies
Innovation networks and systems, commercialization, implications for industry structures, translation from lab to practice, application and use of products and other innovations, critical analyses of growth and consumption, including economic, social and cultural approaches of innovation processes.
Governance of newly emerging sciences and technologies
Regulations, anticipatory governance practices, risk assessment, risk concerns, (constructive) TA, forms of public participation and engagement, including critical evaluation of forms of governance.
Visions and cultural imaginaries of newly emerging sciences and technologies
Promises, expectations, visions, science fiction, imagination, socio – technical change, moral change, role of media, including assessments of such visions and analyses of their role in innovation processes.
Publics and their relations to newly emerging science s and technologies
Science communication, risk communication, public engagement, participation and discourses on NEST, science museums, informal science learning initiatives, including critical evaluation of such initiatives and the notion of ‘publics’.
Politics and ethics of new and emerging sciences and technologies
Responsible innovation, (in)equality, equity, development, global and social distribution of benefits and risks, sustainability, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ impacts of emerging technologies, including theoretical perspectives on NEST and global developments.
How to apply
S.NET encourages proposals for individual papers, posters, traditional panels, roundtable discussions and other innovative formats. Abstracts should be approximately 250 words in length. Proposals for panel sessions should include a general introduction and abstracts of the separate contributions. Proposals should include the theme or strand to which the abstract/panel session is submitted. If an abstract fits more strands, or does not fit the existing strands, simply note that in your submission. The deadline for abstract submissions is March 2, 2018; send your abstract in PDF form to 2018snet@gmail.com. All submitters will be notified about the results of the review process by the end of April 2018. Details of the submission process are available online: www.maastrichtsts.nl/snet.
The local organizing committee
Tsjalling Swierstra, Harro van Lente, Nora Vaage, Conor Douglas, Danielle Shanley, Darian Meacham, Cindy van Montfoort, Jacqueline Graff.
Location
Maastricht is an ancient Roman city of some 120.000 inhabitants in the south of The Netherlands and has a beautiful medieval inner-city. Generally known as the venue of the Treaty of Maastricht, it has a distinctly international orientation. Maastricht can easily be reached by plane, train and car. Maastricht University is internationally oriented; its students come from all over the world. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) is located in the centre of Maastricht.
The Society for the Study of New and Emerging Technologies (S.NET), which at one time was known as the Society for the Study of Nano and other Emerging Technologies, is holding its 2017 annual meeting in Arizona, US. Here’s more from a July 4, 2017 S.NET notice (received via email),
We have an exciting schedule planned for our 2017 meeting in Phoenix,
Arizona. Our confirmed plenary speakers –Professors Langdon Winner,
Alfred Nordmann and Ulrike Felt– and a diverse host of researchers from
across the planet promise to make this conference intellectually
engaging, as well as exciting.
If you haven’t already, make sure to register for the conference and the
dinner. THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN MOVED BACK TO JULY 14. 2017.
October 9-11, 2017, Arizona State University, Tempe (USA)
Conference Theme: Engaging the Flux
Even the most seemingly stable entities fluctuate over time. Facts and artifacts, cultures and constitutions, people and planets. As the new and the old act, interact and intra-act within broader systems of time, space and meaning, we observe—and necessarily engage with—the constantly changing forms of socio-technological orders. As scholars and practitioners of new and emerging sciences and technologies, we are constantly tracking these moving targets, and often from within them. As technologists and researchers, we are also acutely aware that our research activities can influence the developmental trajectories of our objects of concern and study, as well as ourselves, our colleagues and the governance structures in which we live and work.
“Engaging the Flux” captures this sense that ubiquitous change is all about us, operative at all observable scales. “Flux” points to the perishability of apparently natural orders, as well as apparently stable technosocial orders. In embracing flux as its theme, the 2017 conference encourages participants to examine what the widely acknowledged acceleration of change reverberating across the planet means for the production of the technosciences, the social studies of knowledge production, art practices that engage technosciences and public deliberations about the societal significance of these practices in the contemporary moment.
This year’s conference theme aims to encourage us to examine the ways we—as scholars, scientists, artists, experts, citizens—have and have not taken into account the myriad modulations flowing and failing to flow from our engagements with our objects of study. The theme also invites us to anticipate how the conditions that partially structure these engagements may themselves be changing.
Our goal is to draw a rich range of examinations of flux and its implications for technoscientific and technocultural practices, broadly construed. Questions of specific interest include: Given the pervasiveness of political, ecological and technological fluctuations, what are the most socially responsible roles for experts, particularly in the context of policymaking? What would it mean to not merely accept perishability, but to lean into it, to positively embrace the going under of technological systems? What value can imaginaries offer in developing navigational capacities in periods of accelerated change? How can young and junior researchers —in social sciences, natural sciences, humanities or engineering— position themselves for meaningful, rewarding careers given the complementary uncertainties? How can the growing body of research straddling art and science communities help us make sense of flux and chart a course through it? What types of recalibrations are called for in order to speak effectively to diverse, and increasingly divergent, publics about the value of knowledge production and scientific rigor?
The Society for the Study of New and Emerging Technologies, formerly Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies, (S.NET) is holding its eighth annual conference in 2016 in Bergen, Norway.
A call for proposals was sent out recently (Jan. 28, 2016 via email),
The Co-Production of Emerging Bodies, Politics and Technologies
The 8th annual S.Net meeting will take place from the 12th to the 14th of October 2016 in Bergen, Norway.
In spirit of the previous meetings it will continue to provide room for reflections on emerging technologies,
this time with a special (though not exclusive) focus on politics.
Former discussions at S.Net have often examined politics in the sense of governance of new and emerging technologies;
regulation; RRI; research policies; sustainability. The S.Net 2016 conference also invites papers and other contributions that
explore other and broader meanings of the “politics of new and emerging technologies”:
How do emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology or ICTs shape institutions,
citizen organizations and other political agencies? And, vice versa; how are these emerging technologies shaped by politics?
In what new ways are the bodies of citizens’ subjected to technological intervention and what are
the political effects of such interventions? What new forms of politics can be seen to emerge together with technological emergence?
We will dedicate a number of sessions to talks, workshops and other formats that examine new and emerging configurations
of human nature, ethics (the good life) and politics (the good society) in the context of new and emerging technologies.
Confirmed speakers January 2016:
Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School
Silvio Funtowicz, Adjunct Professor Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities
Joseph Dumit, Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Institute for Social Sciences (ISS),University of California
Important dates:
Deadline for submission of proposal: March 10th Notification of accepted proposals: March 31st
Registration deadline: August 15th
Conference: October 12 -14.
The S.Net 2016 Conference will invite the submission of abstracts to explore these topics relating to emerging technologies, tentatively organized around the following themes:
Innovation policies, imaginaries and practices
Narratives and imaginaries of emerging and future technologies
Public engagement, citizenship and emerging forms of expertise
Politics in the era of emerging technologies
Safety and security
Emerging technologies and human nature
Cancer: Emerging technologies, bodies and politics
Visualization in science and technology
Here’s some information about the presentation formats,
1) Paper presentation sessions:
a) Individual papers.
Please submit abstract (maximum 300 words) and indicate relevant themes (A-H); you may choose more than one.
Presentations will typically be 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minutes question period.
b) Thematic session:
Please submit abstract (maximum 1000 words) and indicate relevant themes (A-H); you may choose more than one.
Sessions should include 3-4 presentations. All session participants must be confirmed.
Please specify the length of the contribution and, if applicable, how many participants can be included in the event.
2) Special format sessions:
We encourage experimental formats beyond the usual paper based-presentations. All types of alternative audio-visual and art-oriented formats (e.g. theatre, movies, photography and installations) can be proposed. Interactive formats such as story-telling fora, ‘hands-on workshops’ and similar are also welcome. Please submit abstract (maximum 600 words) and indicate relevant themes (A-H); you may choose more than one.
Please specify the length of the contribution and, if applicable, how many participants can be included in the event.
