led by Loup Cellard

In everyday life, we navigate through situations where attributes about us and the world are tracked, ordered through information architectures and enriched by personalisation methods. Our worry regarding the power of computational devices is justified by many critical studies rightly pointing to their roles as pervasive background instruments participating in the scripting of interactions, the constant optimisation of experience, and the risks of a mundane infrastructural surveillance. The approach of track 1 of the Summer School consists in reclaiming a pause to inquire and reflexively intervene in the normative and routinized enactment of digital media. To borrow a method of american sociologist Harold Garfinkel, we will ask the participants to conduct “breaching experiments”: interventions that break expectations and conventions, therefore revealing the latent organisation of our digitised life. Moreover, our aim is to envision what “digital breaching experiments” could look like: the disruptions of familiar behaviours, socio-technical norms and regular flows of information in digital media contexts. Respecifying breaching experiments for digital media studies brings a number of empirical and methodological challenges we will explore based on two case studies: the data traffic infrastructures of (A) mobile apps and the scripted interactions of (B) social media and conversational agents (e.g. Alexa, Google Home). If two groups are already formed to work on the mentioned case studies, participants are invited to either join one of the groups or think about how “breaching experiments” or similar types of “norm breaking” experiments can be performed in relation to a case study of their choice (e.g. drones, chatbots, urban sensors, user interfaces…). Loup is at your disposal before and during the workshop to provide some methodological guidance. No specific knowledge about ethnomethodology is needed to follow the Track.

led by Philippe Sormani

In his 1997 paper “Toward a Critical Technical Practice”, Philip E. Agre passingly remarked upon “computing […] as a kind of imperialism [aiming] to reinvent virtually every other site of practice in its own image” (p. 131). Track 2 of the Summer School returns to Agre’s passing remark, and his project of “critical technical practice” more broadly, to reflect upon, reconfigure, and/or reorient that project in the light of contemporary developments in ethnomethodological analysis, and its distinctive notion(s) of “respecification” in particular. For this purpose, the track invites its participants to select from their “materials” and ongoing inquiries a discourse fragment, video recording, physical object, and/or computational artefact for which they wish to deepen and discuss its empirical analysis. The jointly investigated “perspicuous setting(s)” (Garfinkel 2002), in addition to explicating the “methods” involved in situ, will invite participants to tease out, if not tinker with, the normative implications of their empirical analysis, be it in the light of the notion of “montage” (e.g., Stalder 2016) or related notions (such as “assemblage” or “entanglement”), all of which have gained traction in and across media studies, current digital sociology, as well as science and technology studies. Track 2, in other words, brings together workshop participants and current practitioners in ethnomethodology, upcoming and established, to work out what “critical technical practice” could actually look like today (conceptually, analytically, interactively, aesthetically, etc.). Therefore, participants are invited to “bring their own materials,” whatever they may be, team up and/or do solo subprojects, whilst taking inspiration from the Track’s and its guests’ (ethno-)methodological inputs. Participants may join one or the other case study launched by the convenor, too. Designed as reflexive endeavors, these case studies explicate various AI assemblages and robotic systems (e.g., “DIY AI” kits, “AV” prototypes) from within their multifaceted montage and tricky performance(s) in situ and in vivo.