Upcoming Events
It is hard to imagine digital culture without the work of Philip E. Agre. His description of the mutual dynamics of digital technology and ideology, so-called ‘grammars of action’ (Agre 1994), and the appeal for a critical technical practice (Agre 1997) have inspired scholars across media studies, HCI, and digital art and design for over 30 years. This workshop, ‘Agre After Techno-Utopianism’, seeks to evaluate his contribution to the study of technology, ideology, critique, and practice since the ‘techno-utopia’ of the early internet era ended, and more dystopic energies emerged.
The relevance of his work today is substantial. In Surveillance and Capture (Agre 1994), Agre saw the threats new workplace technologies posed that would mutate into examples of surveillance capitalism. In Real-Time Politics (Agre 2002), he wrote extensively on the downsides of digital cultures when the web was still considered a techno-utopia. In Pengi (Agre and Chapman 1987), Agre and David Chapman explored critiques of dominant AI conceptualizations. Together, these strands can be considered precursors to work, now commonplace, in software studies and integrated into computational methods for the study of digital culture. In Toward a Critical Technical Practice (Agre 1997), Agre famously offered a synthetic approach to studying technology, straddling the ‘craft work of design’ and the ‘reflexive work of critique’. In High Tech to Human Tech (Agre 1995) the political economy of digital culture became an even greater interest, debunking the ideology of ‘empowerment’ in newly ‘computerized’ workplaces. Even lesser-known work on the Networked University (Agre 2000) offered a prescient insight into the ‘promise and danger’ of remote learning.
Agre’s contribution to, as well as critique of, digital culture was just as significant. He ran the monthly mailing list The Network Observer (TNO) (1994-96) before starting the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE) (1996-2001), offering regular insights into the ‘social and political aspects of computing and networking’. Not only did Agre critique the emerging digital world, but contributed to the counterculture within it. Since this period, we have experienced the downsides of networks, social media, and platforms, with AI and sensory media accelerating capitalism further. Bringing the founders of the nettime (1995-present) mailing list into conversation with the history of REE we want to think about how list cultures equally manifest as cultures of resistance. In this, we want to re-discover ideas that resisted tech-utopian narratives, and practices that challenged these ideologies.
Collectively, we want to deepen our understanding of Agre’s thinking and the significance of his work. From revisiting well-known texts to rediscovering less-popular work, and exploring the exciting interconnections between various disciplines and forms of ‘net activism’ that engaged with Agre’s work from computational science to sociology, and from work in political economy to across the wider arts and humanities. Within the context of the contemporary platform condition we want to collectively reflect on the relevance, as well as limitations, of his work; continuing to debunk cyber utopias, whilst disassociating and rearticulating narratives of power.
CfP for the workshop "Agre After Techno-Utopianism"
For this purpose, we invite contributions to a two-day workshop, 1-2 September 2022 where workshop participants will dive into the work of Agre through different formats: conversations, exegese, and critiques. In this, we are equally interested in exploring his role in shaping digital culture as we are in his academic work.
We invite contributions that engage with Agre's work in a comprehensive manner. We want to develop a foundation for how to read and work with Agre. We especially welcome contributions that seek to apply, and develop, Agre’s key concepts. However, the workshop will also aim to make sense of how Agre's thought has itself developed, from his early experiments with Pengi to the political economy of the internet. How, for instance, did his work on Pengi shape the idea of critical technical practice? What kinds of critique does Interactionism offer for the digital?
While the written contributions are designed to support a thorough examination of Agre's thinking, we will provide ample space for discussion. Here Agre can be confronted with contemporary questions. How, for instance, to think about ‘data practices’, sensor media or automation along with Agre?
Our second concern is to discuss the possibilities and practical implications of a collective inventory or archive of Agre’s work, exploring methods of documenting the network that developed around the RRE in the US and Europe and consider how it might be preserved and/or re-presented. We believe his heterogenous interventions deserve to be organized in a way that is respectful to the media specificity and materiality of early net critique, as well as being made accessible to the broader public.
As the location of the Harold Garfinkel archive, and a pioneer in the study of media practice, ethnomethodology, early internet studies, and the study of infrastructure, SFB1187 Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen is well suited to host this workshop.
Format: 2-day discussion workshop with conversation formats and interviews as well as dedicated discussions of contributions. Papers will be circulated in advance.
Please submit an extended abstract (1000 words)
Deadline for submissions: 10 May 2022
Suggested (non-exhaustive) topics. How did Agre develop critiques around the following issues:
- Web communities and cultures (mailing lists, social media, tactics, resistance)
- Connectivity and networks (wired-ness, de/centralization, infrastructure)
- Capital-isms and technology (surveillance, networked, corporate, managerial)
- Work and the workplace (tasks, practices, organizational forms)
- Meaning of work (empowerment, the entrepreneurial self)
- Surveillance and privacy (grammars of action, capture model)
- Ethnomethods (accountability, activity, plans)
- Activity Theory (L. S. Vygotsky) and Interactionism as modes of critique
- Medium specificity (devices, platforms, AI)
- Critical Technical Practice (CTP), design and methodology (critique, tech ethics, APIs)
- Archives and histories (interactivity, accessibility, documentation)
- Other topics open to ‘Agre-ian’ analysis (e.g. environment, ecology, race)
We welcome contributions from former colleagues and contemporary witnesses. We also hope to hear various personal accounts of these early days of the internet: the ideas, visions, and hopes that shaped, and have been reshaped, by these early developments.
Please send submissions to Tatjana Seitz: tatjana.seitz@uni-siegen.de
Organizers: Tatjana Seitz, Sam Hind, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Gießmann
Works:
Agre P.E. and Chapman D (1987) Pengi: An implementation of a theory of activity. AAAAI-87 Proceedings 268–272.
Agre P.E. (1994) Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy. The Information Society: An International Journal 10 (2): 101–127.
Agre P.E. (1995) From high tech to human tech: Empowerment, measurement, and social studies of computing. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 3 (1): 167–195.
Agre P.E. (1997) Toward a critical technical practice: Lessons learned in trying to reform AI. In Bowker GC, Leigh Star S, Turner W and Gasser L (eds) Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 131–158.
Agre P.E. (2000) Infrastructure and institutional change in the networked university. Information, Communication & Society 3 (4): 494–507.
Agre P.E. (2002) Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process, The Information Society, 18(5), pp. 311–331.
Web resources:
The Network Observer: https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/tno.html
Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE): https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/
Venue
Keynote Speaker, 8 Sept 2022, 11 am: Deborah Lupton
Further information will follow.
In this interactive workshop we will complete several tasks to learn the basic procedures of using MAXQDA, a software that is commonly used for analyzing qualitative data such as interviews, protocols, reports or fieldnotes. The software’s core function is to structure text or other data by applying codes/labels. This allows for a structured and transparent analysis, with easy access to the quantification of results. In this workshop we will simulate a one-document research project to become familiar with the basic steps along the research chain.
With Dr. Daniel Müller (House of Young Talents)
Organized by the House of Young Talents exclusively for SFB 1187 members
The Workshop will take place online and is held in English.
Please sign up here.
Thursday, 06.10.2022, 9.30-16.00 o'clock
Friday, 07.10.2022, 9.30-13.00 o'clock
More detailed information will follow
With Dr. Daniel Müller (House of Young Talents) exklusiv für Hilfskräfte (SHK, WHB und WHK) des SFB 1187
Der Workshop will take place in Siegen (AR Campus) and will be held in German.
We kindly ask for registration by 22 September 2022 here.
Following the motto “Spread Your Research”, the Women's Networking Day 2022 addresses the possibilities of digital self-presentation and visibility in academia. This year’s Women’s Networking Day brings early career researchers of all career stages (female students, PhD students and postdocs) together to open networking opportunities and to provide career-relevant topics and skills. The program offers a keynote and workshops with experts from different fields, a photo shoot and spaces to network and share experiences. In addition to external experts, university partners and senior colleagues in positions relevant to the young female researchers are also invited in order to share “in-house” information and encourage networking opportunities.
P R O G R A M M
10:00 - 12:00 Uhr: Welcome
Dr. Rebecca Weber (Referentin für geschlechtergerechte Karriere)
Keynote by Christiane Attig (Chemnitz): “Science Comminication & Podcasting (In-House Networking)” (in English)
12:00 - 13:00 Uhr: Lunch
13:30 - 14:15 Uhr: In-House Networking with Dr. Susanne Padberg / Alumni-Services
14:30 - 17:30 Uhr: Workshop-Sessions, Online
Workshop I (in English) - Katja Wolter (Steinbeis Institut): "My visibility as a scientific expert for recruiters on LinkedIn & ResearchGate"
Workshop II (in German) - Susanne Geu: "Tweet your science – Twitter in der Wissenschaft"
Participants (only members of the CRC 1187) also have the opportunity to take part in a photo shoot by Ekki Raff the following day (19 Oct, 10am-4pm, AH-A 228)
This year’s Women Networking Day is a cooperation of the two Collaborative Research Centers and 1187 “Media of Cooperation” and 1472 “Transformations of the Popular”.
Intended group: Female employees of all status groups of CRC 1187 & 1472
Please sign up here and add in the comment section at which workshop you want participate
Venue
AH-A 2917/18 und online
Herrengarten 3
Siegen
Following the motto “Spread Your Research”, the Women's Networking Day 2022 addresses the possibilities of digital self-presentation and visibility in academia. This year’s Women’s Networking Day brings early career researchers of all career stages (female students, PhD students and postdocs) together to open networking opportunities and to provide career-relevant topics and skills.
This year’s Women Networking Day is a cooperation of the two Collaborative Research Centers and 1187 “Media of Cooperation” and 1472 “Transformations of the Popular”.
Participants (only members of the CRC 1187) have the opportunity to take part in a photo shoot with Ekki Raff
Please sign up here
Venue
AH-A 228
Herrengarten 3
More detailed information will follow.
Organized by the House of Young Talents
The Workshop will take place in Siegen and is held in English.
7 places are reserved for CRC members till 2 weeks before the workshop
Intended group: all docs and postdocs
Please sign up here.
Venue
tba
Adolf-Reichwein-Str. 2
Workshop with Dr. Birgit Happel (geldbiografien.de)
Target group: researchers and employees of CRC 1187 & 1472
More information will follow.
A cooperation of CRC 1187 & 1472
Sign up here
More information will follow
With Dr. Nina Fenn
Organized by the House of Young Talents with 7 places reserved for CRC members till 2 weeks before the workshop
Intended group: all docs & postdocs of the SFB 1187
The Workshop will take place online and is held in English.
Please sign up here
The workshop addresses German and international publication strategies of different disciplines and the review of ‘in progress’ texts by peers. We will focus specifically on the various publication options for the doctoral thesis. In addition, the workshop will deal with alternative publication formats such as blogs and the challenges of interdisciplinary publications which are common in the context of collaborative research centers. Accordingly, the workshop addresses the following topics:
- Publishing in a team (e.g. with PI and possibly other colleagues of the subproject) or in single authorship
- planning a strategy (implementation) individually or in a team (e.g. subproject)
- Publication strategy and career planning: how to occupy research area(s)
- German and/or English?
- Monograph(s) and contributions to/editing of edited volumes
- Journals (incl. thematic issues/guest editorships) and peer review as quality measures and visibility instruments
- Visibility metrics (citation frequency, impact factors, rankings, indexing, other reputation criteria)
- Open Access (at the University of Siegen) and Predatory Journals
- Working papers as a form of pre-publication
- Reverse engineering to improve opportunities for prestigious journals for maximum visibility
Following the workshop, individual consultations on publication strategies can be arranged.
Organized by the House of Young Talents exclusively for MGK members
The Workshop will take place online and is held in English.
Please sign up here.
More detailed information will follow.
Organized by the House of Young Talents
The Reception will take place in Siegen and is held in English.
Thursday, 08.12.2022, 9-16 o'clock
Friday, 09.12.2022, 9-14 o'clock
Coach: Dr.in Mareike Menne
This workshop enables an intensive examination of all topics that are relevant for a strategic positioning as a female leader in the university context. You will first develop principles of academic and female leadership from your work experience, which will then serve as a basis for practice transfers, for which you are invited to bring your own cases and questions. Following levels of leadership will be addressed: people leadership (e.g. goal and success definitions, team building, conflicts, motivation, individual biases), organizational leadership (e.g. design of interfaces between administration and work area, internal/external interlacing, formal basics of leadership action, structural biases), and self-leadership (e.g. personal leadership style, ethics and values, resilience, role clarity and personal growth). Within the workshop, you will get the chance to alternate between impulses and exchange, between plenary and group work.
This workshop addresses female researchers in postdoc positions, junior professorships and leaders of junior research groups.
The workshop will take place in Siegen and is held in English.
Please sign up here.
Venue
AR-UB 114
Adolf-Reichwein-Str. 2
Lead by Constantina Rokos, M.A., Social Anthropologist
Research and associated research fields involve numerous diversity-facets that pose challenges. Thus, science and knowledge creation are based on the assumption that researchers move appropriately and reflectively within the research fields. Researchers must be consequently trained to reflect on their position and power relations in their field to conduct research appropriately.
Constantina Rokos, M.A. is a research fellow and decentralized equal opportunity officer at the Münster School of Business (FH Münster). She specializes in intercultural competences and DEI from an educational and research perspective. A self-reflexive and ethnological approach characterizes her work.
This workshop serves as a first approach to self-reflective and diversity-sensitive discussions to recognize one's practice and the diversity of one's field and to develop appropriate research behaviors.
The Workshop is held in English and will take place online on two days
Monday, 16 Jan 9.30-13.00
Monday, 13 Jan 9.30 - 13.00
Intended group: all members (m, f, d) of the SFB 1187
Please sign up here
The writing workshop addresses the practice of academic writing. We will deal with writing strategies, writer's block, argumentation structures and rhetoric of different scientific formats (journal articles, anthology contributions, reviews, monographs), and rules of good scientific practice, such as recognizing and avoiding scientific plagiarism. Additionally, the workshop will provide basic skills in time and project management which will help you in organizing your writing process.
Organized by the House of Young Talents exclusively for MGK members
Intended group: all docs & postdocs of the SFB 1187
The Workshop will take place online and is held in English.
Please sign up here.
The workshop will address German and international publication strategies of different disciplines within the Humanities and Social Science discuss the review of ‘in progress’ texts by peers. We will focus specifically on the various publication options for the second qualification thesis (e.g. habilitation). In addition, the workshop will deal with alternative publication formats such as blogs and the challenges of interdisciplinary publications which are common in the context of collaborative research centers. Accordingly, the workshop addresses the following topics:
- Publishing in a team (e.g. with PI and possibly other colleagues of the subproject) or in single authorship
- planning a strategy (implementation) individually or in a team (e.g. subproject)
- Publication strategy and career planning: how to occupy research area(s)
- German and/or English?
- Monograph(s) and contributions to/editing of edited volumes
- Journals (incl. thematic issues/guest editorships) and peer review as quality measures and visibility instruments
- Visibility metrics (citation frequency, impact factors, rankings, indexing, other reputation criteria)
- Open Access (at the University of Siegen) and Predatory Journals
- Working papers as a form of pre-publication
- Reverse engineering to improve opportunities for prestigious journals for maximum visibility
Following the workshop, individual consultations on publication strategies can be arranged.
Organized by the House of Young Talents exclusively for SFB 1187 members
The Workshop will take place online and is held in English.
Intended group: all postdocs of the SFB 1187
Please sign up here.
Past Events
- Examine machine vision ‘challenges’ in autonomous vehicle research
- Advance contemporary work on the political economy of AI in respect to how datamachine-learning cloud infrastructures computation highly-skilled labour start-ups and big tech firms contribute to the development of AI.
This workshop about visual network analysis is open to all publics, with or without experience with the discipline. We will focus on the mechanics of reading a network map, and from there understand how to build them so that they are useful in practice. The workshop is mostly tool-agnostic, but we will use Gephi, a free network visualization tool, as our tool of choice, for those comfortable with it. We will also address the issue of building a narrative about a network, and how to mobilize the multiple layers of mediation involved, and notably the layout algorithm. Finally, we will engage with (and discuss) Gephisto, an experimental tool designed to produce network maps in one click (but with a catch!). This workshop will make it clear what to expect and not to expect of network maps, how to make them well, how to interpret them properly, and how to approach visual network analysis as an operational practice.
Mathieu Jacomy is post-doc at the TANT Lab in Copenhagen, and previously was research engineer at the Sciences Po médialab in Paris. Jacomy tweets at @jacomyma
Venue
"Prototyping For More Than Human Futures"
More information on the talk will follow.
On the lecture series: "Testing Infrastructures"
From QR codes used to verify COVID-19 vaccination status’ to cloud software used to train machine learning models, infrastructures of testing are proliferating. Whilst the infrastructures themselves come in different forms - from ‘off the shelf’ systems to tailor-made technologies - they all have a capacity to generate specific ‘test situations’ involving an array of different actors from ‘ghost’ workers to python scripts. An increasing reliance on digital platforms, protocols, tools, and procedures has led to a redistribution of testing itself: not just where testing takes place, and who performs the testing, but who has access to, and control over, mechanisms for testing, test protocols and of course, test results. In this lecture series, we focus on the practices making up the test infrastructures and explore different perspectives to make sense of the realities enacted by testing.
We invite our lecture guests to ask: how do testing infrastructures engender the construction of specific testing routines and practices? What kinds of affective experiences, reactions, and responses are generated through testing? Here we invite reflection on how testing infrastructures oft fade into the background, pointing to a tapestry of maintenance and repair practices. Lastly, what are the ways in which we can evaluate the role of digital infrastructures more broadly? This includes the challenge of what novel test methods can be developed and actually ‘tested’ to gain a better understanding of how infrastructures work. Our exploration of test practices in this context is interwoven with the search for test media that bind actors together or create barriers; that enable cooperation or declare it impossible.
Possible questions include (but are not limited to):
- What are the implications of testing in different social situations and in what moments do they come to the fore?
- When and where are tests conducted—for whom and what, through whom and what, and by whom and what actors?
- What are digital practices for/of testing and with what types of data do testing infrastructures support?
- What other practices spawn from distributed testing? Think of practices of passing and obfuscation within nested situations of testing and the outsourcing of ‘validation work’ as constructions that govern.
- What methodological strategies are there to make test procedures and their foundations transparent?
- Can different politics of testing be distinguished? If so, where and under what conditions?
- Can we demarcate between embodied testing and disembodied testing?
Guests are welcome to register via Mail with 'Send an E-mail'
Venue
"Testing compliance: Israel’s repurposing of Secret Services surveillance technologies for Covid-19 Contact Tracing in 2020"
With the rapid unfolding of the COVID-19 global pandemic, Israel was one of the first states outside East Asia to impose involuntary surveillance measures to combat the virus. The government utilized the country’s permanent state of exception to bypass the parliament and deploy a hitherto classified anti-terrorism tool developed by its internal security service (Shin Bet) to track the location of COVID-19 patients and notify citizens who have been near an identified patient to self-quarantine. This talk explores the unprecedented repurposing of an anti-terrorism tool for addressing a civic health crisis through the lens of testing infrastructures. It argues that the mass infrastructural test was deployed as an a priori policy to generate compliance through securitization. This policy had to be justified at any price, including publishing compromised public data that hid the actual low-efficiency rates of Shin-Bet’s contact tracing.
The talk explores how data essentialism and securitization were used for solidifying the underlying infrastructural surveillance that made the Corona-tracking possible (Gekker & Hind, 2019). Then, following critique about the emergence of data gaps and inequalities in access to data during the pandemic in the global south (Milan and Treré 2020), I further portray gaps in the quality, quantity, and accessibility of two types of government pandemic data: data about the people – the secretive, mass-surveillance data used for infrastructural testing; and data for the people – the public, low-quality, incomputable reports for justifying mass surveillance. Finally, I illustrate these gaps by analyzing four infrastructural dataveillance practices used by the Israeli government in 2020: the repurposing of the Shin-Bet’s anti-terrorism infrastructure for contact tracing; an open-source contact tracing app; the “national index” dashboard that measured city-level compliance with lockdowns, created for the government by behavioral economist Dan Ariely; and the “Philosopher’s Stone” - a plan promoted by the Ministry of Defense to team up with the infamous espionage company NSO, to build an algorithmic system that would rank citizens by a ‘contagiousness risk factor.’
Anat Ben-David is an associate professor in the department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel. She is co-founder of the Open University's Open Media and Information Lab (OMILab). Her primary research areas are Web history and web archives, Digital STS, critical data studies, and digital and computational methods for Web research.
On the lecture series: "Testing Infrastructures"
From QR codes used to verify COVID-19 vaccination status’ to cloud software used to train machine learning models, infrastructures of testing are proliferating. Whilst the infrastructures themselves come in different forms - from ‘off the shelf’ systems to tailor-made technologies - they all have a capacity to generate specific ‘test situations’ involving an array of different actors from ‘ghost’ workers to python scripts. An increasing reliance on digital platforms, protocols, tools, and procedures has led to a redistribution of testing itself: not just where testing takes place, and who performs the testing, but who has access to, and control over, mechanisms for testing, test protocols and of course, test results. In this lecture series, we focus on the practices making up the test infrastructures and explore different perspectives to make sense of the realities enacted by testing.
We invite our lecture guests to ask: how do testing infrastructures engender the construction of specific testing routines and practices? What kinds of affective experiences, reactions, and responses are generated through testing? Here we invite reflection on how testing infrastructures oft fade into the background, pointing to a tapestry of maintenance and repair practices. Lastly, what are the ways in which we can evaluate the role of digital infrastructures more broadly? This includes the challenge of what novel test methods can be developed and actually ‘tested’ to gain a better understanding of how infrastructures work. Our exploration of test practices in this context is interwoven with the search for test media that bind actors together or create barriers; that enable cooperation or declare it impossible.
Possible questions include (but are not limited to):
- What are the implications of testing in different social situations and in what moments do they come to the fore?
- When and where are tests conducted—for whom and what, through whom and what, and by whom and what actors?
- What are digital practices for/of testing and with what types of data do testing infrastructures support?
- What other practices spawn from distributed testing? Think of practices of passing and obfuscation within nested situations of testing and the outsourcing of ‘validation work’ as constructions that govern.
- What methodological strategies are there to make test procedures and their foundations transparent?
- Can different politics of testing be distinguished? If so, where and under what conditions?
- Can we demarcate between embodied testing and disembodied testing?
Guests are welcome to register via Mail with 'Send an E-mail'
Venue
Gender & Diversity with Dr. Simone Pfeifer (Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz / University of Cologne)
Dr. Simone Pfeifer currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the DFG Research Training Group 2661: „anschließen-ausschließen - Cultural Dynamics Beyond Globalized Networks“ at the University of Cologne. At the same time she is an associate senior research fellow in the research project “Jihadism on the Internet: Images and Videos, their Appropriation and Dissemination” at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. She holds MAs in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Cologne and in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. She completed her PhD at the University of Cologne with a dissertation on the social media practices and transnational everyday lives of Senegalese in Berlin and Dakar. As scientific researcher she was part of the Graduate School "Locating Media". Simone will talk about her experiences in collaborative research projects, her transition to the postdoc phase, and - as a mother of two children - reconciling family and science.
About the series:
The “Gender & Diversity Lunch” series invites all members of the CRC “Media of Cooperation” and “Transformations of the Popular” to an exchange on current topics and issues in the fields of gender equality, diversity and the compatibility of family and science. The goal of the series is to facilitate networking between CRC members and individuals from different fields and with different biographical experiences. A guest on a particular topic is invited to each event. The series is held at lunchtime, including a snack. Suggestions for topics and guests are always welcome.
A collaborative format of CRC 1187 & 1472 on equal opportunities
Registration via Juliane Biewald (juliane.biewald@student.uni-siegen.de)