Deadline for abstracts: July 31, 2019

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Editors:
Óscar Moreno-M, The University of Edinburgh (UK)
Javier Guerrero-C, Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano (Colombia)

Description

This special cluster aims to put together works analysing grey processes of illegal and informal innovation in Latin America and other geographies in the global south. The objective is to overtake the security and economic approaches to see the kind of knowledge, designs, technologies, techniques, learnings or shrewdness flowing through contexts of illegality and informality. Creativity expressed in workarounds, repair, maintenance, reuse, as well as the production of craft machines and artefacts are crucial for this call. How does the informal or illegal nature influence innovation? How is the illegal and informal related to the legal and formal? How could the type of creativities that emerges in these grey environments be characterized? How is the relationship between production and consumption in these grey areas? How can we overcome the malevolent, disdained or tropical vision and start seeing the productive and creative dimensions of illegality and informality? Continue reading →

Deadline: December 1, 2018

Special Issue: Theorizing Communication from the South

Guest Editors: Mohan J. Dutta, National University of Singapore Mahuya Pal, University of South Florida

In this special issue, we take forward emerging calls for decolonizing communication to explore communication theories anchored in the cartographies of the Global South. We encourage submissions that question assumptions regarding internationalization, de-Westernization, and globalization, along with other key concepts, and that consider new directions for approaches to theorizing communication. Submissions should engage with questions concerning the production of knowledge, the role of communication in global relations, and the potential for communication to contribute to advancing imaginaries of the Global South. Continue reading →

Deadline: September 30, 2018

“Computing in/from the South”
Edited by Sareeta Amrute and Luis Felipe R. Murillo
Afterword by Kavita Philip and Anusuya Sengupta

A Special Section of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

Computer expertise involves technical competence, infrastructures,
interdependent economies, and distinctive political projects. Yet, most
often, computing is examined from Silicon Valley outwards. In this
special issue, we reverse this polarity by asking, what does computing
expertise as political action look like from the South? Following on
John and Jean’s Comaroff’s Theory from the South (2014), the emergent
literature on the “Globalization from below” (Alba, Lins Ribeiro,
Matthews, Vega, 2015), and feminist approaches to technoscience that
stress entanglements between bodies and materials (Barad 2007, Haraway
1991, Chun 2013) and the political and economic formations such
entanglements may yield (Suchman 2015, Atanasoski and Vora 2015,
McGlotten 2016), these articles investigate what it means to
re-territorialize and prefigure technopolitical projects outside the
main axes of digital work. Continue reading →

Thematic Cluster for Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society – Call for Papers

Frail Modernities: Latin American infrastructures between repair and ruination

Deadline for abstracts: July 31, 2018

Editors: Raquel Velho, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA)
Sebastián Ureta, Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile)

Description

Common sense tells us that infrastructures are important, if possibly boring, parts of daily life. Most are seemingly built to blend into the background, being “designed to become invisible as [they are] stabilized” (Lampland & Star, 2009, p. 207). However, a growing amount of STS case studies have shown that infrastructures never become completely stabilized, or even invisible, in the first place. Instead of being perfectly immutable devices, infrastructures are shown to be highly paradoxical things––malleable, yet rigid; future-oriented, yet bound to their context of creation (Edwards 2003; Graham 2010; Howe et al. 2016; Jackson et al. 2007). Continue reading →