Category: CFP

Call for Papers

Tapuya thematic cluster: Call for papers. The grey zones of innovation. The Illegal and the Informal in Marginal Worlds

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Deadline for abstracts: July 31, 2019

Download PDF document here: Long version / Short version

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 →

Special Issue: Theorizing Communication from the South

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 →

Computing in/from the South: A Special Section of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

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 →

Tapuya: Call for 2019 cover images

As part of its mission to reach engage with the Latin American STS/Estudios CTS community, Tapuya LASTS would like to invite students, artists, researchers and members of the general public to contribute original images for the design of its 2019 cover. These images will appear above and below the title band, as on the current 2018 cover.

The images can include photographs, works in traditional media, or digital art, that reflect on any sociocultural, historical or political aspect of science and technology in Latin America and any of its territories. Selected images will be chosen not only for their intrinsic artistic or aesthetic value, but should ideally include a significant backstory related to Tapuya’s topic matter.

A preliminary selection of the images will be made by Associate Editor Luis Reyes-Galindo, designer of the Volume 1 cover, and after a curation process three covers will be presented to the Editorial Board for a final decision. The chosen image(s) will feature on the cover of Tapuya Volume 2 throughout 2019. The authors will be given the opportunity to write a small essay on the story behind the images and their significance, which will appear in Volume 2.

The images need to be in as high a resolution as possible, and in colour, TIFF or JPEG format works best. In terms of specific dimensions this can vary as long as they can be made to fit the approximate dimensions of the cover – the spaces should stay the same above and below the title bar (please visit our website at https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ttap20 to see our cover for Volume 1). To participate send the images to tapuya.lasts@udlap.mx.

No financial remuneration will be given for the images.

Frail Modernities: Latin American infrastructures between repair and ruination

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 →