Deadline for Abstracts: September 1, 2021

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

Editors:

• Duygu Kaşdoğan, İzmir Katip Çelebi University, Turkey
• Jessica Caporusso, York University, Canada
• Katie Ulrich, Rice University, USA

Description:

Biofuels have long been proposed as solutions to fossil fuel reliance, though they are contentious. For some, biofuels are alternatives to petroleum that sustainably leverage the reproductive capacity of photosynthetic lives, such as plants. Various actors have pursued strategies to promote this sustainable vision of biofuels: national and subnational governments, intergovernmental organizations, and related civil and private sector actors work to develop  “best governance practices,” while scientists and engineers carry out advanced biotechnological research to improve the productivity and efficiency of biofuel production. On the other hand, critical social scientific research on biofuels has largely examined the destructive and unjust impacts of biofuels production on rural/agrarian communities and ecologies, with a focus on the complex relationships between the Global North and Global South, between state, capital and society, and between nature and society.

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New deadline for abstracts: April 15, 2021

Keywords: categories, counts, figures, registration technologies, documentary artifacts, archives,

political violence, facts.

Editors:

Oriana Bernasconi (Department of Sociology, Universidad Alberto Hurtado- Chile and Millennium Institute on Violence and Democracy -VIODEMOS) obernasc@uahurtado.cl

Paola Diaz-Lizé (Centre d’études des mouvements sociaux-CEMS-EHESS-Francia and Center for social conflict and cohesion studies COES- Chile) paola.diaz@ehess.fr

1. Introduction

This cluster aims at strengthening the link between the field of social studies of science and technology (STS) and that of human rights, by examining three central operations that are part of the management of severe human rights violations: documenting, factualizing and commensuring.

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Deadline: April 1, 2021

Cluster editors: Luis Reyes-Galindo, Julieta Piña and Arturo Vallejo.

‘Citizen science’ has become an umbrella term for a growing number of projects that introduce laypersons into the heartlands of science-making, and an extension of calls for increasing science ‘democratisation’ and ‘engagement.’ Engagement, and therefore citizen science, may be classified according to its varying degree of institutionalisation (Invernizzi 2020):

1. Top-down approaches which strongly demarcate what laypersons may and should do within scientific projects (e.g. pre-framed data gathering and sorting).
2. Cooperative or counter-hegemonic interactions in which laypersons-institution interaction occurs on more level epistemic terms (e.g. NGO-led science, patient-group data gathering).
3. Science ‘on the margins’, where science and knowledge are created and live out independently from institutions.

This special cluster aims to reflexively explore projects of citizen science in Latin America and the Global South, particularly in the first two modes, i.e. when layperson-institutional interaction is a critical component of engagement. We invite papers that include but are not limited to sociological, anthropological or historical case studies; philosophical reflections on epistemological, ontological, cultural, geopolitical and ethical questions raised by citizen science; and discussions on the role that citizen science can play in science policy—including the wide range of diversely-democratic and participatory conceptualisations of science-society relations found in the Global South. Project management and infrastructure-related articles that fully engage with STS topics are also encouraged.

Abstracts (max. 500 words) for proposed papers should be submitted by 1 April 2021. Selected papers will be invited to submit full manuscripts by 1 November 2021, aiming for publication in Tapuya’s Vol. 5 (2022). For this special cluster, papers submitted in Portuguese and Spanish with full peer-review in their original languages—aiming for a final-version publication in English—will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Unfunded or underfunded scholars from the Global South will receive an APC waiver from Tapuya. Please send proposed abstracts to Luis Reyes at: luisreyes@ciencias.unam.mx

CALL FOR ARTICLES

The politics of data in Latin America: Towards a terrestrial Internet
Marcela Suárez (FU Berlin), Jenny Guerra González (UNAM)

Please send your abstract to marcela.suarez@fu-berlin.de by October 15, 2020. Deadline extension to December 15, 2020. Submitted abstracts should not exceed 250 words excluding references.

Data extractivism, algorithmic governance, and corporate control of Internet business are part of the regime of digital capitalism. Digital technologies are producing a social space that is far from immaterial, neutral and abstract. As Latour (2010) points out, the greater the digitality, the greater the materiality. In this issue we argue that the Internet is terrestrial because the effects of its corporate and governmental control materialize in specific spaces; for example: the maritime space where underground cables pass; the aerial space of the signals from satellites and antennas, as well as those spaces rich in the raw materials and natural and human resources necessary to sustain the Internet. These spaces are not dissociated from diverse forms of human and non-human forms of life that cohabit it and embody the effects of disputes over data.

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Deadline extension for abstracts. New date: January 15, 2021

Special Issue for Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society – Call for Papers

Ends in Other Terms: Uncommoning Extinction

Editors: Manuel Tironi, P. Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile) / Marcelo González Gálvez, P .Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile) / Marisol de la Cadena, UC Davis (USA)

Description

Extinction is around the corner. And not any extinction, but that of the human. ‘We’, as biological inhabitants of the Earth, face the real and concrete possibility of disappearance. Indeed, after decades of anthropogenic aggression to soils, airs, rocks, and waters, after having exhausted resources and exploited ecosystems, after having pushed and stressed all planetary boundaries, finitude is not anymore a scatological horizon for our species, but a present-future ready to be actualized—and to be acted upon. New imperatives arise. There’s no time for contemplation nor speculation. Our house is on fire. We are summoned to intervene and change, and fast. Now, always now, before it’s too late (Colebrook 2016).

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