EASST 2010 track: Practices on the move: dynamics, circulation and diffusion

PRACTICES ON THE MOVE: DYNAMICS, CIRCULATION AND DIFFUSION A thematic track in the EASST 2010 Conference 1-4 September in Trento, Italy

This track provides an opportunity to move beyond the study of situated practices (Suchman 1994; Hutchins 1995), and to develop and explore the theoretical resources required to understand and analyse their spatial and temporal dynamics.  The tradition of studying specific sites of practice has tended to obscure vital questions about mechanisms of circulation and diffusion: how do the material, cognitive and symbolic elements of practices travel? How do necessarily local sociomaterial practices relate to path-dependencies and global trends in the elements of which they are composed? How do related temporalities of circulation affect the transformation and persistence of  social practices?

Contributors are invited to fuse concepts from geography, history, management and social theory with science and technology studies in order to understand and capture critical trajectories of practices including those of escalation, reinvention, retreat and erosion.  In pursuing these questions, this track seeks to address and confront the multi-sited, multi-scalar and temporal relations involved in the reproduction of practice.  The call for proposals for EASST 2010 represents ‘science and technology as an ecology of heterogeneous elements and interactions’.  This track provides a chance to focus on the ways that diverse elements circulate and on the implications of these distinctive travel patterns for the emergence, durability and distribution of specific socio-material practices.

The track will enable different ‘strands’ of science and technology studies to come together in new configurations.  For example, how do theories of innovation (Von Hippel 2005), diffusion and marketing mesh with notions of sociotechnical scripting (Akrich 1992)?  Likewise, how do technologies ‘carry’ knowledge cultures and vice versa? This deliberately conceptual/theoretically-oriented track puts the geographies, choreographies and dynamics of sociomaterial practices centre stage.

We invite papers that address these fundamental theoretical concerns from contrasting positions and perspectives, and with reference to a range of empirical cases – in particular, detailed analyses of mobile technologies; ICTs; embedded infrastructures; scientific networks; formal and informal communities of practice and distributed material cultures.

 Suggested themes include:

-    The life of elements: how do the heterogeneous ingredients of practice circulate?

-       How are local knowledges/technological configurations abstracted, distributed and ‘reversed’ or re-enacted.

-       Codification, inscription, regulation

-       Sites of exchange: exhibitions, internet, media and mediation

-       Methodology: how to study paths, projects, processes

-       How technologies carry or are carried by practices

-   Different temporalities of circulation and how these shape processes of innovation

-   How elements and practices become ‘stuck’; how they endure and disappear and how they become immobile

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted online (following website instructions) by 2010 March 15^th.