ANTHEM

A very interesting call for papers started making the rounds yesterday on various blogs and mailing lists, emanating from the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy (CPPE) at the University of Leicester. “The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts” conference is to take place between 29 April and 1 May 2009 at Leicester. It brings together the concerns of modern and classical forms of political economy regarding the nature of the capitalist mode of production with recent object-orientated inquiries into economic ordering that draw on actor-network theory, especially within economic sociology and science and technology studies. The deadline for proposals is 28 November 2008. The full call for papers is reproduced below.

Update [18 July 2008]: A nice PDF flyer is now also available.

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A thought-provoking gathering took place yesterday (25 June 2008) at Oxford University, organised by the STS group at the James Martin Institute. “Is there a turn to ontology under way in Science and Technology Studies?” - asked the provocation piece written by Steve Woolgar and colleagues. Ted Schatzki, Mike Lynch, Noortje Marres, and Arie Rip laid out their thoughts in response, each presentation accompanied by the comments of two discussants. The papers and the comments can be downloaded from the Saïd Business School website. There are also additional comments by Annemarie Mol and John Law.

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Issue 16 of Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory is out and  it is packed with interesting articles on the technologies of politics, several of them engaging with actor-network theory. Authors include Kristin Asdal, Noortje Marres, Peter Sloterdijk, John Law, Richie Nimmo, Guro Ådnegard Skarstad, and Nigel Thrift.

The draft programme for the 2008 4S/EASST Conference in Rotterdam is now available from the 4S website [1MB PDF]. There are just too many interesting talks here for us to be able to even begin to list them, so we will stick with highlighting just the one session that is most closely in line with the ANTHEM theme: Session 1.3.16 “Actor Network Theory meets (Post)Phenomenology,” between 13:30-15:30 on 21 August 2008 in Room T3-31. Session organisers: Jack Post and Peter-Paul Verbeek. The talks:

• “I have never been Modern - nor has Postphenomenology been so,” by Don Ihde, State University of New York at Stony Brook
• “Posthuman Perceptions: on hybrids and human-technology relations,” by Peter-Paul Verbeek, University of Twente

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On 6 June 2008 Bruno Latour will be giving a lecture entitled “Can Modernity be Modernized?” at the University of Bologna, on the occasion of receiving the ISA Medal for Science from the Institute of Advanced Studies.

A lot seems to be going on in Canada next week… In addition to the objectivity conference in Toronto there is also the “What is an Organization? Materiality, Agency, and Discourse” ‘preconference’ (to the ICA’s 58th annual conference) on 21-22 May 2008 at the Université de Montréal, in, you guessed it, Montreal.

Keynote Speakers:

• Barbara Czarniawska (U Göteborg, Sweden)
• Bruno Latour (Sciences Po, Paris, France)
• Haridimos Tsoukas (ALBA, Greece, University of Warwick, UK)
• Linda Putnam (U of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

The main conference page with the detailed programme is here. During the conference Bruno Latour will be awarded an Université de Montréal honorary doctorate.

If you happen to be in Canada and near Toronto next weekend, you might be interested in this conference on the nature of objectivity organised at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto: “Reclaiming the World: The Future of Objectivity,” 23-25 May 2008. The keynote speaker is Bruno Latour. The programme is available here [PDF] and some abstracts and papers can be downloaded from here.

The 2nd Triangular Post-Graduate Conference, “Challenges for contemporary research on technology and organisation,” will take place on 4-6 June 2008 at UCD Business School. The conference is jointly organised by Lancaster University, University of Cambridge and University College Dublin, and is chaired by Séamas Kelly, Lucas Introna, and Matthew Jones. The call for papers invites doctoral students from information systems and organisational studies to present preliminary research findings and/or challenging theoretical and methodological issues concerning their research. (more…)

Audio and video recordings (mostly in French) of the “The Tarde/Durkheim Debate” with Bruno Karsenti as Emile Durkheim, Bruno Latour as Gabriel Tarde, and Simon Schaffer as the Dean are now available from the CRASSH website. The English translation [PDF] is available from Bruno Latour’s website. Photos of the event can be found on the Tarde/Durkheim: Trajectories of the Social conference website.

And here are a couple of videos from YouTube:

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The 4th Social Study of IT Open Research Forum (SSIT-ORF) will take place on 23 and 24 April 2008 at the Information Systems and Innovation Group (ISIG) at the LSE. At ISIG there is a long tradition of research interest in both actor-network theory and Heidegger, as approaches to the study of technology. This event may be of particular interest to PhD students and junior researchers who would like to discuss their research with other PhD students and leading IS academics in this area. The deadline for registration has been extended to 30 March 2008. Register here.