Sunday, November 3, 2013

CfP: STS in Singapore

News from the Calls front! In short: Global STS, 14-15 March 2014, Singapore, featuring a keynote by Wiebe Bijker, endorsed by 4S, submission deadline 15 January 2014.
Might well be worth looking into!

Here's the full announcement:

Call for Papers

In marking the 10th Anniversary of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, the Humanities, Science, and Society Research Cluster (HSS@HSS) will hold an international conference entitled Global STS: Exploring Transnational Dimensions of Science, Technology, and Society on 14 and 15 March 2014 at the NTU campus in Singapore.

For the past forty years, the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) has significantly contributed to our understanding of how science and technology mutually interact with society. Numerous concepts, frameworks, and theories have been developed by STS scholars but only a few touch upon the transnational dimensions of scientific production and technological development. The production system of science and technology has expanded beyond nation-state borders and implications and repercussions of technoscientific risk are rapidly spreading at the global scale. The conference aims to take STS across new frontiers where the global features of science and technology that increasingly shape the future of society in the 21st century are critically examined. Can we build better explanations to understand rapid developments of science and technology in the globalized society? How have transnational networks of scientific systems transformed epistemological contents and practices of science? How should the notion of technological politics be applied in diverse political regimes across the globe? These questions provide the grounds for exploring what we might consider as “Global STS”.

The conference aims to provide a venue for an interdisciplinary interaction between sociologists, historians, anthropologist, philosophers, and political scientists to examine how precisely globalization shifts the structures and cultures of technoscientific production and how transnationalization of technoscience produce far-reaching implications on the globalized society in terms of the application and commercialization of scientific knowledge and technical systems. As today's world is marked by the rise of Asia as a new center of technoscience production, we also invite STS researchers to probe the future development of STS looking into Asia's influences on global technoscientific enterprises in the 21st century. As an academic event, the conference seeks to extend the existing STS scholarship in exploring new territories to unpack science-technology-society relations, taking into account the histories, cultures, and institutions that mark the global contestation of technoscience.  
 
Topics of interest include but not limited to:
  • ·         Transnational Technoscience                                
  • ·         Sustainability and Global Development
  • ·         Risk and Disaster                                                                 
  • ·         New Media and Game Studies 
  • ·         Large-scale Infrastructures                                                
  • ·         Gender and Technoscience
  • ·         Cities and Urban Systems                                        
  • ·         Future Energy
  • ·         Health and Biomedicine                                          
  • ·         Governance and Institutions
Selected conference papers will be collected and published in an edited volume or a special issue for international circulation.

Keynote Speaker
Wiebe E. Bijker is professor of Technology & Society at the University of Maastricht. Professor Bijker is the author of “Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change” and a co-editor of influential volumes such as “The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology”, “Shaping Technology/ Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical Change”, and “Paradox of Scientific Authority: the Role of Scientific Advice in Democracies”. He is former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science and the recipient of the 2012 Leonardo da Vince Medal awarded by the Society for the History of Technology.  

Accommodations and Travel Subsidies
Participants will be provided with accommodation at Nanyang Executive Center (this does not apply to Singapore-based participants). Partial travel subsidies are offered to graduate students and participants from non-OECD countries. Please note that only one person for each paper is to be accommodated. 

Submissions and Deadline
To participate in the conference, please write an abstract of 300 words using the template available here: http://bit.ly/absform and send it to STSConference@ntu.edu.sg by 15 January 2014. Accepted abstracts will be notified by 1 February 2014.  For further information, please check the conference website at http://Global-STS.org or contact Sulfikar Amir at sulfikar@ntu.edu.sg.
 
This event is officially endorsed by the Society for Social Studies of Science.

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