The constitutive power of new technologies:
attachments, aversions, identifications
Tuesday 31st March @ Keele University
An Informal, Interdisciplinary Workshop
This workshop will offer a space to reflect on how perceptions, usages and engagements with new technologies are capable of forming political, social and cultural identities.
Confirmed participants include:
- Performance artist Kerstin Bueschges (Anglia University, Cambridge) giving her provocative response to Anna Furse’s Glass Body on IVF
- Lieve Gies (Keele University) on war porn and the internet
- Maria Bortoluzzi (Udine University) on ‘Second Life’
Topics for discussion will include: the internet as a tool in research and education· science fiction, social realities, legal possibilities,….
Other possible themes:
- Narrating medical technologies: the stories which people tell about their experiences of (bio)medical technologies and the technological impact on embodiment, disembodiment and the virtual.
- (Virtual) migration, diasporas and technology
- Investments, emotions, irrational attachments in relation to technology
- Technology and risk
- Technology and methodology
- Generational, gender and sexual differences around technology
- Excess and overload of technology in everyday life
- Discipline, social control, conflict and resistance to technology
- Access and equality issues: does technology help to address social and material inequalities?
We envisage that this project will draw on a diverse set of literatures (some keywords: dystopias, risk society, liquidity, identity, simulacra, cyberpunk/feminism, embodiment, surveillance, hegemony/resistance, ecology/environment, diasporas, cybercrime, consumption).
We are aiming for a varied format accommodating thought pieces, brainstorming sessions, discussions of novels and films, full papers, etc.
Programme
If you are interested in participating and/or giving a paper or discussing work in progress, please contact Ruth Cain at Keele University: r.c.m.cain@law.keele.ac.uk by 15 February 2008
