Call for papers: Critical Approaches to Informational Phenomena – Past(s), Present(s) and Future(s)

Call for Papers to CIS’2021

Critical Approaches to Informational Phenomena – Past(s), Present(s) and Future(s)

Online Workshop at the

International Society for the Study of Information (IS4SI) Online Summit, 12-19 September 2021*

ORGANISATION

Critical Information Studies research group (CIS)

CHAIR

Syed Mustafa Ali, CIS Convenor, Open University, UK

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Ray Corrigan, CIS, Open University, UK

Mark Hall, CIS, Open University, UK

Andy Hollyhead, CIS, Open University, UK

Magnus Ramage, CIS, Open University, UK

Steve Walker, CIS, Open University, UK

Topic:

This workshop aims to explore contestation of the view that there is only a single way of understanding any of the past, present and/or future of informational phenomena (and sociotechnical assemblages more broadly). In opposition to singular (or unilinear) perspectives, we assert that informational phenomena always have multiple past(s), present(s), and future(s).

We seek to engage with various critical orientations contesting the claim that embracing a universal narrative is the correct way of thinking about informational phenomena, especially when that narrative is formulated by those in dominant positions of power.

Critical approaches to informational phenomena must always allow for production of a multiplicity of narratives, and especially those informed by perspectives generated by those located at the margins. To unsettle dominant power perspectives and in pursuit of restorative justice, it is necessary to embrace an ethics – and politics – wherein the views of those historically peripheralized are given preference.

The overarching theme of the workshop might be summarised as follows:

Lessons from the past(s), contestations in the present(s), envisioning the future(s)

Workshop discussions will focus on:

• How dominant narratives about informational phenomena and/or technologies can be interrogated (disrupted, unsettled) by drawing attention to their multiple past(s), present(s), and future(s) from one or more critical orientations.
• Examples of informational phenomena and/or technologies, where adopting a critical orientation can provide a means by which to disclose the contingent nature of the phenomenon and contestation over how it is understood.
• Critical orientations on information phenomena and/or technologies informing strategies and tactics for engaging with past and present developments and struggles with a view to shaping future trajectories – opening up some and closing down others.

Contributions are encouraged from various critical orientations including (but not limited to):

• Critical theory
• Political economy
• Feminist technoscience
• Postcolonial/decolonial theory
• Critical race theory
• Critical legal studies
• Critical data/algorithm studies
• Critical sociotechnical studies
• Critical discourse analysis
• Critical archive/canon studies
• Surveillance studies
• Critical infrastructure studies
• Critical systems studies

As a guide to contributors, examples of practical applications of these critical approaches include the following (although others are, of course, possible):

• The emergence in the 1970s of the influential Scandinavian ‘Collective Resource Approach’ to participatory design, involving collaboration between trade unionists and radical computer scientists, and its subsequent evolution.
• The question of how to balance the power of digital archives to make alternative past and present histories both more visible – through digitisation – and less visible – through exclusion from digitisation.
• Battles over the legality of mass surveillance legislation (such as the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 in the UK, though this is replicated in other jurisdictions) fought by civil rights and privacy advocates.
• Project Cybersyn, the early 1970s experiment to redesign the Chilean economy along cybernetic lines during the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende; relatedly, analyses of the structural roots of global inequality via sociotechnical and sociomaterial systems thinking.

SUBMISSIONS

Please email

• extended abstracts (300 – 500 words) for intended presentations in English until 15 May 2021 to s.m.ali@open.ac.uk “re: CAIP”. Submissions will be reviewed according to the scope of the workshop, and presenters notified of acceptance accordingly.
• Short papers of around 5 pages based on accepted presentations will be published in the Proceedings of the Summit. Details will be announced in due course.
• Publication of full papers will be considered after the workshop.

For further information please contact the chair at the above email address.

* The workshop is part of the IS4SI Summit 2021: https://is4si.org

Technology and social change: some shifting patterns of technological contention

Below is the abstract for a presentation I gave at the recent International Summit for Information Studies (IS4IS) conference in Vienna. It was part of a panel organised by Graeme Kirkpatrick (Professor of Media Arts, Aesthetics & Narrative, University of Skövde) inspired by the work of Andrew Feenberg, who opened the panel.

Technology and social change: some shifting patterns of technological contention

Introduction
Feenberg (2002) analyses technology in terms of managerial autonomy to assert control over and through technological choices, implying the necessity of increased democratisation of technological relations in the workplace in achieving a more participatory and democratic society. I argue that the recent history of the relationship between organised labour and digital technologies has seen a retreat from earlier attempts to assert control over technology, most notably through the Scandinavian traditions of participatory design, to an increasingly tactical and defensive view of these technologies as tools in labour organising and campaigning. This reflects the decreasing power of organised labour in the industrialised West and global North, at least. Simultaneously, the workplace is no longer the only, or even primary, place in which the majority encounter sophisticated digital technologies. The most prominent debates about the use of ICT in social emancipation are largely outside the workplace, concerning for example, debates about surveillance, the technical and economic relations around technological infrastructure (as, for example in the US net neutrality debate), and the role of ICT in social uprisings (see for example, Castells 2012 ).

Information and communications technologies (ICT) have a close relation to social emancipation that long predates the digital era. Moveable type is widely seen as important in the Protestant Christian reformation in Europe [Eisenstein, 2005] . Similarly, the unstamped press, pamphlets and ballads were important in the emergence of an English working class movement in the early 19th century [Thompson, 1963]. More recently, for much of the digital period there has been a strong current of thought that has associated the emergence of computing with democratic ideas in the workplace as well as, more widely, community, civil society and public service settings. This can be seen in the workplace origins of participatory design, and in fields such as community informatics (CI), and information technology for development (IT4D).

As is well documented, the participatory design (PD) movement has its origins in collaborations between researchers and the trade union movement in Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s. It was part of a wider concern of Nordic unions to develop a more ‘offensive’ approach to technology and work, attempting to assert a degree of control over new technologies in the workplace. It grew out of co-operation between researchers and trade unions, where values and practices of participation were particularly strong. This took place in a context of increasing workers’ rights to participate in company decision-making, following Sweden’s 1976 Codetermination Act and the establishment in the same year of the Centre for Working Life, to promote democracy in working life, paid for through a tax on employers [Lundin, 2010]. However, as trade union influence in the workplace declined, so did unions’ ability to sustain even these relatively modest attempts to assert some control over the introduction of technology. Attempts to develop alternative workplace visions of technologies faded, exacerbated also by criticisms of early PD projects’ involvement ‘blue-collar’ and craft unions had involved a failure to take account of changing workplaces, including most obviously the changing role of women.
In parallel, as computing technologies became more widespread beyond the workplace, unions began to experiment with the use of ICT in their own organising and campaigning work on more ‘traditional’ unions issues such as wages, job security and occupational health and safety (see e.g. Lee, 1996). As unions became concerned about the growing power of transnational corporations in an increasingly globalised economy, communications technologies in general and the internet in particular offered the ability for unions to try to co-ordinate solidarity at a similarly global level. In some instances, this ‘cyber-campaigning’ involved using the web as a site of conflict itself, for example, in the organisation of email protests to companies involved in disputes. As the internet and mobile communications have increasingly become part of the fabric of everyday personal and organisational life (in the global North, at least), so ICT has almost disappeared into the everyday work of unions. This absorption has seen the playing out of different understandings and interpretations of technologies among political, industrial and organisational groupings within unions (Martinez Lucio & Walker, 2005; Pulignano et al, 2013). A distinctive aspect of the incorporation of digital communication technologies, however, has been its use in extending unions’ response to globalisation (see e.g. ICEM, 1996). The emphasis in these cases was less to challenge the nature of technologies themselves but rather to exploit them in addressing more traditional union concerns.

As technology has come to saturate everyday life, and the power of organised labour has diminished, struggles between contesting views of technology are happening elsewhere. Edward Snowden and Wikileaks have, for example, highlighted the extent of state surveillance of citizens’ communications. Here, technologies such as the internet have enabled radically new modes of struggle in the almost instantaneous global release of confidential information. Importantly the subject of the struggle is itself about competing understandings of the use and abuse of ICTs. More widely, ‘hacker’ cultures (see, for example, the Chaos Computer Club congresses, and the ‘Anonymous’ hacking ‘groups’) are now increasingly the sites of alternative understandings of technology. Such visions often strongly highlight concerns of personal freedom and autonomy. Some, for example, see market relations as important in challenging transnational corporations. For example, community broadband movement often invokes arguments about competition and the structure of markets in attempts to build community approaches to building technological infrastructure.

Conclusion
Feenberg (2002) argues, social conflict may help us to identify possibilities for social change. This paper is not a comprehensive survey of the recent history of contention around ICT. Rather, it is a sketch of the fall and rise of some differing ways in which ICT and information have been used since the 1970s. These cases illustrate some of the shifts in the nature of the struggle between competing visions and interests in the development and use of digital envisaged by Feenberg. Early attempts to assert control in the workplace were, effectively rebuffed and unions rather sought to exploit ICT instrumentally. More recent contention of the nature of technology have taken place outside the workplace, increasingly originating in more self-consciously ‘digital’ political cultures. as been enrolled in social contention.

References and Notes
1. Castells, M Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2012
2. Eisenstein, E.L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 2005
3. Feenberg, A. (2002). Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2002
4. Lee, E. The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism. London: Pluto Press. 1997
5. Martinez Lucio, M. and Walker, S. The Networked Union? The Internet as a Challenge to Trade Union Identity and Roles. Critical Perspectives on International Management, 1, pp.137–154. 2005
6. Pulignano, V., Martinez Lucio, M. and Walker, S. Globalization, Restructuring and Unions: Transnational Co-ordination and Varieties of Labour Engagement. Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, 68, pp.261–289, 2013
7. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. London, Penguin. 1962
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI and ISIS. This abstract is distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Information and social contention: an initial outline

This is the abstract of a presentation I gave at a workshop ‘Information’ organised by my colleague Chris Bissell at 14th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas in Porto earlier this year (see here for more, well, information). The short paper will be available in the OU’s ORO research repository shortly.

Social movements arise where there is some form of social contention, typically when a movement of people with values and aims different from a society’s mainstream arises. Information is important in several ways to these social movements; the establishment of a shared movement identity, the co-ordination of activity, and as a terrain of conflict with a social adversary. While the role of information and communication technologies in recent social movements, such as the ‘Arab spring’ or Occupy movements, has been widely studied, the role of information itself has generally been seen as unproblematic. Recent work in the philosophy of information may provide a basis for thinking about the role of information, as distinct from the technologies used to store, organize and communicate it, may provide a basis for thinking about it. This paper sketches how this might work using examples from the European labour movement, where there has been considerable debate over the last decade or so as to whether or not there is an emerging social movement, or whether it remains a transnational bureaucracy disconnected from ‘grassroots’ trade unionists. It draws on the experiences of a series of transnational projects which aimed to develop cross-border collaboration through the use of e-learning and online networking approaches. The failures and relative successes of this approach may be explained at least partially as informational problems.

Every worker deserves the right tools

I’ve just seen sub-heading ‘Every worker deserves the right tools’ on a a flyer for an OU colleague’s (Clara Mancini) work. I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. Clara is doing some important work on helping ‘working animals’ (e.g. dogs that are trained to detect cancer, or care for people with diabetes) to communicate more effectively with people.

What I find depressing is that the claim for animals is, rightly, uncontroversial but I very much doubt that it would be in most (human) workplaces. Or at least, little effort is made to identify what the right tools might be. Every worker deserves the right tools – even humans.

If you want to find out more about Clara’s work she’s exhibiting at the Natural History Museum Universities Week next week and the Royal Society Summer Exhibition at the end of the month.

Review: Technology Enhanced Professional Learning: Littlejohn and Margaryan (2014)

Review: Technology Enhanced Professional Learning: Littlejohn and Margaryan (2014)

Technology-enhanced professional learning: process, practices and tools. London & New York: Routledge (Edited by Alison Littlejohn and Anoush Margaryan, 2014, 208 pages, ISBN 978-0-415-85409-2)

I’ve just reviewed the above book for JIME (Journal of Interactive Media in Education). It was written before the Networked Learning conference in Edinburgh, that I’ve just got back from. I hope, though, that it’s in the spirit of Neil Selwyn’s keynote there which urged us (researchers in networked learning) to be more critical, with good grace.

Examining hybrid digital/material resources in networked learning: a critical realist approach

Examining hybrid digital/material resources in networked learning: a critical realist approach

The abstract of the paper that Sarah Davies and I will be presenting next month at Networked Learning 2014 in Edinburgh has been published on the conference web site (the full paper is available from the  OU’s ORO repository). It has ever such a slightly sceptical tone about the value of Actor-network Theory (see here if you’ve not come across it before), which given the other papers being presented could be quite entertaining. It’s part of a project we’re working on with Elaine Thomas looking at current state of play of ‘hybrid’ digital/material resources in networked learning (for example, remote labs or other physical devices which are linked to distributed learning). For me, interest in this was triggered by some of the ideas we looked at in the IBZL project.