Autumn School, 05.-07.10.2020, Konstanz, Germany
Organized by the Research Unit “Media and Participation. Between Demand and Entitlement”, in cooperation with the Research College “SENSING: The Knowledge of Sensitive Media” (Potsdam)
Contemporary modes of Teilhabe (participation) in media-infused environments unfold within material and bodily infrastructures as the ground for any form of sensemaking, that is, between sensors, sensation and meaning. Instead of locating such sensuous and techno-sensory regimes and attached meaning structures in predefined places of power, such as institutions, the notion of infrastructure underlines what comes to pass as sensed or registered and the occurrence of meaning depends on dynamic processes of participation.
How such emergent forms of Teilhabe occur with and through the sensuous materialities of infrastructures in order to yield meaningful effects defines the key concern of this autumn school. We conceive of participation as a process of infrastructuring with and through sensuous realms of the human and more-than-human, in order to generate different forms of sensemaking in their material, technological, embodied, economic, computational, affective, haptic, and operational dimensions.
Potential subjects of inquiry could be:
- relations of power and knowledge in infrastructures of sense/making
- dimensions of de-sensing, in-sensing, and de-affection
- sensor technologies and more-than-human processes of sensing
- VR-based infrastructuring of seeing and hearing
- hearing technology platforms (hearing aids, cochlear implants)
- infrastructures of seeing, platformization of seeing practices
- decolonial and queer critiques of infrastructures and modes of participation
- sensuous matter/materialities of infrastructures / infrastructures of sense
- case studies relating to haptic media and the sensuous
- motion gestures as practices of sensemaking, i.e. calculated publics or networked audiences
Successful completion of the autumn school can be awarded with 5 credits according to the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). Credits will be awarded on the base of preparatory readings, 100 % (active) participation during the course, and impulse presentation.
Please hand in a one-page paper on how questions of infrastructures and sense|making are central to your own work and research. Please send your paper and a short biographical note to mediale.teilhabe.kn [at] gmail.com by April 13, 2020. Please, feel free to direct any questions concerning the Autumn School to us.
References
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Berlant, L. (2016). The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (3): 393–419.
Farman, Jason (2018). Delayed Response. The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Gabrys, Jennifer (2016). Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. University of Minnesota Press.
Gordillo, Gastón R. (2014). Rubble. The Afterlife of Destruction. Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Harney, S. (2015). Hapticality in the Undercommons. In: Routledge Companion to Art and Politics, ed. by Randy Martin, pp. 173-179.
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Plantin, J.-C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N. et al. (2018): Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society, 20 (1): 293–310.
Star, S. L., and Ruhleder, K. 1996: ‘Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research 7 (1): 111–134.
Sundaram, R. (2015). Post-Postcolonial Sensory Infrastructure. E-Flux Journal 63 <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60858/post-postcolonial-sensory-infrastructure/>.
Tellioğlu, H., Habiger, M., and Cech, F. (2017). Infrastructures for Sense Making. Infrahealth 2017 - Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Infrastructure in Healthcare. <https://dl.eusset.eu/bitstream/20.500.12015/2908/1/infrahealth2017_paper_21.pdf>.
Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft