The autumn school “Data Centres, Data Owners, Data Lakes: Infrastructures and Flow in Science & Technology Studies”, organized by the Centre for Anthropological Knowledge in Scientific and Technological Cultures (CAST) at Ruhr-University Bochum, will take place on November 10–13, 2018, in Bochum.
With the growing smartification of ever more devices in our everyday life, big data masses are generated, transmitted, analysed, stored and re-used. Devices, grids, wires, data centres and data formats are re-organized and thereby re-configure people’s relations to data and each other. With the notion of data lakes new data infrastructures are developed to handle big and smart data. New data infrastructures spur new flows of data, of technologies, of people and of values, and these again shape and reshape infrastructures. Using Science & Technology Studies literature on infrastructures and infrastructuring we explore the intersections and co-emergences of data infrastructures and flows as sites and processes of concentration, negotiation, and sociomaterial (re)-building. For the autumn school we encourage participations of PhD students who do ethnographic studies of data sites from a Science & Technology Studies perspective. We apply literature on infrastructures to explore data, its relations and flows. We ask how different concerns about data are formed and negotiated? How is data enacted differently in different sites within the infrastructure? How do actors, material devices, imaginaries and practices engage in infrastructuring work?
We warmly invite doctoral students to apply for participation in this autumn school, which will combine lectures with supervised group work, writing exercises, academic speed dating and data lab methodology to engage with how to imagine and write about data, data infrastructures and data flows. The aim is to engage with participant’s own research and discuss the methodological and analytical challenges of the study of data in the social sciences. The autumn school will have a strong STS orientation and applicants taking inspiration from this tradition will be prioritized.
The deadline for application is August 19, 2018.
For further information, check here.