Call for Papers/Presentations
Open Research Seminar: Living in the Broken World – Fostering Repair, Maintenance, and Care
12-13 December 2024, Tampere University
Steven J. Jackson, a professor of Information Science and Science and Technology Studies, argues that we currently live in a “broken world”. The concept emphasizes the fragility of the balance that has enabled humans to flourish for the past millennia. In the 2020s, on the precipice of ecological devastation, Jackson invites us to imagine ‘what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points. This shift in perspective requires us to acknowledge the limits of our fragile world and recognize the importance of repair, maintenance, and care as a means of sustaining the good life amidst all the brokenness.
The two-day research seminar seeks contributions from diverse academic disciplines to explore the concept of a broken world: how repair, maintenance, and care configure research settings, research methodologies, and eventually research ontologies and epistemologies while considering the societal impacts of the research. We also encourage addressing the barriers, “black holes”, conflicts of interest, and historical injustices that arise when discussing the idea of brokenness.
Call for papers/presentations
In order to support future research and action in the field, the seminar welcomes different types of presentations: research papers, “work-in-progress” papers, practice-based responses, research plans, research idea papers, and “wildcards” (suggest your own presentation type).
Proposals may respond to, but are not limited by, the following themes:
- circular ecosystems
- broken world and Global South
- imagining beyond brokenness
- consumerism, repair and maintenance
- education and broken world thinking
- technological obsolescence and sustainable innovation
- cultural narratives of breakdown and repair
- resilience and vulnerability in broken systems
- failures and fixes of digital infrastructures
- ethics of care in research and knowledge production
- indigenous knowledge and traditional practices of repair
- urban decay, renewal, and community care
- art, aesthetics, and visualisations of brokenness and repair
Please submit your proposal (200-250 words) with a brief bio via email to antti.kurko@tuni.fi by 15th of November. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 21st of November.
Seminar programme
In addition to presentations from participants, the seminar includes keynote presentations by Professor Steven Jackson and Dr. Valeria Graziano.
- Steven J. Jackson acts as a Professor of Information Science and Science and Technology Studies and Vice-Provost for Academic Innovation at Cornell University (USA). His work combines ethnographic, legal, humanistic, and interpretive traditions grounded in pragmatism, critical theory, and post-structuralism with an overall interest in how people build and maintain order, value and meaning in and with the worlds around them. He is fascinated by processes of breakdown, maintenance and repair as central but neglected moments in our individual and collective relationships with technology. This has led to ethnographic projects with mobile phone repair workers around the world, amateur fixer movements in Europe and North America, and to collaborative projects with interactive and new media artists. He is especially interested in places where new computing forms and practices meet the social and natural worlds, with implications for collaboration, sustainability, justice, learning and inequality.
- Valeria Graziano a cultural theorist, educator and organiser with a background in performance studies and political theory. She is based at the Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Rijeka, Rijeka. Over the years, she has been involved in numerous research initiatives across the cultural sector and social movements, focusing on popular pedagogy and politics of recreation; repair practices and refusal of free work; care and piracy. She has lectured extensively in a number of international institutions, including Aalto University (MA Curating, Managing and Mediating Art) and Università Roma Tre (MA in Gender Studies). She was a consultant for the Art Council of England and the Serpentine Gallery, developing frameworks to improve the participation of black and minority constituencies. She also accompanied Intermediae Matadero and the Arts Collaborative Network in processes of organisational change.
The conference will take place in person only at Tampere University center campus. There is no participation fee.
The open seminar is the final event of Assemblages of broken world seminar series, funded by the DigiSus research platform. For questions and more information, please write to antti.kurko@tuni.fi.
Organizing committee:
Tarja Rautiainen-Keskustalo, Minna Vigren and Antti Kurko
Digital and Sustainability Transitions in Society
Tampere University, Finland