CfP: Can Improved Science and Technology Mean Progress? - 4S Annual Meeting, Boston, 2017

​Call for Papers

Open Panel: Can Improved Science and Technology Mean Progress? More Intelligently Steering Technoscientific Systems

Organized for Annual 4S Meeting to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, August 30-September 2, 2017

Description
Must technoscientific “progress” proceed so technocratically? Dominant innovation discourses implicitly support the view that scientific knowledge and technological innovation automatically translate into improved living. Such a view has led to the promotion of “permissionless innovation,” an ideology that legitimates a hands-off approach to the “disruptive technologies” designed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and freedom of research in their R&D departments. However, scholars have shown that sociotechnical innovations typically benefit some people and organizations more than others. Thus it is clear to many within STS that those wishing to enact non-technocratic visions of progress face social as well as technical barriers.

To mitigate or head off the worst consequences of permissionless innovation and other discourses that naturalize the politics of technoscientifc change, scholars must consider alternative ways of steering technoscientific agendas aside from allowing small groups of politically and financially powerful elites to make most of the decisions. How might new technologies and research programs be shaped to be more suitable for public purposes before markets let them loose into the world?
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The purpose of this panel is to explicitly examine what would be required to guide science and technology toward better fulfilling more humans’ needs more of the time. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, mechanisms for slowing the pace of technoscientific change, addressing the privileged position of particular decision-makers, counteracting the subtle effects of “permissionless innovation” and other naturalizing discourses, and better enabling lay citizens and experts to critically probe the politics of innovation.

Submission
Submission Deadline: March 1, 2017. 
Submit paper, session, and making and doing proposals here: 
https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s17/

Please check the box to submit your paper to open panel "Can Improved Science and Technology Mean Progress? More Intelligently Steering Technoscientific Systems."

You can find more details about the conference on
http://www.4sonline.org/meeting

Organizers
For more information contact:
Taylor Dotson, New Mexico Tech, [email protected] 
Michael Bouchey, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, [email protected]