CfP Risk technologies session at forthcoming Sociology of Risk mid-term

I’m very tempted to submit something for this – in spite of my continued lack of conference travel funding & the number of international trips I’m already committed to next year.

Edit to add: problem solved – I only just noticed that the deadline is today…

Relating with the Digital, Relating to the Future: Bringing Risk to Life
Session organized for the ESA RN22 (Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty) Mid-Term Conference “Risk, Uncertainty and Transition”, Stuttgart, 8-10 April 2015

Convenors: Nat O’Grady (University of Southampton) and Matthias Leese (University of Tuebingen)

Recent literature suggests that the rise of digital technologies in the back offices of governmental bodies, emergency responders, and a variety of private firms does not exactly seal a new dawn of technocracy in which the ability to intervene, to govern or control lies at the behest of auto-poetic software and algorithmic code. To analyse, to identify, or to detect risks are not tasks which, in other words, exclusively rely on computers. What matters instead are the new forms of relation inaugurated between humans and technology in exploring transformations to risk governance. Question of interface, of design, and visualization have thus come to the fore. This session seeks to bring together scholars from across social science who share an interest in how digital technologies have led to a re-problematisation of risk governance; specifically with regards to how such technologies are brought to life in their relation to human operators and those that are governed.

Empirical and/or theoretical contributions are solicited concentrating on a number of themes including, but not limited to:

•         Practices of visualising the future
•         The politics of data-based decision making
•         Organisational transformation in relation to digital technologies
•         Digital technologies and the remaking of  futures
•         New logics and modes of calculation
•         The organisational situatedness of technologies of risk management

Please send your abstract of 300-400 words to Nat O’Grady (N.O’grady@soton.ac.uk<mailto:grady@soton.ac.uk>) and Matthias Leese (matthias.leese@izew.uni-tuebingen.de<mailto:matthias.leese@izew.uni-tuebingen.de>) by 15 December 2014 the latest. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.