CALL FOR PAPERS FOR THE SWISS STS MEETING 2008

SCIENCEFUTURES

A joint event of the Centre for the History of Knowledge (ETH Zurich and
University of Zurich) and The Swiss Association for the Studies of Science,
Technology and Society (STS-CH)

Organizers: Kijan Espahangizi, Michael Hagner, Martina Merz, Barbara Orland,
Marianne Sommer, Daniel Speich, Jakob Tanner

Date and location: February 6-9, 2008, ETH Zurich and University of Zurich,
Switzerland

The Swiss STS Meeting 2008 is an academic event tailored to the interests of
junior scholars, in particular Ph.D. students, in science and technology
studies in Switzerland and abroad. This is the fourth conference of its
kind, and the institution has become an important interdisciplinary platform
for the exchange and production of knowledge for a substantial number of
young researchers. The general topic of the conference, ScienceFutures, does
justice to this interdisciplinarity by alluding to interfaces between
science, technology, sociology, history, cultural studies, literature, and
other fields that are contributing to the rich area of science and
technology studies. It is explicitly meant to bridge the gap between the two
cultures of the sciences and the humanities, but also those between the
humanities, the social sciences, and the arts.

ScienceFutures

ScienceFutures is a provocative reaction to the notion that with the
millennium, utopian thinking has come to an end. While in early modern
thought utopia was the site of happiness removed in space, it increasingly
became a good place in the future in nineteenth-century progressionism.
Subjected to différance in space and time, utopias acquired a technical and
scientific makeup. Trust in the calculability of the future was also a
necessary condition for the rise of the modern welfare state, leading to a
heyday of social planning. However, in high modernism the future lost its
character of being a 'storehouse of possibilities'. Rather, confronted with
risks and uncertainties, the futurology of the 1960s tried to 'colonize' the
time ahead and reduce its openness, now conceived not as a chance but as a
potential danger. The result was a 'defuturizing' of the present, and a
technocratic stance towards social change. In the aftermath of the traumatic
outgrowths of totalitarianism, the utility of prospective thinking remained
fundamentally questionable, and the dynamics of scientific and technological
innovation made it difficult to anticipate future developments with
plausible certainty.

Where do we stand today? Organizational change management and environmental
sustainability are future oriented. In economics, probabilistic prognoses
have gained importance, with 'futures' as a new financial product that
capitalizes on uncertainty. It has even been argued that the postmodern age
has brought a revival of the utopian (and dystopian), built on the
transforming power of science, medicine, and technology. Is the present
characterized by chronotopes and heterotopias that force us to rethink
traditional notions of time and space? What are the characteristics of the
discourses on a posthuman age, presumably initiated by the 'revolutions' in
biotechnology, nanotechnology, information science, and robotics?

Key Issues

The prospect of a brave new world with a deep structure that has been
reorganized along tracks unfamiliar to the present through ruthless boundary
crossing opens up many questions: How are the citizens of the glocal and
virtureal worlds of the future imagined? Will fundamental dichotomies such
as dead/alive, fictitious/real, female/male, animal/human, or
artificial/natural dissolve? Which new forms of social organization will
shape future collectives? Are new boundaries and new sources of conflict
emerging?

Thinking the unfamiliar, not to mention to communicate and realize the
unknown, creates problems. The difficulty of translation is associated with
questions regarding the formal and representational: the media, genres,
models, languages, narratives, vocabularies, and the iconographies through
which future worlds become possible. How do the scientists and engineers,
the science fiction writers, and cultural theorists deal with the problem of
translation? How do they convey the strange, the other, and still make
sense? What kinds of aesthetics and which rationalities are at work in these
epistemologies of the future? Associated with these are further questions,
such as in how far our visions of and possibilities for the future may be
rooted in our present. How do our anthropomorphisms, and more specific
contingencies, set boundaries to the strange? The role of the social past in
future scenarios of societies, as well as the ways in which our bodies might
be seen as checks to the possible, or to the contrary become the sine qua
non for and site of projections into the future, are worth investigating.

Finally, as befitting a field that cultivates the virtue of
self-reflexivity, one may inquire after the role of science and technology
studies in the creation of ScienceFutures. Are the above observations
applicable to researchers in science, medicine, and technology, or does the
old division between the natural and human sciences, on the one hand, and
the humanities and social sciences, on the other hand, loom in this kind of
approach to ScienceFutures? How do scientific disciplines and investigators
conceptualize the futures they see opened up by their work, its consequences
for society, and how do they deal with problems of communication? How does
the reference to future developments change the position of scientific
experts within the social power games of their present? What is the role of
envisioning models and scenarios in the production of knowledge itself? How
are epistemic conditions rearranged by taking the future into account? And
finally, what are the prophecies exponents make regarding the futures of
their own disciplines, including science studies? In how far are 'a
flattening of the world' and a 'democratization of science' creating
unprecedented possibilities and problems?

The meeting encourages scholars to engage with futuristic science, and to
address questions surrounding the prospects of science and technology, of
estimated social, cultural, political, and economic implications. How are
futures negotiated between the scientific practitioners and diverse publics?
Do utopias (inevitably) envisage conformity, or are diversity and dissent
built into visions of the future? Has science become the mythology of the
scientific age? Or do the fears outweigh the hopes connected with science
and technology? Is someone's desire another's nightmare? Are futures
politically instrumentalized, and if so, how do they function as threats
and/or as promises? In what kinds of genres and media are the visions of
future worlds created and communicated? How are form and content related?
Are the utopias and apocalypses free from bodies as we know them, or do they
to the contrary aim at the apotheosis of the human?

Session and Abstract Submission

We invite submissions for organized sessions or individual papers that
approach the topic of ScienceFutures. It is possible to submit session and
individual abstracts electronically on the conference website at
http://www.zgw.ethz.ch/sts. Sessions
will be 105 minutes and should not
exceed three presentations of maximum twenty minutes each. If five or six
speakers address similar topics, two sessions may be submitted. The deadline
for submissions is July 15, 2007, and abstracts should not exceed 500 words.
Closer to the event important information on the program development, travel
possibilities, and locality.

Enquiries may be addressed to sts08wiss.gess.ethz.ch