Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 395.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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    [1]    From: Ilieva, Polina <Polina.Ilieva@UCSF.EDU>
           Subject: CFP: Fourth Workshop on Scientific Archives (18)

    [2]    From: Irina Zakharova <i.zakharova@ish.uni-hannover.de>
           Subject: EASST/4S CfP Panel - 'The banality of failure' (69)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2024-01-17 06:17:15+00:00
        From: Ilieva, Polina <Polina.Ilieva@UCSF.EDU>
        Subject: CFP: Fourth Workshop on Scientific Archives

Fourth Workshop on Scientific Archives
https://www.ica.org/en/fourth-workshop-on-scientific-archives

The Committee on the Archives of Science and Technology of
the Section on University and Research Institution Archives of
the International Council on Archives is pleased to announce the 
Fourth Workshop on Scientific Archives. This workshop aims to 
bring together a diverse community of collaborators
participating in generating, preserving, arranging, processing,
appraising, digitizing, providing access to the contemporary archives of
science and technology.

Date: Wednesday, June 5 and Thursday, June 6, 2024

[As it happens, Humanist's plain-text format was overcome by 
Safelinks to the extent that I've omitted the remainder. The above 
link should, however, provide any interested reader sufficient 
information. --WM]

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2024-01-16 19:55:27+00:00
        From: Irina Zakharova <i.zakharova@ish.uni-hannover.de>
        Subject: EASST/4S CfP Panel - 'The banality of failure'

We would like to draw your attention to the call for abstracts for the panel
“The banality of failure: Disturbances, fragilities and resilience of
digital infrastructures, media and technologies” at the EASST/4S 2024.
We would like to invite you to discuss with us, how can societies
productively engage with technological fragilities?  What is the role of
failure in our relations with technologies? How to develop practices of
resilience? As big and small breakdowns challenge everyday activities, our
panel explores the banality of failure and maintenance work.

The abstract submission deadline is February 12th. To submit your abstracts
please use the following link:
https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easst-4s2024/p/14248

We are looking forward to exciting discussions at the EASST/4S 2024 in
Amsterdam!


Kind regards,
Irina Zakharova, Erik Koenen, Christian Schwarzenegger & Sigrid Kannengießer


The banality of failure: Disturbances, fragilities and resilience of digital
infrastructures, media and technologies


Long panel abstract:

This open panel takes as a starting point studies of infrastructures, their
breakdowns, and the often invisible maintenance work supporting digital
technologies. How can societies productively engage with technological
fragilities?  What is the role of failure in our relations with technologies
and what practices of resilience develop from these relations? How can
everyday maintenance work be acknowledged and integrated into
technopolitics? Breakdowns such as an internet connection not working during
an important video call or an electricity outage following an ecological or
human-made crisis are no rare occurrences. As such small and big breakdowns
challenge everyday activities, they render visible the inherent fragility of
our digitally mediated existence. There is, however, an inclination in both
public discourse and academic scrutiny to focus on the extraordinary rather
than the commonplace. Taking a step back from such attention to the
transformative power of breakdown, this paper aims to explore the banality
of failure and everyday maintenance work.

Dealing with ‚small’ everyday technical malfunctions, failures, and
glitches, caring for or fixing technological breakdowns has become as
invisible and taken for granted as the digital infrastructures themselves.
Noticeably, these practices of everyday maintenance are often overlooked
when advertising new technologies, but present integral components of the
economic revenue models, digital design and user experience. Lastly, we need
to recognize the environmental impact stemming from intentional design of
digital technologies that seem destined to fail, pushing consumers towards
more frequent replacements rather than fixes. This panel invites to explore
such disturbances, fragilities and resilience in our relations with digital
infrastructures. Topics can include empirical cases of common or
exceptional, deliberate or unintentional technological failures and their
fixes, reflections on existing failure-free technopolitics, material
obsolesce and the intentionally limited lifecycles of digital technologies,
and conceptual inquiries into the nature of failure, disturbance, and
resilience.


--

Dr. Irina Zakharova
Postdoctoral researcher
Leibniz University Hannover
Institute of Sociology
Working group Sociology of Digitalisation



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