CRESC 5th Annual Conference 2009: Objects - What Matters? Technology, Value and Social Change
1-4 September 2009, University of Manchester
Conference Announcement
The fifth annual conference of CRESC will tackle Objects - What Matters? Technology, Value and Social Change. As contemporary social theorists continue to signal the need to reconfigure our deliberations on the social through attention to practice, to object-mediated relations, to non-human agency and to the affective dimensions of human sociality, this conference takes as its focus the objects and values which find themselves at centre stage. And we ask, in the context of nearly two decades of diverse disciplinary approaches to these issues, what matters about objects? How are they inflecting our understandings of technology, of expertise, and of social change? How has a focus on objects reconfigured our understandings of how values inflect the ways in which people make relations, create social worlds, and construct conceptual categories? How have objects become integral to human enthusiasms and energies, to transformational ambition, or to the transmission of values across time and space? How do objects move between ordinary and extraordinary states, shade in and out of significance, manifest instability and uncertainty? How do moral and material values attach to objects as they move in space and time? What dimensions do they inhabit and/or reveal?
For the full call of papers please go to http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/conference2009/callforpapers.html
Plenary Speakers
Confirmed plenary speakers to date include:
- Mario Biagioli (Harvard University)
- Patricia Clough (City University of New York)
- Graham Harman (American University Cairo)
- Chandra Mukerji (University of California, San Diego)
- Annemarie Mol (University of Amsterdam)
- Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds)
- Kathleen Stewart (University of Texas, Austin)
Conference Convenors: Penny Harvey (Manchester), Hannah Knox (Manchester), Kath Woodward (Open University), Elizabeth Silva (Open University) and Nick Thoburn (Manchester)
Conference Organisers:
Conference Administrators: Bussie Awosanya and Karen Ho
Conference Manager: Josine Opmeer