Call
for Contributions
Deadline:
15 June 2016
The
Internet Rules, But How?
An
STS take on doing Internet governance
Preconference
workshop – AoIR 2016
5
October 2016 – Berlin, Germany
Workshop
facilitators:
Dmitry
Epstein, Christian Katzenbach, Francesca Musiani, Julia
Pohle
Keynote
speaker:
Laura
DeNardis
Over the last decade, the
regulation and governance of the Internet at the national
and international level have attracted growing attention
by policy-makers and researchers. This is particularly the
case in post-Snowden times which increased distrust of
formal government institutions and their ‘dangerous
liaisons’ with the private sector.
Traditionally, Internet
governance (IG) research focussed on new institutions that
have been explicitly established to negotiate the
Internet’s technical coordination or deliberate
Internet-related public policy issues. Recently, authors
have criticised this institutional focus, including a
small group of scholars who draw on perspectives from
Science and Technology Studies (STS), calling to rethink
and substantiate questions of ordering and governing the
net. Their contributions highlight the day-to-day, mundane
practices that constitute IG, take into account the
plurality and ‘networkedness’ of devices and arrangements
involved in the governance of information technology, and
investigate the invisibility, pervasiveness, and apparent
agency of the digital infrastructure itself.
IG, in this view, consists of
practices and controversies of design, regulation, and use
of material infrastructures. Accordingly, the observation
and investigation of practices require different,
innovative research approaches, which delve into the
variety of ways in which digital uses and practices may be
an integral part of today’s IG. In this way, STS-informed
perspectives are increasingly instrumental for challenging
and expanding our understanding and for informing our
examination of ordering and governing processes in the
digital realm.
This preconference workshop
seeks to nurture the growing interest in researching and
observing IG from an STS-informed perspective. More
broadly, the workshop aims to facilitate a discussion and
an exchange of perspectives about the intertwined roles of
design, infrastructures, and informal communities of
practice in IG.
For the full-day workshop, we
are inviting contributions for four sessions:
1. The
first research panel will focus on theory, inviting papers
that share a strong conceptual interest in understanding
how STS can inform theoretical perspectives on Internet
governance, for instance by revealing socio-technical
controversies or by unveiling power and control structures
embedded in Internet architecture and its governance
institutions;
2. The
second research panel will focus on STS-informed empirical
work on Internet governance, inviting papers that make use
of the conceptual and methodological tool-sets of STS to
observe and study IG practices and the ways in which the
norms shaping the provision, design and usage of the
Internet are negotiated, and de- and re-stabilised;
3. For
the methodological fishbowl session, we will invite
researchers to report on their experience with
STS-inspired Internet governance research. The open
discussion will focus on the practicalities of doing
participatory observation in IG and the challenges of
negotiating one’s role as a researcher and an active
participant (or even an activist) in IG processes;
4. For
the final open roundtable discussion we are inviting
researchers to reflect on the notion of “black box” as it
relates to the treatment of technological artifacts in
public and media discourses (e.g. related to the French
intelligence bill). We foresee that unpacking the notion
of the “black box” will also help engage IG research and
researchers with the broader community of Internet
scholars who are deliberating topics such as politics of
platforms and algorithms.
Please submit your
contributions no
later than June 15 to ig-workshop-aoir2016@hiig.de. We
expect extended abstracts for sessions 1-2 and position
papers for sessions 3-4, max. 800 words. Registration at
the AoIR 2016 conference is necessary in order to
participate at the workshop. Notification will be sent out
in mid-July so that participants can book Early Bird
Tickets for the conference before August 1.
This workshop is part of a
broader effort of advancing an STS-informed conversation
on Internet governance. It builds on the successful panel
on STS perspectives on IG that took place during AoIR 2015
in Phoenix and a special issue of the Internet Policy
Review to be published in early September 2016.
The workshop is supported by
the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet),
the Internet Policy Review of the Alexander von Humboldt
Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG, Berlin), the
Department of Communication, University of Illinois at
Chicago, and the Institute for Communication Sciences
(CNRS/Paris-Sorbonne/UPMC, Paris).
Contact: Julia Pohle.
Christian Katzenbach. Francesca Musiani. Dmitry Epstein