糖心TV

The latest issue of Sociologica 14, no. 2 (2020) contains a special feature on 鈥淟istening in a Time of Pandemic鈥� co-edited by CIM scholar Dr Naomi Waltham-Smith and a collaborator and fellow sound-studies scholar at the American University in Paris, Dr Jessica Feldman.

During the pandemic, listening habits around the world have been undergoing significant transformation in response to various public health measures imposing physical distancing and stay-at-home isolation. This situation has prompted new experiments with digital mediations, transformations in modalities of protest and autonomy, and impulses towards anecdotal accounts in a bid to share experiences of isolation. The essays in this special feature, powerful and evocative by turns, range across a variety of socio-political and disciplinary concerns and point towards a crucial issue facing societies today: how to design new forms and practices of listening to foster the forms of sociality and collectivity urgently needed in a changed world.

As part of MD4SG '20 4th Workshop on Mechanism Design for Social Good (August 17-19, 2020), CIM doctoral student Helena Su谩rez Val will be participating in the presentation of a work-in-progress paper: 鈥楩eminicide & Machine Learning: Detecting Gender-based Violence to Strengthen Civil Sector Activism鈥�, co-authored with Catherine D'Ignazio, Silvana Fumega, Harini Suresh, Isadora Crux锚n, Wonyoung So, Mar铆a De Los Angeles Mart铆nez and Mariel Garc铆a-Montes.

Abstract: Gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome, feminicide, are a serious problem in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), as they are in the rest of the world. Although governments have passed legislation criminalizing feminicide, these laws have not been accompanied by relevant policy nor by robust data collection that measures the scope and scale of the problem. Drawing from Data Feminism, we situate feminicide data as "missing data" and describe the work of activists and civil society organizations who attempt to fill in the gaps by compiling incidents of feminicide from news reports. Activists doing this work face challenges: lack of time and financial resources, difficulties in accessing official data, and the mental health burden of reading about violent deaths of women. The paper describes ongoing progress on a participatory action research project designed to help sustain activist efforts to collect feminicide data by partially automating detection using machine learning.

Full details of the programme and registration for the event here:

As scholars continue to take stock of Agamben鈥檚 L鈥橴so dei corpi, it is clear that there is much that we鈥檝e already heard before, if only faintly, in earlier parts of the Homo Sacer project. This finale echoes repeated attacks on the presuppositional structure of language, showing Agamben to be a thinker of the unthought and one who, as Derrida observes, claims he is the first to think the unthought. With deliberate irony, I excavate two unthoughts in L鈥橴so dei corpi that remain as yet unspoken among critical responses.

First, Agamben鈥檚 longstanding entanglement with deconstruction goes without any explicit mention in this text beyond subtle allusions to earlier or potential encounters. While Kevin Attell has rigorously examined the relationship between Agamben and Derrida up to 2005, I argue that this more recent, albeit silent, confrontation clarifies the proximity and distance between them. I set Agamben鈥檚 use alongside Derrida鈥檚 deconstruction of metaphorical usure, arguing that both are ultimately concerned with the Heideggerian theme of the withdrawal of being. I examine to what extent use succeeds in its ambition to deactivate the presuppositional logic of the transcendental.

Second, notwithstanding his preoccupations with sound and sense, there is another Heideggerianism that Agamben doesn鈥檛 thematize as such: hearing. Reading Agamben鈥檚 sparse references to aurality alongside Derrida鈥檚 extensive engagement, I reconfigure Peter Szendy鈥檚 overhearing specifically as an usure of the ear. Using the concept to describe how the protagonists mishear one another in trying to hear too much, I overhear the dissonant resonances through which deconstruction remains the presupposition of Agamben鈥檚 thought. I argue that an abandonment of the transcendental asks that nothing remain unheard, only modified by the ear.

As part of ongoing research into COVID-19 App Store and Dataflows Ecologies, CIM researchers Michael Dieter and Nate Tkacz will deliver a talk and workshop for SummerPIT 2020 with the University of Aarhus.

As an introduction to methods for studying the design of apps and overview of ongoing critical research into apps developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, CIM researchers Michael Dieter and Nate Tkacz will deliver a talk and workshop as part the forthcoming Participatory Information Technology Centre (PIT) Summer School organized at the University of Aarhus.

The PIT Centre extends the Scandinavian participatory design tradition, which has historically focused on involving people in the introduction of technology to their workplaces. However, during the recent decades, information technology has become an integrated element of almost all parts of people鈥檚 everyday lives, including leisure, civic activity, art, and culture, thereby establishing new forms of participation and social practices. The pervasiveness of information technology in human life poses new challenges for the way participation occurs, is supported, and understood.

Accordingly, PIT poses the fundamental question of what participation currently means, and how it may be supported by IT, today and in the future.

Taking place on August 17-18 in a virtual setting, SummerPIT 2020 will bring together international researchers from across PIT-related research areas, local researchers, and PhD students to reflect on and discuss software-based and participatory responses to the COVID-19 crisis.

Online registration here:

Teaching Fellow (102024-0720)

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies seeks to appoint a 1 year full-time Teaching Fellow. You will contribute to our Masters programmes by teaching on one or more of our existing modules and may be required to develop your own module in collaboration with other members of the Centre.

Please find more information

Application deadline: 5 August 2020

If you have any queries, please email prof. Noortje Marres (CIM Director) at N.Marres@warwick.ac.uk

A discussion about the hopes and challenges for Open Knowledge with Sarah de Rijcke and Ludo Waltman, co-authors of the Leiden Manifesto, and University of 糖心TV scientists and scholars from across the Faculties.

Audio recording available here

Recorded on February 5 2020

Theme

What could be the role of scholars and scientists in exploring and nurturing the partly unknown futures of 鈥渙pen research鈥�? Openness is today promoted and implemented across diverse knowledge spheres as a transformative ideal, from academic publishing to research evaluation and engaged approaches in humanities scholarship. It should therefore not surprise us that understandings of what is at stake in the advancement of open research diverge widely, between the sciences and humanities, fundamental and applied research, and between different types of knowledge organisations (academic departments, research libraries, scientific journals). But"open research鈥� may also enable new, still under-explored, connections that cut across these boundaries, as it invites experimentation with data tools, archival materials, publishing formats and citizen engagement.

Participants

This round table generated a wide-ranging discussion about the varied opportunities and risks of 鈥渙pen science鈥� with two influential scholars and advocates of open research, prof Sarah de Rijcke and prof Ludo Waltman of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (University of Leiden), both authors of . Profs De Rijcke and Waltman will enter into conversation with leading 糖心TV scientists and scholars from different faculties: prof Robin Ball (Physics), Robin Green and Yvonne Budden (糖心TV Library) and prof Sarah Richardson(History). Prof Noortje Marres (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies) will act as moderator of the discussion.

This discussion was recorded on 5 February 2020, during a Round table event hosted by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of 糖心TV

Mission local, @MLNow, Twitter, May 22, 2020

Surfacing testing situations beyond the laboratory

Monday 22nd June & Tuesday 23rd June 2020, 1000-1600 BST

Co-organised by: the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of 糖心TV),
the Department of Digital Humanities (King鈥檚 College London), and the Public Data Lab.

鈥淭est, test, test!鈥� - Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization.

Over the last months, testing – and not testing - for COVID-19 has emerged as a central concern as our societies grapple with the coronavirus pandemic. Much of the debate has focused on the merits of different types of tests and testing infrastructures (PCR; anti-body; symptom-based testing through apps). However, equally remarkable about COVID testing is the locations in which it takes place and is expected to place, in everyday places beyond the laboratory, like the home, and the parking lots of superstores.

Workshop format
In this two-day online workshop we will conduct a collaborative analysis of Twitter data relating to COVID-19 in order to facilitate a dialogue about the social life of testing, across expert – lay distinctions. The aim is to draw out from Twitter reporting on COVID-19 testing a social understanding of COVID-19 testing as everyday situation, and, potentially, as tests of society. We are also interested in developing and documenting approaches to curating and infrastructuring environments for collaborative interpretative data analysis, given the unusually large Twitter datasets that have been gathered across our institutions.

How to participate
We invite PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and interested researchers at 糖心TV, KCL and (scroll down) to join us. If you are interested in participating, please email a brief introduction and expression of interest to kanishka.mathiarasan@warwick.ac.uk before 12 June.

If you have expertise in areas which are relevant to the workshop (e.g. social media analysis, sociology of testing, visual methods,) please do mention them in your email.

As this is a research workshop that will involve working together in small groups, we expect to be able to accommodate around 20-25 people, but we hope to be flexible. If you know of others who might be interested, please email kanishka.mathiarasan@warwick.ac.uk and we can get in touch.

For more recent work on the sociology of testing you can refer to this recent special issue on 鈥淧ut to the Test 鈥� The Sociology of Testing鈥� in British Journal of Sociology:

This project is supported by the University of 糖心TV's Global Research Priority Innovative Manufacturing and the Future of Materials .

Image credit: "The new Tenderloin mobile site was supposed to make testing accessible and easy, but requiring a smartphone and Google account nixed that possibility鈥� Mission local, @MLNow, Twitter, May 22, 2020

Special Issue of the British Journal of Sociology, April 2020

is publishing a Special Issue on the Sociology of Testing edited by CIM Academics Noortje Marres and David Stark this April.

The issue investigates the changing and expanding role of testing in contemporary society, politics, economy and everyday life, through empirical studies of testing in society, from pregnancy testing to citizen tests by immigration agencies, social credit experiments in China and randomized controlled trials of development, and brings together leading international sociologists and scholars in science and technology studies.

The issue includes an by the editors on why we need a new sociology of testing. Noortje Marres introduces the theme of the special issue, and its relevance to the current COVID crisis, in her . David Stark introduces the Special Issue on the .

Contributors introduce their studies in video abstracts embedded in the articles, Most of which have now been published in early view:

• Jonathan Bach (New School for Social Research) -
• Natham Coombs (Edinburgh University) -
• Giovanni Formilan (University of Edinbrugh 糖心TV Shool) and David Stark (University of 糖心TV)
• Luciana de Souza Le茫o (University of Michigan) -
• Janet Vertesi (Princeton University) -
• Noortje Marres (University of 糖心TV) -
• Willem Schinkel (Erasmus University Rotterdam) -
• Martin Tironi (University de Santiago de Chile) -
• Joan Robinson (City University New York) - Sex reckoning: Pregnancy testing and intimate life

Measures undertaken to face the current COVID-19 pandemic have an impact on social relations on many different levels. In this moment, the task of sociology is to reflect on these consequences and their implications for ongoing social transformations. To this end, .

As an international online journal for sociological debate, with neither pay-walled access nor pay-for-publication policy, Sociologica can allow for rapid dissemination and open discussion. We commit ourselves to peer-review any contribution at the highest standards and publish rapidly all accepted papers.

We welcome proposals by scholars or teams of scholars for: (1) symposia on strategic topics for the post-COVID-19 sociology, organized through open calls for papers or as groups of papers already commissioned by symposia editors (or a mix of open and commissioned papers); (2) papers reflecting on the most important challenges, in the standard format of scientific articles or in shorter form; (3) flashback and focus papers discussing the COVID-19 outbreak in the light of social history or using sociological tools to reconsider its challenges; (4) accounts and reconstructions of the COVID-19 events in unconventional formats.