CFP: “Data Cultures, Culture as Data” – Special Issue of Cultural Analytics (15 Nov 2017)

CFP: “Data Cultures, Culture as Data” – Special Issue of Cultural Analytics
Guest editors – Amelia Acker & Tanya Clement, University of Texas at Austin

“Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems” Donna Haraway Environmental Humanities 6 (2015), p. 160.

Data have become pervasive in research in the humanities and the social sciences. New areas, objects, and situations for study have developed; and new methods for working with data are shepherded by new epistemologies and (potential) paradigms shifts.  But data didn’t just happen to us. We have happened to data. Karen Barad writes that “We are responsible for the world in which we live not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping” (102).

Yet where is our agency in that responsibility? What is the role we play in the data cultures/culture as data we form around sociomaterial practices? How can we better understand how these practices effect, and affect, the materialization of subjects, objects, and the relations between them? How can we engage our data culture in practical, critical, and generative ways?

In every field, boundaries have been drawn between data and human as if making meaning with data is innocent work, but these boundaries are never innocent. Questions are emerging about data cultures and culture as data—urgent questions that range across concerns with the datafication of culture including the codification (or code-ification) of social and cultural bias; the integrity of data and of human agency, subjectivity, and identity. This special issue of Cultural Analytics invites responses to these concerns.

CFP for Economic Anthropology (20 Jan 2018)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Volume 6, Number 1

 

The journal of Economic Anthropology (Wiley Blackwell) is calling for open submissions for Volume 6, Number 1, which is to be published in January 2019. EA is a bi-annual refereed journal published by the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) to make available research that is innovative and interdisciplinary and focused on economic and social life to serve scholars, practitioners, and general audiences. The journal has recorded the highest rate of growth for readership for all 33 American Anthropological Association journals for the last two years. To further the goal of making the most current research available to a broad audience, EA emphasizes clear and accessible writing. We encourage authors to take advantage of the journal’s online format and incorporate photos, graphics, and links to videos or other related materials. The journal considers the work of scholars and practitioners at all points in their careers, including advanced PhD students.

MacKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowships (EOI for 1 Aug 2016)

These are 3-year research-focused postdoctoral fellowships with good funding.
Main page here: http://research.unimelb.edu.au/work-with-us/funding/internal/mckenzie-fellowship

We welcome applicants who might fit into Management and Marketing, and there are opportunities to work across disciplines and faculties, e.g. accounting, sociology, law, etc. I'm happy to host for projects related to categories, performance measures, valuation, museum accounting and sociology of accounting and finance.

Given the excellent conditions, these are competitive, but you won't know unless you submit an application.

Westpac PhD and f/t Master's Funding (31 Aug 2016) - Australian citizens & PR

Call for recent graduates of undergraduate and honours degrees to apply for the Westpac Future Leaders Scholarship - $120,000 over 2-3 years. 

Open to Australian citizens and Permanent residents only.

Westpac have allocated us between 4-5 scholarships for next year. Apparently MBS did not have any eligible PhD applicants last year.

Applications close 31 August 2016.

CFP: From Prizes to Prices and Vice Versa

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Dear Colleagues,

A reminder that the deadline for submissions for this workshop is 31st May.

From Prizes to Prices and Vice Versa

As part of a broader project – Performances of Value: Competition and Competitions Inside and Outside Markets – we call for papers for a workshop that will take place on January 13-14, 2017 at the University of Bologna, Italy.  Costs for travel, lodging, and meals for workshop participants will be covered by a grant from The Leverhulme Trust.

Organizers: David Stark (PI), Elena Esposito, Kristian Kreiner, Celia Lury, Fabian Muniesa, and Christine Musselin.

Project’s website: http://blogs.cim.warwick.ac.uk/valueperformances/

The series of workshops organized for this project will explore processes of valuation, the different forms they can take, and their recent transformations. Alongside mechanisms of pricing that are part of market competition valuation also takes place in ratings, rankings, and other forms of organized competitions outside markets. How do these differing performances of value inter-relate and move across different domains of social life? And what are their consequences for how valuation is performed and experienced?

In recent decades, evaluation through ratings has spread in all fields of social life, from finance to universities, from restaurants to hospitals to politics. These forms of valuation are diffused and difficult to control, often entrusted to the fleeting moods of the web or to private institutions like rating agencies or magazines assessing academic performance. But they have important social effects, which (willingly or not) are difficult to escape. Ratings seem to have a tendency to produce rankings, generating an order in which everyone is located above some of the evaluated entities and below others. Rankings indirectly produce competition. This ordinal hierarchy is intertwined in complex ways with the cardinal evaluation expressed in the numerical form of market prices.

We invite papers that address the following (or related) questions:

– Do ratings offer alternative judgements of value to those provided by prices?

– What role does the performance of value play in introducing alternative criteria into competition?

– When and why did the social form of ratings become widely diffused?

– What is the relationship between ratings and rankings?

– What are the consequences of representations of aspects of social life as a ranked order?

– Should we assume that everyone wants to win or that everyone accepts to play the games of competition? What are the consequences of not joining in?

Abstracts of no longer than 500 words should be submitted by May 31, 2016. If the abstract is accepted, a full paper will be required by November 1, 2016.

Pattern recognition is an interesting thing...

What else can we say about the concept of reactivity, as discussed by Espeland and Sauder? Is it the same thing as engagement, as with audiences, or is that something different? What about engaging with key influencers, like Gladwell's mavens? And is this different from systems of rankings and measures?

These are the questions I'm wrestling with at the moment, as I work through another revise and resubmit, AKA, the bane of academic research life. In this case, I have been extremely fortunate, with very positive comments. That's no guarantee, of course, but I have learned some thing along the way about carefully listening to reviewer comments. In fact, my strategy now is not only to prepare exact quotes from each of the reviewers' points made, but to also rewrite those comments so that I can make sure that I understand them, a task which I can accomplish in several stages, which over time gets me closer to understanding.

Burham's plan for Chicago (wikipedia)

ASA mini-conference on Science, Knowledge and Technology - August 21st, 2015

 

SKAT 25: 

New Directions after a Quarter-Century of the Sociology of Science, Knowledge, and Technology

A mini-conference organized by the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association

August 21, 2015, 9:00 am to 7:00 pm

Prentice Women’s Hospital 3^rd Floor Conference Center

250 E. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60611