Friction - May 2014

Thursday 8^th May & Friday 9^th May, 2014

Keynote talk by Pollyanna Ruiz (LSE)

With workshops led by: Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey; University of Leicester Technology Group; Jen Birks and John Downey; and Rachel Jacobs (Active Ingredient). 

Current workshop themes include: evil media; data, digital leaks and political activism; hacklabs and artistic uses of data.

Workshop and talk abstracts, and information about speakers will be appearing on our blog in the forthcoming weeks: http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/criticalmoment/

Friction:

noun

[mass noun]

The resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another:

 the action of one surface or object rubbing against another

 conflict or animosity caused by a clash of wills, temperaments, or opinions

Oxford English Dictionary, 2013

We are now living in a frictionless economy in which money, jobs and products can move around the world in the blink of an eye. And yet we have not moved to a frictionless society. Rather, many of the technologies that support the frictionless economy create various forms of friction in society. Taking a lead from the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Critical Theory’s Technology and Resistance research strand, we are interested in proposals for papers and workshops that explore  the concept/metaphor of ‘friction’ as a starting point for exploring the relationship between everyday technologies and resistance;  with resistance understood in both a politically empowering and an inhibitory sense. On the one hand, we’re interested in modes of organised resistance: of activist movements making use of, or reacting against, technological developments. However we’re concerned with resistance in a second sense: of technologies resisting their intended function, breaking down, being exploited by hackers or triggering unexpected socio-economic complications.

We invite people to use the concept of ‘friction’ as a route into exploring these themes, with potential topics for discussion including (but not limited to):

• Data and ethics
• Cultural shifts relating to the capture of data
• The vulnerability of software to hacking and surveillance
• Resistance to  surveillance and data harvesting
• Activist uses of data, particularly the circulation of leaked material
• The politics of hacking
• The exploitation of ambiguity in software design by hackers
• Activist and everyday contestations of technological developments
• The sociological and cultural factors required for technologies to ‘work’
• Everyday and/or activist reappropriations of technology
• Tensions between new technologies and existing infrastructures

We are an interdisciplinary group of researchers, including academics from Geography, Business, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Media & Communications: so we welcome a diverse range of perspectives and approaches to this theme. 

Further workshops and keynotes to be confirmed

We encourage interactive presentation formats, and will allocate longer time-slots to workshops to accommodate these, but also have space for shorter 20 minute position papers.

Extended deadline for proposals: 1^st March 2014

If you are interested in participating please submit a 250 word proposal for a workshop or paper, along with your name and current email address, to centreforcriticaltheory@gmail.com

Please also feel free to contact us with more general enquiries, follow the Centre for Critical Theory’s Twitter account @criticaltheory

If you would like to attend, you can register here: http://frictionconference.wordpress.com/