[Air-L] Reminder CfP EASST/4S: Panel "The banality of failure"

[i.zakharova at ish.uni-hannover.de]

Dear colleagues,

 

this is a kind reminder that the deadline for abstract submission for the
EASST/4S 2024 is on February 12. If you are interested in technological
fragilities, failures, and resilience, please consider submitting to our
open panel “The banality of failure: Disturbances, fragilities and
resilience of digital infrastructures, media and technologies”.

 

Link to the submission form:

https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/easst-4s2024/p/14248 

 

We are looking forward to exciting discussions at the EASST/4S 2024 (16-19
July) in Amsterdam!

 

Kind regards,

Irina Zakharova, Erik Koenen, Christian Schwarzenegger & Sigrid Kannengießer

 

 

The banality of failure: Disturbances, fragilities and resilience of digital
infrastructures, media and technologies

 

Long panel abstract:

 

This open panel takes as a starting point studies of infrastructures, their
breakdowns, and the often invisible maintenance work supporting digital
technologies. How can societies productively engage with technological
fragilities?  What is the role of failure in our relations with technologies
and what practices of resilience develop from these relations? How can
everyday maintenance work be acknowledged and integrated into
technopolitics? Breakdowns such as an internet connection not working during
an important video call or an electricity outage following an ecological or
human-made crisis are no rare occurrences. As such small and big breakdowns
challenge everyday activities, they render visible the inherent fragility of
our digitally mediated existence. There is, however, an inclination in both
public discourse and academic scrutiny to focus on the extraordinary rather
than the commonplace. Taking a step back from such attention to the
transformative power of breakdown, this paper aims to explore the banality
of failure and everyday maintenance work.

 

Dealing with ‚small’ everyday technical malfunctions, failures, and
glitches, caring for or fixing technological breakdowns has become as
invisible and taken for granted as the digital infrastructures themselves.

Noticeably, these practices of everyday maintenance are often overlooked
when advertising new technologies, but present integral components of the
economic revenue models, digital design and user experience. Lastly, we need
to recognize the environmental impact stemming from intentional design of
digital technologies that seem destined to fail, pushing consumers towards
more frequent replacements rather than fixes. This panel invites to explore
such disturbances, fragilities and resilience in our relations with digital
infrastructures. Topics can include empirical cases of common or
exceptional, deliberate or unintentional technological failures and their
fixes, reflections on existing failure-free technopolitics, material
obsolesce and the intentionally limited lifecycles of digital technologies,
and conceptual inquiries into the nature of failure, disturbance, and
resilience.

 

--

 

Dr. Irina Zakharova

Postdoctoral researcher

 

Leibniz University Hannover

Institute of Sociology

Working group Sociology of Digitalisation