Panel on "Valuing and Knowing" at the upcoming Graz STS conference

Submissions welcome for Kristin Asdal and Maximilian Fochler's panel on the entanglement of valuation and knowledge practices!

Kristin Asdal is organising a panel with Maximilian Fochler (University of Vienna) at the 18th Annual STS Conference in Graz, Austria next may. The conference will take place on May 6th and 7th, and the call for abstracts in open until 17.00 on January 28th.

If you are interested in taking part in the panel, you can submit a 500 words abstract via the conference website.

Here the call for the session: 

S27 Valuing and knowing: studying the entanglement of valuation and knowledge practices

ASDAL, Kristin (University of Oslo), Norway,  FOCHLER, Maximilian (University of Vienna), Austria

Practices of ascribing and measuring value are crucial to virtually every domain of contemporary societies. Be it the forecast of the expected generation of economic value related to a specific policy action, the quantification of the number of quality-adjusted months of life gained through a specific medical treatment, the assessment of whether the quality of an academic’s work merits tenure or the screening of basic competencies of children in education; in each of these instances (and many more) how value is being ascribed will have important practical and normative consequences.
This panel focuses on the complex relations of valuation and knowledge practices. On the one hand, virtually all valuation practices build on practices and infrastructures of knowing. Whether it is school performance or the level of Co2 emissions, valuation practices build on knowledge practices defining the objects to be valued and measured, and the means through which this can be done. Often, these knowledge practices are made durable in knowledge infrastructures, such as databases or standardized indicator systems. On the other hand, knowledge practices themselves are strongly influenced by practices and regimes of valuation that define what counts as good knowledge in a specific context. For example, citation metrics affect the perceived authority of both scientists and the knowledge they produce, and standards for considering evidence, for example in regulatory decisions, may exclude specific knowledge practices.

This panel calls for papers from Science and Technology Studies and Valuation Studies that address the co-production of knowledge and valuation practices. It deliberately does not focus on a specific topical domain, but invites contributions focusing on very different fields of practice to invite comparison.

We also welcome methodological reflections on how to study valuation practices as knowledge practices (and vice versa). What is the relation of recent work on this to older traditions of studying knowledge production practices and their contexts (such as the laboratory studies)? Which methodological approaches are apt to study the complex entanglements of knowledge and valuation practices. 

 

More information on the conference here: https://sts-conference.isds.tugraz.at/event/5/

 

Published Jan. 7, 2019 6:24 PM - Last modified Sep. 18, 2019 3:51 PM