WTMC PhD Fall Workshop 4-7 November 2024 ‘Infrastructures Across Borders’ (online)
From Monday 4 until Thursday 7 November 2024, WTMC will organize the next WTMC (online) Autumn Workshop on ‘Infrastructures Across Borders’.
Infrastructures are all around, or perhaps rather ‘all below’: the word literally means ‘those structures that are below’. Often understood as “big, durable, well-functioning systems and services” that have important consequences for social organization (Edwards et al. 2009) – i.e. roads and railways, power lines, communication networks or water management systems are key examples. But of course, infrastructures also include our knowledge production and transfer systems (which includes WTMC itself), financial systems, worldwide markets, and, arguably, our cultures and their very norms and standards by which we interact. This autumn workshop delves into the making, maintenance and destruction of infrastructures as well as their performativity, which has been a vital topic in STS research for decades. We will pay particular attention towards the spatiality of infrastructures: think of their participation in border-making (and thereby governing over life and death) and/or border-crossing, their varied materializations in different localities across the globe and even in outer space.
Together with colleagues who have developed different takes on the issue, we will take stock of rich past and ongoing research in the field. Moreover, we will use the workshop as a platform to engage participants and lecturers in a critical discussion on how STS scholarship on ‘infrastructures’ can function as a productive intermediary or means of intervention in a geographically heterogeneous world full of tensions.
Please note that the workshop is being organized online, with the exception of the second day, 5 November 2024. During this day, participants will convene in small groups at a location of their choice in the Netherlands. Participants who are not able to join these meetings, for instance because they reside outside of the Netherlands, can meet up online. Attendance to the four full days is mandatory.
Confirmed speakers at this workshop include: Geoffrey Bowker, Sulfikar Amir, Anique Hommels, Nina Klimburg-Witjes and Huub Dijstelbloem
Registration for this workshop is possible between September 12 and September 27, 2024.
Please register HERE
WTMC PhD candidates can register for free.
For external PhD candidates a participation fee of € 695 is charged.
After their acceptance, external participants will receive an email with an invoice and online-payment request and receipt. To participate, you must pay the fee via the online payment request. Registration to the workshop is final after the advance payment has been received by WTMC.
NB: For this workshop, a few free seats are reserved for STS PhDs who are affiliated with institutions in ‘Global South’ countries AND who do not have access to institutional funding. If you are interested in one of the free seats, please send a 1-page letter in which you explain your motivation why you would like to join the workshop directly to the training coordinators Alexandra Supper: [email protected] and Evelien de Hoop: [email protected] before September 25, 2024.
Contact
If you have any content-related questions regarding this workshop, please feel free to contact the training coordinators Alexandra Supper: [email protected] or Evelien de Hoop: [email protected]
For practical questions, please contact [email protected]
