WTMC Spring Workshop DOING COMPARISON
2 – 4 May 2018
Conference centre Soeterbeeck, Deursen-Dennenburg, the Netherlands
Comparison is pervasive throughout Science, Technology and Innovation Studies. As STIS students, we study science or technology or innovations in two different countries, we look at how participation to music varies between groups, at how knowledge or technologies (may be made to) travel between contexts, or how concepts have been used in different periods of time. We search for similarities and differences, for ways to generalize from case-studies, or for research designs that afford such generalizations right from the start. We’re deeply into comparison even if we’re often hardly aware of it.
This workshop sets out to articulate and render reflexive STIS’s engagements with comparison. When do we do comparison, and why? How is comparison done, epistemologically as well as practically? How can research objects be made comparable? Does comparison always require symmetry? How does comparison articulate or even produce difference? What are the assumptions and infrastructures we build our comparative work with? What is a case-study a study of, and what do we do when we compare countries, data-sets, or contexts? And what do we make of the irreducibility, the situatedness, the singularity, the context-specificity that as STIS researchers we’ve come to value so much and that were a solid part of our critique of comparison?
Different than usual, we will work around one central publication: Practising Comparison (J. Deville, M. Guggenheim & Z. Hrdličková (eds), 2015, Mattering Press).
The workshop is aimed at PhD students across STIS.
Confirmed speakers include: Anna Harris and Sarah de Rijcke.
The registration form for this workshop is now available here.
Please register by 15 February 2018!
Costs for WTMC members: meals 10 EUR /day.
Costs for everyone else: 695 EUR, including fee, accommodation and meals.
If you have any content-related questions regarding this workshop, please feel free to contact Govert Valkenburg: [email protected] or Bernike Pasveer: [email protected]
For practical questions please contact Elize Schiweck: [email protected]
