WTMC Spring Workshop – ‘Routines and Disruptions’

From 26 to 28 May 2025, WTMC will organize the next WTMC Spring Workshop on ‘Routines and Disruptions’.

This workshop explores (everyday) routines and their disruptions, and the myriad ways in which they interact with each other in relation to the design, use and experience of technology. Thus, we are interested both in disruptions to routine and in routines’ ability to disrupt. With regard to the latter – i.e. routines’ ability to disrupt – you may for example think of day-to-day gardening practices to grow one’s own food, and the way in which rendering these practices more visible may disrupt widespread innovation-based and market-based sustainability discourses; or the ways in which daily office use practices may silently challenge floor plan designers’ notions of productivity and worker well-being. With regard to the former, i.e. the disruptions to routine, you could for example think of individual patients’ needs disrupting routinized health workers’ practices; or the ways in which everyday routines can be disrupted when the technologies that support them fall into disrepair, and how this in turn can give rise to new routines, through for instance the tinkering with technologies or repurposing of everyday objects.

Through a variety of empirical cases, the main thrust of this workshop is to delve into notions of routines and practices, visibility and invisibility/silence, continuity and disruption. Making use of a variety of different formats of discussions and lectures, we want to explore such questions in terms of their conceptual, methodological, as well as political implications.

Please note that the workshop is being organised as an on-site, residential event at Study and Conference Center Soeterbeeck in Deursen-Dennenburg. Attendance to the three full days is mandatory.

Confirmed Speakers

Confirmed speakers at this workshop include: Lea Beiermann, Joeri Bruyninckx, Annapurna Mamidipudi, Esther Miedema and Susan van Hees