ReWired: Asian/TechnoScience/Area Studies - Call for Participation

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HUMANITIES RESEARCH INSTITUTE presents
in conjunction with the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa 
 

SEMINAR IN EXPERIMENTAL CRITICAL THEORY (SECT VII)

ReWired:

Asian/TechnoScience/Area Studies

August 1-10, 2011 at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

The Seminar will address how technoscientific knowledge-systems are re-ordered when geo-political formations shift.

   You "don't invent the future," John Seely Brown famously noted - "you unleash it by leveraging the global community mind."

    Today the fastest expansion of technoscientific knowledge production and urban development is occurring across multiple Asian sites in the throes of techno-economic boom. Seely Brown's observation, made in conversation with Paul Duguid, was meant to characterize late 20th century knowledge institutions and sites of technological production in the US. It nevertheless uncannily predicts the radical de-centering of global technological futures in the 21st century, not least in the Asian context.

    The 2011 Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT VII) seeks to elucidate these rapidly transforming landscapes of knowledge production, the shaping of contemporary knowledge institutions, their impact on social life in intense urban contexts, and this century's techno-scientific horizons of possibility. Comprehending these movements, forces, and structures requires integrating deep understandings of history and politics represented by Asian and critical Area Studies with emergent work on the transnational dynamics of science and technology as well as on market economies and their modes of governance.

    The social life of information emerges in particular kinds of institutional structures and historical conditions. It refracts, reflects and embeds larger social forces and modes of production, extending some ideas and undercutting others. What are the impacts and influences of varying social arrangements and socio-technical assumptions on each other, and on learning practices and institutions? What sorts of networks are conducive to knowledge making now? How do the shapes and impacts of open source knowledge arrangements, for example, compare with proprietary ones?  What do these recent formations and experiences tell us about the knowledge institutions and production arrangements to come?

    Envisioning the technological future has too often seemed the province of western technologists. Recent media and economic analyses accurately identify the importance of new technological practices in contemporary Asia. Nevertheless, they often reduce complex historical processes to simplistic narratives: about the invisible hand of technoscience, or about the formerly ignorant attaining progress and becoming newly-empowered individuals and societies. The dominant questions that follow are equally misleading: Does information technology liberate developing countries from their legacy of poverty? Is Asian science as good as western science? Are women empowered by the digital revolution?

    This way of viewing things presumes Asian modernities to be marked by lack and belatedness. It views technology as the sole or dominant driver of social, economic, political and cultural change. It sees scientific ability as inherent to certain kinds of peoples. And it highlights the Asian "tiger "and "dragon" as representative of particular techno-political threats to US dominance.

Sect VII--ReWired: Asian/TechnoScience/Area Studies--will seek a more nuanced understanding of these processes by engaging a diverse set of critical accounts of science and technology as they apply to the historical conditions of these developments in Asia. Computing practices, unlike older forms of technoscience from physics and mathematics to botany and forestry, are increasingly recognized as emerging via networks shaped by, in, and across the formerly "underdeveloped" world, including India, China, South Korea and Taiwan. The Seminar will experiment with juxtaposing histories of "older" sciences with the contemporary practices of "digital natives;" integrating critical knowledge of states, science, and social movements from the histories and social sciences of Asia; engaging studies of cultural production in Asian contexts; and broadening studies of peer-to-peer creative and community-based practices generated by the transnational digital sphere.

Asia has long been part of global flows of knowledge, commodities, and culture, all too readily overlooked in conventional accounts of its "emerging" development. Accordingly, SECT VII will avoid euphoric claims of radical novelty, as well as assumptions of simple continuity with colonial pasts. We approach Asia's disparate hybrid modernities without postulating a unifying Asian modernity, seeking to understand their various, often contradictory but productive discourses of science, technology, digital revolution, political economy, community, nation, and identity.   

    In this experimental critical space, SECT VII will seek to nurture, across disciplinary and regional borders, discussions of the kind that have not flourished within the more established Area Studies or disciplinary paradigms. The seminar space will be one of practical invention and intellectual innovation. We find continuities with other ongoing projects: most notably, the Digital Media Learning initiative of the UCHRI, and the HASTAC program, that aim to create "a generation of scholars equally at ease with current (which is also to say historical) knowledge in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, on the one hand, and with the technological, scientific, and engineering knowledge on the other, with a view to facilitating development of new discoveries and new relations between currently available knowledge sources, in order to digitally prompt new bodies of important knowledge." SECT VII similarly builds on the Poor Theory Manifesto developed out of UC Irvine's Critical Theory Institute that sees the past, present, and future as mutually constitutive and "heterotemporal", attending to the "unsystematic" and undisciplined "practices of the everyday."

SECT VII: ReWired is thus concerned with the large questions of infrastructure and information, social technology and technoscience, institutions of knowledge making and learning. It will be of particular interest to those concerned with Science and Technology Studies, Asian Studies, Global Studies, Digital Media, and their interface. And it will appeal to those drawn to theoretical modesty, tinkering and improvisation, appropriation and recombinatorial experimentation, to relationalities and rearticulations.

Dates: August 1-10, 2011

Location: University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

Instructional faculty:
Itty Abraham, University of Texas
Ivan da Costa Marques, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Wendy Chun, Brown University
Joe Dumit, UC Davis
Roger Hart, University of Texas
Cori Hayden, UC Berkeley
Tim Lenoir, Duke University
Kavita Philip, UC Irvine
Achal Prabhala, Wikimedia Foundation
Sha Xin Wei, Concordia University, Montreal
Nishant Shah, Center for Internet and Society
Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University
Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia
Kath Weston, University of Virginia

Application Fee: $20

Registration Fee: $1250

Registration fee includes shared housing, instruction, and some meals. 

Applicants are urged to seek funding from their home institutions. A very limited number of scholarships may be available to full time registered students.

Presented by the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa. For additional information, please visit http://www.uchri.org/sect.php or contact us at sect@hri.uci.edu or 949-824-8900.

Progress Report 1: The Untold Story of Technology

For my research project, I’d really like to expose the other side of technology and advancements of Western culture. For example, I feel that engineering, being born out of capitalism and modern technology, is a lot history. HIS-story is told, the story of the conqueror and it is the same with technology and engineers who create or implement this technology. We only see benefits and progress come out of it because we are the ones who are benefit from it, but what about the other effects that it has on other communities? What may be progress and advancements to us, may be taking a huge step back for others. It is important I feel to realize different world views and how these world views may affect how we view progress.

One example of where I got this idea is the emergence of a ‘new field’ in which humans study animals and their use of plants as medicine. This has been in existence for thousands of centuries, Native peoples’ have always done this, this has been part of the reason they have been able to gain knowledge of the plants and eco-system. This is exactly what I intend to explore with this research project, how we may feel we are using ‘cutting edge’ technology and ‘progressing’ because we are a superior Western culture, but, what if other countries employ the same methods in different ways, but are ignored simply because they do not compete with the West? What if others have more effective and efficient methods?

I don’t have a specific country that I’d like to look at, but I feel it’d be interesting to look at indigenous cultures and go from there. I plan on going to your office hours for a better discussion on direction I should take this.

I also think it'd be interesting to look more into the Academic Military Industrial Complex and how it affects our education as well as shapes our entire world view as a Western Culture.