SPEAKERS AND PROGRAMME
10.00-13.00 Opening and short individual talks by
Olgerta Tona, Assistant Professor, Department of Applied IT (University of Gothenburg)
Karim Jebari, Associate Professor in Economics, Institute for Future Studies (Stockholm)
Yonathan Miller, founder of the Tech Worker Coalition Berlin
Coppélie Cocq, Associate Professor in Sámi Studies and Digital Humanities (Umeå University)
13-14 Break
14-15.30 Roundtable on Digital platforms and collective rights with all speakers
THEME
Digital platforms have opened up a new degree of scope, scale and speed that pushes formal and informal institutions in new directions. Developments of the latest months present a plethora of examples of these changing conditions, which reveal a redrawing of the boundaries between the public and private and raises urgent questions about the future of established institutions, with the Game Stop trade market affair and the new social networking app Club House as some of the more well-known examples recently.
The TechnAct Research Cluster takes these developments as our point of departure for our Summer Meet-Up in 2021. While we are concerned about the impact on society and democracy when so much conversations are going on within private spheres, we are also aware that the public sphere has never been a space equally available for all, as significant traditions of feminist, queer and critical race scholarship demonstrate.
During this one-day symposium, we want to critically scrutinize these questions about the relationship between digital platforms and formal and informal institutions, seeing that the impact of tech companies in liberal democratic contexts may seem far-reaching, while in authoritarian contexts, governments rather attempt to take control over the arbitrary power of these companies.
At the heart of these dynamics, we find questions of collective rights and freedoms and want to use the discussions on this event to collectively reflect on how, when, and where, digital platforms can be used as tools for enhancing such rights and freedoms, in various contexts and modes of engagement, as well as the various limits of their reach. In a spirit of anticipatory temporality, we want to approach this complex topic through the strategy of a politics of the open end (Puar 2007), and encourage participants to imagine the many futures that are embedded in the conversations of our present times.
TechnAct is a cross-disciplinary research cluster at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. For detailed information about the event and the cluster, please visit; www.technactcluster.com
Welcome!
/TechnAct Research Cluster
