Hereby we would like to draw your attention to the extension of the
deadline until 20.08.2019.
Call for Participation for the Workshop:
Experimental interventions and interventional experiments in the Global
South: On the temporal and spatial consequences of a new figuration of the
social and natural sciences
at the University of Cologne, Germany, September 18 – 19, 2019.
Recent scholarship has drawn attention to how “practices of
experimenting, testing, and
measuring have broken free from the laboratory” (Beisel et al. 2018:
109) and how they increasingly invade local epistemic settings in the
Global South. We furthermore observe that these experimental
interventions are no longer conducted by natural scientists, governments
and non-governmental actors alone. Increasingly we also witness how
experimental practices are employed by social scientists such as
behavioral economists, ethologists, anthropologists, archaeologists and
Human-Computer-Interaction Scholars. Apart from experimental
interventions aiming at changing local livelihoods to the better, we,
and our interlocutors in the Global South, thus more and more come into
contact with scientific experiments which equally have the potential to
change local livelihoods to the better, or worse.
Our workshop aims at scrutinizing the temporal and spatial conditions of
such experimental interventions and interventionist experiments by
focusing on the ways in which evidence is produced and stabilized in
order to critically question the status of both an experimental politics
and science as well as their interventionist claims and approaches.
Please see the attached PDF document (Call for Participation) for
further information.
We would like to emphasize that we see this workshop as a working
meeting and an opportunity for exchange. We would like to invite
interested scientists, especially in earlier phases of their academic
careers (PhD candidates and early Postdocs), to join us in tackling this
recent transdisciplinary field. Together we aim at identifying new
research desiderata, further conceptualizations and critical questions
for future work. We wish to bring together people from different social
and cultural sciences who intend to enter into fruitful discussion and
who primarily work in the context of Africa – although we are open to
contributions from other areas concerning the Global South. Apart from
conventional conference presentations we are open to ethnographic
working reports, discussion papers or joint ‘close readings’ of texts
with relevant theoretical or conceptualization impulses.
We are happy to announce that a keynote input, in order to frame the
workshop thematically, will be given by*Rene Umlauf *(Halle/Wittenberg)
on “Who is testing who? Experimentality beyond the laboratory“.
Applications should be send to s.holdermann@uni-koeln.de
<mailto:s.holdermann@uni-koeln
before August 20, 2019. We offer limited funds for travel expenses.