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Appels à communications | conférence 2024 conjointe des sociétés 4S/EASST

Les membres du CIRST participent activement à la conférence conjointe qui se tiendra du 16 au 19 juillet en Europe.

Transforming Methods for Digital Research

In their efforts to grasp the fast-paced transformations of social, cultural, and scientific practices in the context of an ever more digitally mediated life, social and humanities researchers are encouraged to constantly adapt, extend, and transform their methods. After a sweeping “computational turn” (Berry, 2011) revived empiricist and positivist epistemologies in social sciences, a growing number of qualitative, feminist, and decolonial researchers have taken on (re)inventing their own set of methods to investigate sociotechnical practices, configurations, and contexts in which digital technologies play a transformative part. This includes thick data methodology (Latzko-Toth et al., 2017), which refers to a range of methods that are not predominantly computational nor based on the collection of massive sets of digital traces but rely instead on the density or “thickness” of collected/constructed data. As an attempt to federate qualitative, constructivist, and critical approaches stemming from related epistemologies, this panel seeks to gather presentations that will contribute to building an extended repertoire of qualitative and mixed methods for the digital age. If they take up the idea of “following the medium” by leveraging digital affordances (Rogers, 2013), these “hands-on” methods are not primarily focused on automated analysis nor the visualisation of large corpora of traces generated in an automated way. Instead, this panel highlights the methodological assemblages, hybridisations, and tinkerings burgeoning on the fringes and in the gaps of the old canons of social sciences and the new canons of data science, thus filling a void in the quadrants of methods redistribution (Marres, 2012). As a combined format open panel, we welcome academic paper presentations and shorter contributions to a dialogue session around the specificity, newness, and diversity of this emerging constellation of methods and how they situate themselves within the landscape of digital research.

Date limite : 12 février 2024

Psychology in STS: situating its expertise and the process of ‘making up people’

This panel aims to bring together STS researchers who chose psychology as their object of study. This versatile human science has no specific scientific framework. Its methods and epistemologies, as much as its objects, are not specific enough to characterize it. And yet, even if we adopt Fernando Vidal’s position that psychology is only what psychologists do (Vidal 2008), we must recognize that «psychology» is an entity that has taken on a meaning of its own in contemporary societies. Since the 19th century, especially in North America, psychological expertise has also taken a particularly important role in policies (Herman 1995) as much as in policing everyday life and politics (e.g., Aubry and Travis 2015).
We can approach the social object that is psychology as a scientific discipline, with its divergent currents, epistemologies and various modes of knowledge production. We can study its institutions: the organization and development of the profession, both clinical and scientific, its networks and conflicts with other professions, such as psychiatry. And we can study how it became such a legitimate expertise in the political and public sphere. But STS researchers are also invited to consider the use of psychological knowledge and concepts by non-psychologists. Psychological language is now pervasive and mobilized to make sense of many social phenomena (i.a. racism, gender violence, conflicts, etc.). We invite papers to contribute to the analysis of the production and expansion of this expertise, as well as to the history and analysis of psychologization processes and the making of a “therapeutic culture”. Papers addressing the specificity of the study of psychology from an STS perspective will also be considered. We welcome traditional papers, dialogue sessions and other workshop formats.

Date limite : 12 février 2024