[p2p-research] Urban Laboratories workshop

Mon May 4 12:43:32 CEST 2009

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 7:01 PM
Subject: Fwd: [My-ci] clarification - cfp - Urban Laboratories workshop
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

fyi

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bas Van Heur <basvanheur at gmx.net>
Date: Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 12:34 PM
Subject: [My-ci] clarification - cfp - Urban Laboratories workshop
To: my-ci at orgnets.net

 Apologies for the unclarity in the recently posted cfp - In the title 'STS'
refers to Science and Technology Studies. Here is the improved version:

Please circulate!

CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop

*Urban Laboratories: towards a Science and Technology Studies (STS) of the
Built Environment

*

Thursday 5 and Friday 6 November

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Maastricht University, the Netherlands

Organized by the Manchester Architecture Research Centre and Maastricht
Virtual Knowledge Studio

*Theme and Focus

*

This workshop follows a recent argument by Collier, Lakoff and Rabinow
(2006) in highlighting the relevance of the laboratory concept for the human
sciences and proposes to analyse the urban built environment as an
assemblage of local knowledge claims, collaborations and emergent
interactions. This approach highlights – following a veritable tradition in
STS - the contingent cultural and institutional dimensions of knowledge
production.

Such a shift allows for a more ethnographic investigation of laboratory
dynamics and creates awareness of the heterogeneity of urban laboratories:
besides academic research institutions, it might also be productive to
investigate policy think tanks, planning departments, economic development
agencies, architectural firms and creative clusters as urban laboratories.

Despite increasing references to the notion of laboratory in specific urban
development and policy projects, sustained research on the role of these and
other laboratories in shaping and transforming our cities is almost absent.
This seems to reflect a broader trend in STS: after foundational work in the
1970s and 1980s that investigated the socio-cultural and technical context
of knowledge production, this once active field of laboratory studies is now
rather neglected (Kohler 2008) and Karin Knorr Cetina’s hope in a 1995
review essay that laboratory studies could be further extended by
investigating “processes of laboratorization” (163) in a variety of settings
has hardly been realized.

This workshop aims to contribute to this extension by revisiting the
theoretical notion of laboratory and by investigating the ways in which this
notion can be productively put to work in our analysis of the urban built
environment. Three dimensions are central in this regard:

*Dimension 1*: we still know very little of the actual dynamics involved in
the emergence and reproduction of urban laboratories. Research, however,
needs to avoid the internalist bias of early laboratory studies and should
pay explicit attention to communication between urban laboratories and the
rise of regional and transnational networks of expertise. *How do facts
emerge and circulate in and through these networks of expertise?*

*Dimension 2*: this second dimension is related to the first, but zooms in
on questions of method i.e. the ways in which features of urban life become
objects of laboratory research and manipulation. In the case of research on
and in the city in particular, there seems to be a constitutive tension
between laboratory and fieldwork science that needs to be addressed (Gieryn
2006). *Through the use of which methods and in what ways do the various
urban laboratories construct and manipulate local objects of research?*

*Dimension 3*: laboratories interact with other laboratories, but they also
engage with a world directly outside the laboratory. This third dimension
refers to the fact that laboratories actively shape the urban environment in
which they are embedded. *How and to what extent do processes of
laboratorization transform the built environment in which laboratories are
simultaneously embedded?*

For a full call for papers, please see:
http://www.fdcw.org/maastrichtvks/2009/04/workshop-urban-laboratories-to.html<http://../../cgi/derefer?TYPE=3&DEST=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fdcw.org%2Fmaastrichtvks%2F2009%2F04%2Fworkshop-urban-laboratories-to.html>

*Call for Papers

*

Please submit a 500 word abstract by *1 July 2009* to the organizers Bas van
Heur (b.vanheur at vks.unimaas.nl<http://../../cgi/g.fcgi/mail/new?CUSTOMERNO=17505637&t=de869912820.1241087108.594147d&to=b.vanheur%40vks.unimaas.nl>)
and Ralf Brand (Ralf.Brand at manchester.ac.uk<http://../../cgi/g.fcgi/mail/new?CUSTOMERNO=17505637&t=de869912820.1241087108.594147d&to=Ralf.Brand%40manchester.ac.uk>).
We will send out notices of acceptance mid-July.

The goal of this workshop is to publish an edited volume on Urban
Laboratories. For this and to facilitate discussion during the workshop, we
ask all participants to prepare a full paper and to submit this to the
organizers before *1 October*. We will then send the papers to all
participants.

Limited funding for travel expenses and accommodation will be available. If
you have any questions on this call for papers or on the workshop in
general, please contact the organizers.

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