Annual Meeting of the Socio-gerontechnology Network
Shifting Relations: Ageing in a Datafied World
19 – 20 September 2024
Technical University of Vienna
Favoritenstraße 11
1040 Vienna
Austria
The Socio-gerontechnology Network together with the Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences, the Technical University of Vienna, and VICESSE Research GmbH invites proposals for papers, posters, and sessions to be submitted to the 2024 Annual Meeting by 22nd March 2024.
The Socio-gerontechnology Network
Since its inaugural meeting in 2017, the Socio-gerontechnology Network has provided a forum for interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the complex relations between ageing, technology, and society from various social sciences and humanities perspectives. Drawing on perspectives, theories, and methods from Age Studies (AS), STS, Critical Data Studies, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Social, Cultural, and Critical Gerontology as well as (new) materialist sociology, the network aims at providing an interdisciplinary space for researchers interested in critical explorations of demographic and technological change. The network embraces both early and more established academic scholars and meets once a year.
2024 Meeting Theme: Shifting Relations
In shifting landscapes of demographic change and technological innovation, ageing and technology are phenomena that are increasingly characterized through their relationships with each other. In the last decade, researchers have explored various facets of this relational terrain between ageing and technology, reflecting on the social, infrastructural, cultural, and material forces through which ageing, care, health, and technology shape each other. Such engagements with the relationships between ageing and technology have highlighted how technological innovations not only address but also create discourses around demographic ageing. They have also made apparent how ageing and later life have always been shaped in relation to different forms of materiality and how both phenomena – ageing and technology – are assembled through and situated in dynamic relations between humans, non-humans and more-than humans.
In the last years, new and emerging forms of technological systems, particularly artificial intelligence and machine learning, have increasingly highlighted the datafied relations between ageing and technology. Many of these systems rely on massive amounts of data to track, surveil and measure ageing in various ways, often assuming that these data are somewhat neutral and truthful representations of reality – an assumption that has been increasingly challenged (among others) by scholars in the field of Socio-gerontechnlogy. These critical engagements with the datafication of ageing open up new reflections on the quantified and datafied aspects of ageing, questioning, for example, how humans grow older with and through their data, how data infrastructures age and how they create ageing, the role of data in a political economy of ageing or how new forms of age-related inequality, exclusion, discrimination, or bias emerge in algorithmic cultures.
With this years’ meeting theme “shifting relations”, we want to open the SGN annual meeting to provide space and time to reflect on these different aspects of relationality that emerge when researching ageing, data and technology. This includes, for example, theorizing relationality as a concept in Socio-gerontechnology, empirically exploring different relationships between ageing and technology, engaging with diverse methods and methodologies to build, maintain, break, and repair relationships through research and activism in ageing and technology, or reflecting critically on our own practices of relation-building and boundary-making within and outside of the Socio-gerontechnology community.
We invite scholars interested in the relational terrain between ageing and technology in the broadest sense to submit their work. More specifically, topics for submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following (list in alphabetical order):
- Ageing in more-than-human relations
- Ageing technofutures, speculative science fiction, and re-imaginations of the relations between ageing and technology, including future visions of positive relations between ageing and technology
- Building, maintaining, breaking, and repairing relations through research and activisms in ageing and technology
- Critically reflecting on practices of relation-building and/or boundary-making in Socio-Gerontechnology
- Digital capitalism and the political economy of ageing and technology
- Digital inequalities, digital and datafied ageism, and data power
- Global relations in ageing and technology, e.g., ageing and technology in the global south
- Intersectional approaches towards ageing and technology
- Mediated and datafied practices in the everyday lives of older adults
- Relations between ageing and digital technologies, (big) data, algorithms, and AI
- The surveillant relations of ageing and technology
- Theorizing relationality in ageing and technology studies
The Call
We look forward to discussing these questions with you at our 2024 Annual Meeting and invite submissions for papers, posters, thematic sessions, and workshops:
- Papers will be presented orally during a conference session by one or more authors.
- Posters will be exhibited throughout the conference.
- Sessions and workshops will offer a dedicated 1.5-hour slot to discuss a specific theme or topic in a format determined by the session chair. Sample formats include a set of paper presentations, panel discussions, workshops, artistic performances or other. We welcome alternative spaces and formats of presentation/discussion. If you need assistance or have questions, please reach out to us and we will try to accommodate your ideas.
Submission format: Please include the title, author name(s), affiliation(s), and email(s), and an abstract of max. 300 words. For session or workshop submissions, please also include the individual contribution titles and authors (for paper sessions) or collaborators, as appropriate.
Please submit your paper, poster or session/workshop proposal via e-mail to socio-gerontechnology2024@kl.ac.at by 22nd March 2024.
Authors will be notified about the decision on 30th April 2024.
Conference Fees
Conference participation is free for members of the Socio-gerontechnology Network. Participation fee for non-members is 50 EUR. A reduced fee (30 EUR) is available for students (including PhD students), un/underemployed scholars and scholars from non-OECD countries. Please follow your own judgment if you fit in this category.
Socio-gerontechnology Travel Stipends
We are happy to announce that we are able to make four travel stipends of 200 EUR available for presenting a paper or poster at the conference. Presenters who are eligible for a reduced conference fee can apply for travel stipends. Please include your motivation for applying for a travel stipend in your abstract submission.
Timeline
22nd March 2024 Call for proposals deadline
30th April Decision Letters & Registration Opens
15th June Announcement of the program
19th – 20th September Meeting
Organising Committee
- Vera Gallistl, Karl Landsteiner University, Austria
- Katrin Lehner, Karl Landsteiner University, Austria
- Martin Kampel, Technical University Vienna, Austria
- Roger von Laufenberg, VICESSE, Austria
- Nicole Dalmer, McMaster University, Canada
- Unmil Karadkar, University of Graz, Austria
- Anna Wanka, Goethe University, Germany
This conference is hosted by Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences, the Technical University of Vienna, VICESSE Research GmbH and supported through the ALGOCARE project (funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund).