Open panel at 4S (Oct 6-9, virtual).
“Lacking Agency, Legitimacy, Or Care—Conspiracy, Coterie, Contagion And Other Not-so-good Relations” (open panel @4S).
Goodness is fickle. Goodness is fragile, Martha Nussbaum has argued; and it is potent. Good relations come with agency, legitimacy or care, depending on the moral regime that goodness is inflected in.
This panel explores how moralities shape and are shaped in worlds equipped with a plethora of technologies. The panel focuses on the heterogeneous moralities, brittle and persistent, that animate the mediatized, digitized, and datafied dealings of today.
The panel proceeds from the hypothesis that today’s technicized worlds re-mix and re-configure regimes of goodness and of engagement (Laurent Thévenot). Digital technologies, Noortje Marres notes, may transform the situational fabric of the everyday, synthesizing public and private in novel ways. Web algorithms, e.g., rank postings and invoke users according to distinct logics of valuation (Andreas Birkbak and Hjalmar Bang Carlsen). When myriad practices are coordinated in far-flung assemblages, public justification, organized planning, and intimate care interlock, clash or undermine one another (María Puig de la Bellacasa).
Against this backdrop, the panel tends to the weak, wicked, and poor relations that lack agency, legitimacy, and care. It examines affected non-users and uses (Eric Baumer), bystanders (Susann Wagenknecht), conspirators (Timothy Choy), traitors, trespassers, and intruders—shadowy figures that fail to entertain good relations. Drawing attention to bystanding, treason, coterie, contagion (Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory, and Jeffrey Hancock), and carelessness, the panel sets out to tackle a range of uneasy techno-moral figurations.
Submission are due March 8: https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/call-for-submissions/