<div dir="ltr"><div>Hi everyone</div><div><br></div><div>I would like to invite you to join our session titled <i>Hacker Culture: Understanding the actors behind our software</i> which we will be hosting with Paula Bialski at the <a href="https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/">EASST/4S 2020 conference in Prague next August</a>. This is <i>the</i> major annual Science and Technology Studies (STS) conference, and a wide tent of research traditions.<br></div><div><br></div><div>We wrote this call for papers with software/system/infrastructure maintenance issues in mind, as we ourselves are sympathetic to these themes.<br></div><div><br></div><div>If the below CfP sounds good to you, please submit a 250 word abstract to <a href="mailto:bialski@leuphana.de">bialski@leuphana.de</a> and/or me at <a href="mailto:maco@itu.dk">maco@itu.dk</a> (and this Gmail thing at <a href="mailto:mace.ojala@gmail.com">mace.ojala@gmail.com</a> works too) by 17th of February 2020.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Hoping to hear from you, and to establish a good conversation in Prague!<br></div><div><br></div><div>--------------8<--------------8<--------------8<--------------8<--------------</div><div><br></div><div><h2 class="gmail-" style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px 0px 20px;padding:0px;border:0px none;outline:currentcolor none 0px;font-variant-ligatures:normal;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;line-height:1.4;vertical-align:baseline;font-family:Roboto,sans-serif;color:rgb(51,51,51);background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
Hacker Cultures: Understanding the actors behind our software</h2>
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Paula Bialski, Leuphana University Luneburg; Mace Ojala, IT University of Copenhagen</p>
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The spiralling changes around how we experience our social and physical
world have stemmed from the massive amount of digital technologies that
are ubiquitously used in all parts of our society today. Big data,
offshore data centres, universities, grocery stores
run by software companies of all shapes and sizes, are often hard to
grasp and black-boxed, deeming the user unable to participate. These
infrastructures are constructed by a wide range of “hackers” – a
slippery term generally applied to anybody building or
maintaining software or hardware. They (or we?) go by a wide range of
labels such as programmers, developers (or “devs”), designers, analysts,
data scientists, coders, sysadmins, dev/ops, or sometimes simply tech.
They build, break, fix, and secure our navigation
system, our banking database, our doctor’s healthcare software, our
games, our phones, our word processors, our fridges and toasters. They
work in massive software corporations, in teeny startups, or in
something in-between. They volunteer for, or are employed
by, free and open-source projects. While their work is ubiquitous,
hackers can hold a lot of power but also none at all – as the software
they are building oftentimes overpowers their capabilities of
understanding and managing it. Inspired by research around
hacker cultures, such as Chris Kelty’s work among free software
communities, Biella Coleman’s work on the Debian communities (2012) and
the politically-motivated hacker collective Anonymous (2014), or Stuart
Geiger’s embedded ethnography in Wikipedia (2017
with Halfaker) – this panel shines a light on the people who build our
opaque and oftentimes confusing technical worlds. In doing so, we wish
to challenge the role of the STS scholar in describing the powers and
agencies, and the practices and struggles of
hacker cultures – a challenge that, in our increasingly complex,
commodified technical worlds might never be fulfilled.</p>
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<span class="gmail-" style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px none;outline:currentcolor none 0px;font-variant-ligatures:inherit;font-variant-caps:inherit;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;line-height:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;font-family:inherit;font-style:inherit;font-weight:600">Submit
To: </span><span class="gmail-" style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px none;outline:currentcolor none 0px;font-variant-ligatures:inherit;font-variant-caps:inherit;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;line-height:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;font-family:inherit;font-style:italic"><a href="mailto:bialski@leuphana.de" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="gmail-">bialski@leuphana.de</a></span></p>
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<span class="gmail-" style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px none;outline:currentcolor none 0px;font-variant-ligatures:inherit;font-variant-caps:inherit;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;line-height:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;font-family:inherit;font-style:inherit;font-weight:600">Keywords:</span> software,
hackers, culture, agency, data collection, ethnography, computing</p>
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<span class="gmail-" style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px none;outline:currentcolor none 0px;font-variant-ligatures:inherit;font-variant-caps:inherit;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-alternates:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;line-height:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;font-family:inherit;font-style:inherit;font-weight:600">Categories: </span>Information,
Computing and Media Technology</p>
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Big Data</p>
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Engineering and Infrastructure</p></div><div>-------------->8-------------->8-------------->8-------------->8--------------</div><div>-- <br></div><div>Mace Ojala</div><div>ETHOS Lab (<a href="https://ethos.itu.dk">https://ethos.itu.dk</a>) + Technologies in Practice (<a href="https://tip.itu.dk">https://tip.itu.dk</a>)<br></div><div>IT University of Copenhagen<br></div></div>