»Automation, Control, and Incompetence – Socio-Technical Ecologies of Responsible
Filtering in the 20th and 21st Century«

How do practices of »filtering«—technical, racial, cultural, political, environmental, and otherwise—produce the ecologies of modern life? How might a theory of filtering encompassing technological and cultural operations better explain the forms of control, responsibility, and incompetence ordering modern life? We invite papers addressing these questions from fields including media studies, cultural studies, histories of science and technology, human-computer interaction, digital humanities and informatics.

»Automation, Control, and Incompetence – Socio-Technical Ecologies of Responsible Filtering in the 20th and 21st Century« is a workshop conceptualized by the research project »Filtering«. The event takes place on December 1st and 2nd.

We understand filtering as a fundamental technique that enables human and non-human actors to shape and create environments through differentiation. The environments emerging from processes of filtering are interconnected and encompass several dimensions. They are always material, but also invoke the symbolic and social (Cubasch et al 2021; Razghandi and Yaghmaei 2020). We consider these filtered environments as powerscapes that are shaped by constellations of interests, entangled agencies and power relations. The notion of powerscapes addresses filtering not only as a fundamental technique of making environments but also as techniques that must be open to critique from all involved. Powerscapes hint at the underlying power and hierarchical structures that emanate from filtering technologies, as technologies – or »engines« – of differentiation (Irani and Philipp 2018), in situations where different actors, entities and machines interact and share awareness. We raise the urgent question of how filtering can become responsible for filtering both as a design process and with regard to the resulting socio-technical environment. Please find the complete call for papers below to download.

Individual paper submissions should be in the form of abstracts of up to 150 words and a list of references. Abstracts should include the paper’s main arguments, methods, and contributions to the workshop. Send your abstract under the subject line »MoA Automation Workshop« to mario.cypko [​at​] fu-berlin.de.

The call for papers for the workshop is now open until August 28th.