Blurring the Boundaries: Fields of Expertise and Spaces of Intervention in Collective/Hybrid Knowledge Production
Recent scholarship on the production and diffusion of knowledge has been increasingly concerned with bringing such figures as the scientist, the expert or the intellectual closer to an increasingly fragmented assemblage of ‘publics’. Sociologies of ‘intervention’, ‘translation’, or ‘techno-political’ democratic experiments have multiplied and, alongside them, their objects of study. The aim of this conference is to explore the production of such hybrid ‘collectives’, where experts, laypersons, artifacts and nature(s) create new networks and reconfigure the boundary struggles between expert knowledge and newly emerging publics.
We invite papers that engage through ethnographic, sociological, and historical accounts with this blurring of boundaries between the field of expertise and spaces of interventions, papers that critically engage with first, processes of translation and enframing through which knowledge travels and gains hold in a field of intervention, second, interplay of different communities of belief that produce visions of the future (both religious and scientific) and new practices based on that, and third, accounts that trace the entangled histories and geographies of how certain ways of knowing and acting become dominant.
Keynote Speaker: Zsuzsa Gille, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The conference will include panel sessions on:
Translating Power and Enframing Society
Convener:Sergiu Novac
How do certain scientific or expert discourses gain legitimacy? What role do science, technology and technocratic expertise play in structuring power relationships? Which actors become spokespersons for others in a network when dealing with an issue of public controversy? How does a certain way of enframing a field of intervention lead to disenfranchisement of alternative ways of acting, knowing and organizing? What can sociology and anthropology learn from ‘post-normal’ science? In this panel we invite papers that engage with these questions; we are specifically interested in the way ethnographic imagination can draw upon these recent attempts at blurring the boundaries between science and society and fruitfully engage in an ongoing trans-disciplinary conversation that touches upon urgent contemporary public controversies.
Competing Visions of the Future
Convener: Victoria Fomina
This panel seeks to address the process of production of ideologies (whether pertaining to the scientific or to the religious paradigm), their consolidation in the form of beliefs, and their dissemination and transformation. It will attend both to the cognitive peculiarities, which condition the formation of beliefs and internalization of ideologies on the individual level, as well as to the structural macro processes and the larger socio-historical context, which contributes to making certain inferences more likely and intuitive and certain ideologies more appealing to the larger segment of a community than others. As any ideology involves a projective dimension - a narrative of the past and the present, which determines how an epistemic community envisions its future - specific local historical and socio-political circumstances play crucial role in shaping the ceaseless dialectical process of production, transmission, translation, and transformation of ideologies.
Uncertain Transitions in a Historical Perspective
Convener: Eva Schwab
Both expert knowledge and concrete interventions are based on complex assemblages of material devices, accounting tools, institutional and political arrangements. In this panel we invite papers that look at the acquisition of ‘agency of intervention’ (Eyal/Buchholtz 2010), which is not so much based on the autonomy and objectivity of expert knowledge, but on a specific interplay of some of the above mentioned components. This panel partly overlaps with the first panel, yet it brings the whole question of intervention at a whole different level: Through what historical circumstances do certain ideas become hegemonic, what makes them reach their ‘tipping point’ (Sassen 2008) or, on the contrary, what forms of resistance hinder them from gaining broader consensus? We welcome sociological or anthropological contributions engaging in a comparative framework with histories and unequal geographies in the production and diffusion of knowledge.
300 words abstracts and a short CV should be submitted electronically, using the online submission form below.
APPLY HERE
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
Accommodation in the CEU dormitory and meals during the day will be provided by the department.
We cannot cover accommodation elsewhere or reimburse meal costs. Unfortunately, we cannot cover the travel costs of the participants.
Depending on your specific inquiry, please contact:
Accommodation: Lilla Nagy, Program Coordinator:
; www.sociology.ceu.hu; +36 1 327-3000/2327
Topic: Victoria Fomina:
; Sergiu Novac:
; Eva Schwab:
Online submission process: Iulius-Cezar Macarie: