Conference - Participation and the Postdigital. Contemporary technologies and practices in education and urban life - Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus

Registration is now open for the conference 'Participation and the Postdigital. Contemporary technologies and practices in education and urban life' (May 4-5, 2023) in Braunschweig (Germany), organised by members of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History and Haus der Wissenschaft Braunschweig GmbH. The conference will be held in-person, with selected sessions streamed online.

Click here to go to the registration website: https://events.gei.de/

UPDATE (May 2, 2023): Detailed conference programme: Download

Conference schedule

Informal get-together - May 3, 2023

For those arriving the day before the event, there will be an informal get-together (at your own expense) at 18:00 at the „Liebeskuh“, Lange Straße 61, 38116 Braunschweig. To help us make the reservation, please let Maren Wittal (maren.wittal@gei.de) know by April 14 if you are planning to attend.

Conference Day 1 - May 4, 2023

The registration desk will open on May 4 at 9 a.m. at the Leibniz-Institute for Educational Media | Georg-Eckert-Institute. At 9:30 a.m. the first keynote with Dr. Torange Khonsari will start the conference followed by lightning talks and open panels. The first day will end with an evening event at the Haus der Wissenschaft Braunschweig.

May 4, 2023
9:00 a.m.	Conference opening, teas and coffee
9:30 a.m.	Keynote by Dr. Torange Khonsari
10:30 a.m.	Lightning Talks
13:00 a.m.	Data Walk
14:30 a.m.	Open Panels
17:00 a.m.	Resarch speed dating & evening event

Conference Day 2 - May 5, 2023

On May 5, we will also start at 9 a.m. but at the SpACE Lab (TU Braunschweig). This day includes a brain cruise on the river, a keynote by Prof. Hella von Unger, lightning talks and a keynote by Prof. Petar Jandrić. The conference will end at 4 p.m.

May 5, 2023
9:00 a.m.	Meeting at the SpACE Lab, teas and coffee
9:30 a.m.	Brain cruise (on the Oker river)
11:00 a.m.	Keynote by Prof. Hella von Unger
13:00 a.m.	Lightning Talks
14:30 a.m.	Keynote by Prof. Petar Jandrić
16:00 a.m.	Conference end

Getting here - Travel information

Travel to Braunschweig is easy by car, train, long-distance bus and from the nearest airports. Within Braunschweig, you can easily get to the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media by public transport. The Leibniz Institute for Educational Media can be reached with the M 411 bus from the plaza in front of the main train station (direction 'Lamme' - stop 'Maschstraße') (timetable information).

Due to the good travel possibilities by train and car, Braunschweig is also easy to reach from the major airports:

- Hannover Airport (approx. 65 km)

- Berlin Airport (approx. 230 km)

- Frankfurt am Main Airport (approx. 340 km)

You can get an overview of the city here: City map

The format lightning talk

The lightning talk format is designed to provide insights and provoke in 7 minutes or less. To do so, a few slides can also be used for illustration. We plan plenty of time in the sessions for responding, reflecting, sharing and talking. You can find more information about the format at the following link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01674-9

Conference Topic

Participation has long been seen as central to the internet and digitalisation, e.g. in terms of the “Web 2.0”, social media, media communication, information flows, eDemocracy, eEducation. Utopian hopes have been dashed, however, with the realisation that participation is always unequally distributed and that technological innovation does not automatically lead to social improvements. With the notion of the postdigital, this conference opens a space for critical reflection on how technologies, cultural practices and participation are entangled. With the postdigital, we assume that digital technologies are already woven into most everyday practices, that their use is messy, that injustice is coded into them, but that exciting sociotechnical projects are opening new vistas for collective life in the postdigital. When research and development focus on context and the way in which technology is implemented and connected to social practices, we gain nuanced views on the entanglements between participation and (digital) technologies that does not assume an utopian improvement but critically analyses and reflects how participation unfolds in the postdigital condition.

Organised by the Leibniz-ScienceCampus - Postdigital Participation - Braunschweig, the conference invites participants to think together about education and urban life. In both cases, participating in postdigital practices holds great potential for taking part, for instance in strategic communication, political debate and decision-making processes but can also lead to datafication and monetisation of behavioural data, to ‘unpersonal’ kinds of involvement or to exclusion. As the relations between participation and the postdigital condition are complex and ambiguous, their comprehensive analysis, reflection and design demands perspectives and expertise from multiple disciplines.

Keynote speakers are: