Call for Participation - Participation and the Postdigital - Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus

The website of the conference "Participation and the Postdigital. Contemporary technologies and practices in education and urban life" (May 4-5, 2023) is online. Please register first in the Conference Tool and then register there as a participant for the conference. To submit an abstract (PDF only), click on Submit Contribution.

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

If you have any questions or technical issues, please contact Martin Streicher (streicher@gei.de)

We invite abstracts for the “Participation and the Postdigital” conference from 4-5 May 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.

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 focuses 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.

Plenary speakers are: