SRI graduate fellows invite submissions for 2021 Grad Workshop, “Views on Techno-Utopia”
The Tower of Babel (1563), Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The 2020-2021 cohort of Schwartz Reisman Graduate Fellows presents Views on Techno-Utopia, a one-day, online, interdisciplinary workshop for early career scholars.
Views on Techno-Utopia will bring together early career scholars in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to follow emerging technologies—particularly AI, platforms, and surveillance tech—through the lens of techno-utopianism.
Techno-utopianism predicts that technologies can help us overcome human flaws and usher in a better world. What sorts of societal changes can emerging technologies actually effect? How might we tell which technologies promise more than they can deliver, or carry still-hidden risks? What forms of institutional or legal design make techno-utopianism—or critiquing its reach—possible? When faced with the detrimental effects of technological solutions to social problems, the response is often to “fix” the technology, leaving the underlying optimistic narrative untouched. How might technological “fixes” reproduce the moral systems from which they hope to save us? To what extent does the allure of the “fix” obscure techno-utopian assumptions, affect research and development, including your own?
This workshop will be a place of interdisciplinary encounter, so your proposal should be accessible to people outside of your field. For instance, we encourage science-oriented scholars to consider the moral, philosophical, or social implications of their work. Analogously, we encourage humanists to ground their presentations in concrete understandings of present and future technological possibilities.
We welcome contributions that incisively approach the appeals and risks of techno-utopian optimism, whether by engaging with any of the questions above or by proposing new sites of inquiry.
Views on Techno-Utopia is a good opportunity for presenters to receive feedback from peers and SRI fellows in a small workshop setting, as well as to take part in SRI’s larger, main conference on the following two days, featuring senior scholars from a variety of academic disciplines (information about this event is coming soon.) If graduate applicants are accepted to the grad workshop, registration for the main SRI conference will be included.
Learn more about the workshop on the Absolutely Interdisciplinary website.
