**apologies for any cross listing*** Dear AoIR Colleagues, Please note the March 15 deadline. It's only 300 word abstracts, so that's plenty of time :) Join me and many other STS colleagues in June, 2015 at the Danish STS (DASTS) Conference in Aarhus, June 2-3, 2015. http://sts.au.dk/dasts16/ You can submit papers in many different sessions. I'm organizing a panel called Future Making: Methods, 'Data', and Social Change." See below for session details. Session 6: FUTURE MAKING: METHODS, ‘DATA,’ AND SOCIAL CHANGE Organizer: Annette Markham, Aarhus University. Please submit Title and 300 word abstract before the end of March 15, 2015 via the webform: http://sts.au.dk/dasts16/submit/ . For questions, contact sessions organizer: amarkham [at] dac [dot] au [dot] dk Session Description: How do people make sense of intensely local but digitally mediated and heavily networked life in the 21st Century? How do individuals deal with the enormous amounts of data they generate and accumulate in their everyday digital lives? What stories are told through this data? How much of the story does an individual actually control? What stories are automatically generated by how we organize our files (or not), switch computers, use multiple storage devices, both in the cloud and in our pockets? These questions are well suited to an STS approach, especially if we embrace the challenge to move beyond description to intervention. Within a proactive stance of ethical future making, what creative practices can we offer to developers, citizens, and policy makers to critically interrogate the situations constituted through automation and datafication? How might our well-honed STS methods help people grapple with, manage, or make sense of the complexity of the personal big data they produce as they live their everyday lives in a digital era? This track invites contributions that address these questions and build a case for intervention; modes and attitudes of inquiry that contribute research expertise to collaborative and participatory social change. Format can be traditional paper presentations, but track participants are particularly encouraged to consider how their ideas can be conveyed through workshops, creative presentations, exhibitions, interactive discussions, or other ‘unconference’ activities. These experimental formats are useful for thinking through practices other than academic discourse, while being grounded firmly in robust academic methodologies, to develop models for inquiry that are oriented more toward social change than scholarly description. More specific to the topic of building better digital futures, this track is designed to provoke energetic discussions of how STS scholarship can transform findings into interventions, raise consciousness about the automated and algorithmic processes increasingly curating our memories, and help people develop personally meaningful methods for documenting, archiving, and later re-exhibiting lived experience, whether individually or as part of larger groups and municipalities. The focus of individual submissions should connect to this track theme. Proposals are not limited to the following, but could be focused on one or more of these well known problems of contemporary digital culture: *Datafication*. This term marks the growing tendency to digitize, quantify, and transform human experience into data; this process increasingly directs personal and professional activities. When used as part of big data calculations, our experiences are equalized and flattened into data points, giving the illusion that all experiences are equally meaningful and ultimately accessible. Our digital traces are stored in large government and privately held data centers, bought and sold for marketing, personalization of apps, or just to keep track of us. Data are simultaneously invisible and everywhere. They assume an “itness,” making their qualities seem concrete and incontrovertible. *Algorithmic interpellation*. Algorithms manipulate data and feed us information about ourselves. Future norms and structures are emerging through current designs and frameworks for thinking about social media platforms; the automated and corporatized features of these platforms do not necessarily operate in the best interest of people. *Locus of control*. As information becomes digitized, such as family photos, letters, and other everyday artifacts, information that helps individuals remember gets lost in deep file structures and outdated devices. Although there are many apps and programs to help us sort through these datasets, the digitizing processes has not significantly improved our ability to seamlessly retrieve and make sense of past events. At a broader structural level, similar question can be raised: What is the role of social media platforms in creating our memories? How much does the automated Facebook curation of our Year in Review exhibit, for example, dictate the stories that will eventually be understood as individual memory, generational history, and cultural heritage? *Hegemonic culturing*. Whatever we define as a case, a situation, or a phenomenon is at least a complex play of negotiations, alignments and realignments within society. How do these structures and processes function hegemonically, neutralizing and naturalizing certain ways of being while obscuring other alternatives? This question is important particularly when and if people don’t think of datafication or algorithmic processing as problems at all. A subtle shift in the discourse over the past 20 years indicates a growing acceptance of the ‘fact’ of constant surveillance and mass data collection by companies that provide users with applications, platforms, and devices. At the same time, individuals are increasingly held personally responsible for actions online, while the platforms and infrastructures are portrayed as natural carriers and neutral collectors of data. submit session abstract for consideration by March 15 here: http://sts.au.dk/dasts16/submit/ ***************************************************** Annette N. Markham, Ph.D. Professor MSO, School of Communication & Culture, Aarhus University Affiliate Professor, School of Communication, Loyola University, Chicago amarkham@gmail.com http://markham.internetinquiry.org/ Twitter: annettemarkham