The Production of Participation in the Digital World Call for papers and information about workshop in Trondheim, 12-13 December 2019. _Information_ The skeleton of our digital future is in the making today. In recent years, there has been a raising concern both in academia and the public about the way digitalization shapes society in overt and covert ways. Digital infrastructures both supports, transforms and co-creates social institutions and social life. With semi-autonomous, «smart» and «learning» algorithms, digital infrastructures have been delegated more responsibility and autonomy in filtering, sorting, and classifying vital information, and also with providing advice and making decisions, at the same time as they become less transparent to public scrutiny. Thus, digitalization transforms society and citizens more intensively both in scope and depth – not least in terms of potentials and risks related to democratic participation and empowerment. Public responses to this development have largely been reactive, dealing with the effects of the technologies rather than their raison d’etre. At the same time, this development has only to a limited degree been conceptualized by the social sciences. In order to pave the ground for a more proactive approach to technology development, our research group /Digitalization and social life/ at the Department for sociology and political science, NTNU invite to a two-day workshop in Trondheim in December. We call for contributions that confront the challenges posed by digitalization empirically and conceptually. With the heading /the production of participation/, we invite to a workshop where different arenas for and aspects of the development of digital technologies and infrastructures are studied, with a special focus on how the developments influence users’/citizens’/costumers’ participation and empowerment in digital society. Our starting point is that the conditions for future participation are carved out and battled over, openly or covertly, by and between different “production sites” and “actor collectives”. Although large platforms and technology companies may have dominated the battlefield the last decade, they are not the only contestants. Governments, nongovernmental organizations, cooperatives, consumers, citizens, incumbent businesses, individual entrepreneurs, hackers, visionaries, engineers, branders and workers all participate and contribute, consciously or unconsciously, to the shaping of the infrastructures of the future as they maneuver them today. More or less stable collectives and alliances are formed, and clashes among actors pursuing different interests take place at various levels, local, national, supranational, global. We call for contributions that address the sites, actors and dynamics involved in /the production of participation/://How is this work carried out? Through which strategies and techniques? Under which frameworks? What are the objectives and agendas of the various stakeholders? And how do they comply with democratic ideals of citizen empowerment and participation? _Call for papers_ The workshop will have 2-3 invited speakers (see below) and else consist of presentation of papers.We hereby invite those interested to send in title/abstracts of proposed papers/presentations, about 100-250 words, to Hendrik Storstein Spilker, email: hendrik.spilker@ntnu.no <mailto:hendrik.spilker@ntnu.no>(*deadline 20/10 2019*)*. *We want to include a fairly broad scope of papers, both theoretical and empirical, descriptive and normative, to cover the breadth of research efforts in this area, but encourage all contributors to actively address and engage in the challenges formulated in the title and ingress of this call. The seminar language will be English. For updates about place and program, follow our event page at https://www.facebook.com/events/2101469596815391/ *//* *//* _Keynote speakers_ We are very happy to announce the following exiting key note talks by our invited speakers: Dr. Lina Dencik, University of Cardiff: Civic participation in a datafied society Citizens are increasingly assessed, profiled, categorized and ‘scored’ according to data assemblages, their future behavior is predicted through data processing, and services are allocated accordingly. In a datafied society, state-citizen relations become quasi-automated and dependent on algorithmic decision-making. This raises significant challenges for democratic processes, active citizenship and public engagement. At the same time, we have seen a (re)emergence of citizen-centered democratic practices, from citizen assemblies to crowdsourced policies, that suggest a recognised need to enhance citizen voice in decision-making. Drawing on the on-going collaborative project ‘Towards Democratic Auditing’ carried out by the Data Justice Lab, in this talk I will engage with the question of advancing civic participationin a context of rapid technological and social transformation, considering also experiments in new democratic practices to ensure legitimacy, transparency, accountability and intervention in relation to data-driven governance. In so doing, I will outline emerging terrains for developing citizen agency in a datafied society. Bio: Lina Dencik is Reader at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University, UK and is Co-Founder of the Data Justice Lab. She has published widely on digital media, resistance and the politics of data and is currently Principal Investigator of the DATAJUSTICE project funded by an ERC Starting Grant. Her publications include /Media and Global Civil Society/ (Palgrave, 2012), /Worker Resistance and Media /(Peter Lang, 2015), /Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest /(Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015) and /Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society /(Polity, 2018). Website: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/182924-dencik-lina Dr. Thomas Poell, University of Amsterdam: Governing platforms and Value-Centric Design Digital platforms enable user-driven forms of organization and collective action (Benkler 2006; Bennett and Segerberg 2013, Shirky 2008). Yet, platform-based activity is simultaneously centrally monitored and shaped through ubiquitous techno-commercial infrastructures (Couldry 2015; Fuchs 2017; van Dijck 2013). As platforms penetrate every sphere of life, this combination of distributed user participation and top-down techno-commercial steering undermines public institutions and destabilizes social relations, enhancing the precarity of labor, unsettling urban communities, and disrupting democratic public debate (van Dijck, Poell & de Waal 2018). In the light of these problems, this paper considers how the platformization of society can be governed in correspondence with vital public values. It argues that due to the nature of platform-based activity, effective governing arrangements need to be organized through a framework of ‘cooperative responsibility’, which revolves around the dynamic interaction between platforms, public institutions, and users, which include individual citizens, but also incumbent businesses, advertisers, NGOs, political parties, and other societal organizations (Helberger, Pierson & Poell 2018, 1). However, a major obstacle in developing such arrangements are the progressively entangled economic interests of the involved actors. In the name of optimization and cutting back public expenditure, governments actively contribute to platformization by deregulating markets and privatizing public infrastructures, while citizens increasingly dependent on asset-based welfare schemes revolving around platforms. Hence, future governing arrangements will need to be based on a new political pact informed by key public values and geared towards reducing dependence on corporate platforms. Reflecting on these challenges and drawing on proposals for value-centric design, this presentation will sketch the contours of such a pact. _Bio_: Thomas Poell, Ph.D. is senior lecturer in New Media & Digital Culture and Program Director of the Research Master Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam (NL). He has published widely on digital platforms and popular protest in Canada, Egypt, Tunisia, India, and China, as well as on the role of these platforms in the reorganization of key economic sectors, including journalism, education, and health care. Poell is co-author of /The Platform Society/ with José van Dijck and Martijn de Waal (Oxford University Press, 2018), offering a comprehensive analysis of how platforms disrupt markets and labor relations, circumvent institutions, transform social and civic practices and affect democratic processes. Furthermore, he co-edited /The Sage Handbook of Social Media/ with Jean Burgess and Alice Marwick (Sage, 2018), /Social Media Materialities and Protest /with Mette Mortensen and Christina Neumayer (Routledge, 2018), and /Global Cultures of Contestation/ with Esther Peeren, Robin Celikates, and Jeroen de Kloet (Palgrave/McMillan, 2017). Website: http://www.uva.nl/profiel/p/o/t.poell/t.poell.html. -- Hendrik Storstein Spilker, Professor in the sociology of media and technology, Department of sociology and political science, NTNU Projects: STREAM (Streaming the culture industries): https://www.hf.uio.no/imk/forskning/prosjekter/stromming-av-kulturindustrien... DICE (Digital Infrastructures and Citizen Empowerment): https://www.ntnu.no/iss/dice New book out: Digital Music Distribution https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Music-Distribution-The-Sociology-of-Online...