Dear Colleagues, We would like to invite you to submit an abstract to the track on "Video & STS: Methodologies and Methods" to be held at the EASST 2010 conference. Please find a call for abstracts below. The deadline for abstract submissions is March 15, 2010, 23:59:59 CET Abstract should be submitted through the system: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010/abstract-submission Look forward to meeting you in Italy in September! Best wishes, Yuwei Lin and Christian Greiffenhagen ------------------ CALL FOR ABSTRACTS ------------------ TRACK 10. VIDEO & STS: METHODOLOGIES AND METHODS http://events.unitn.it/sites/events.unitn.it/files/EASST_010_Track_10.pdf Despite the rapid technical developments and a general turn to the visual in the social sciences, video methodologies and methods are still not widely adopted for science and technologies studies (STS). Most researchers continue to rely on ‘traditional’ ethnographic or other qualitative research methods using other means, such as talk or writing. However, as the recent variety of video-based studies have shown, video technologies clearly offer exciting possibilities of capturing the dynamics and complexities in the field. As Macbeth (1990, p. 191) put it: “As a matter of faithfulness to the texture, temporal shape and material detail of the scenes they record, the video of filmic record provides remarkably uninterpreted renderings of the field.”1 But the reality of current STS seems to suggest otherwise. Why are video methodologies and methods not [yet] widely adopted in STS? This panel will contribute to the conference theme of “methodological approaches for investigating scientific and technological practices”. It is devised to explore to what extent video methodologies and methods can help capture and examine the socio-material practice and performance which are so central to the recent pragmatic and practice-based turn in STS since late 70s. We are especially interested in answering the following questions: * How are video methodologies and methods applied in different types of STS research? * What are the challenges of applying video-based methods in STS-like research (e.g., nuisances of using video technologies, field workers’ informed consent, interaction with the field workers, ethics of publishing video data)? * What are the solutions to socio-ethical issues in the employment of video methods? * What are the implications of video-based methods to STS research? * Is it possible to capture ‘where the action is’ on video, or is scientific and technological work too distributed, both spatially and temporally, to allow such capture? Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted by March 15 at: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010/abstract-submission -- Yuwei Lin | yuwei at ylin dot org http://www.ylin.org