The following call for papers has just been released:

Minority Report: The Rise and Fall of Critical Technology Studies

Technology Studies aims to render technology comprehensible in historical, social, and political terms. A subset of this work we call Critical Technology Studies (CTS), holds that technologies are forms-of-life with intrinsic features that produce or merge with certain political and social arrangements. Under this premise, technologies are not like a hammer that can used and put down at will; instead they represent a kind of embedded legislation that structures human behavior and ideas (Winner 1986). Central CTS thinkers such as Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Langdon Winner and others not traditionally cited in STS such as Verbeek and Borgmann have given us a framework to interrogate how technical demands can overrule capacities for civic comprehension and democratic control of complex technologies. Counter to the social constructivist narrative that relevant actors are ever busy negotiating our technological reality, CTS suggests that pervasive technological systems can tightly constrain and sometimes confound social and political action.

Although STS owes an intellectual debt to the trailblazing works of CTS, its key contributors’ methods and insights are marginalized in the field today. In an interdiscipline where scholarship is often embedded in its scientific and technical focus, with many in our ranks enrolled in the innovation enterprise, the time is ripe for a minority report on Critical Technology Studies. Organizers invite contributions that unpack and challenge the view that critical technology scholarship is merely anti-technological Luddism grounded in sidelined arguments of determinism.

We seek submissions that:

• reenergize our understanding of the primary claims of CTS;
• trace the critical reception of CTS within STS;
• connect CTS with parallel political commitments, such as those of neo-Luddites (i.e. Kirkpatrick Sale) and social activists (i.e. the anti-nuke movement);
• apply CTS to contemporary studies of innovation;
• propose new areas of inquiry for CTS.

The following frames the issues we hope to address with the panel. We are currently considering journals and publishers for a special issue or edited collection for publication of further developed papers submitted at the conference.

[originally posted at the Critical Technology Studies blog]

Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) will be better prepared to handle the analytical and political challenges we face through renewing a crucial philosophical and methodological approach best referred to as critical technology studies (CTS). Doing so will avail essential tools to fulfill our roles as interdisciplinary researchers and as citizens in our communities.

To begin this task, we call upon STS an related scholars to:

• Situate CTS in its appropriate position in the origin of the field of STS: This task is aided by methods ranging from the genealogical to the bibliometric. What were the precursors to CTS? How did CTS scholars contribute to the founding of the field of STS and frame early concerns?
• Explain CTS’s main contributions to the interdiscipline: Exegesis of key texts is needed, as is tracking of the flows of ideas through the field. What are the key claims of CTS theorists? How did these influence subsequent STS research?
• Track its decline in prominence: Attending to the critical reception of CTS scholars and works will elucidate the readings and misreadings, the appropriations and marginalizations, and the representations of CTS scholars in the works of their critics. How was CTS characterized by its critics? How did CTS claims move from prominence to the margins?
• Make cases for its resurgence: We need CTS in STS, more broadly in the social sciences and humanities, and as citizens confronting key social and political issues of our time. What can CTS do for us today?

In the Anglophone world, Lewis Mumford developed a unique and critical orientation to technology. Early STS scholars took his influence, along with that of Jacques Ellul from France and Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Juenger, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgens Habermas from Germany. They matured these approaches with a careful and noncommittal engagement. Far from the sole party of this strand of thought, Langdon Winner is scholar deeply shaped by this scholarship and whose work has enjoyed considerable currency in the field. While not as philosophically rigorous, Sclove’s politics of technology is similarly influenced. This tradition (among others) was documented using genealogical methods by Michael MJ Fischer (2007) and is featured at the core of the “knowledge base” in bibliometric research recently published by Bhupatiraju & colleagues  and Martin & colleagues (both 2012). This is the tradition I refer to as CTS (not to be confused with Andrew Feenberg’s [i.e. 1999] critical theory of technology).

A central claim of these CTS theorists is deeply influence by Mumford’s (1964) distinction between authoritarian and democratic technics. Winner (1986) developed the theme in discussing the political qualities of artifacts, differentiating between those qualities that are inherent to artifacts and those technologies that are strongly conducive to particular political arrangements. Sclove’s (1995) design criteria for democratic technologies is similarly influenced.

A central motivation for CTS scholars is the maximization of popular control of technology. CTS theorists are concerned with philosophical and practical methods of intervention into technological infrastructures in order to maximize their conduciveness to popular, democratic control for maximum public benefit. They further have a unique resolve in that they are willing to deem some technological systems as unfavorable to popular control and hence productive of antidemocratic social relationships. In such instances, they may advocate the discontinuation of such existing technologies or the impediment of such new ones.

Ideas that originated with figures like Mumford and Ellul and carried forward by CTS underpin early STS; yet this influence is unfortunately waning. Early STS saw controversies in which CTS was central. This position has since become less one of advancement or progression of the field, and instead one of marginalization and exclusion of CTS by others. The late-1980s and early-1990s saw this approach in decline, partly as a result of criticism by proponents of the social construction of technology (SCOT), an approach to historical and sociological studies of technology established partially as a response to CTS. During this time, CTS was increasingly marginalized through two primary critical claims against its leading proponents: the charges of technological determinism and essentialism. While SCOT theorists ought not to be fully credited with the marginalization of CTS, their contribution was crucial. The matter of exclusion is exemplified by the frequent moving away from deep discussion of the ideas of these theorists. After this period, even figures such as Winner were often reduced to perfunctory, ceremonial citations.

We are invested – and call on other STS scholars to join us – in investigating the particular claims of determinism and essentialism, exploring these with reference to the original texts of the authors in question. While these claims were successful at marginalizing this approach in technology studies, they do not hold up to a balanced reading of CTS texts. The charge of essentialism and determinism are at least inappropriate, and perhaps even intellectually disingenuous.

In redeveloping and updating of these crucial theories of technology, we should attend to advancing critical approaches more explicit in their non-essentialism and emphasizing historical, sociological and technological contingency. Doing so will help STS answer the most pressing questions of our time and develop greatly needed policy approaches.

Few scholars currently active in American universities are cited more frequently in STS literature than Winner (Martin, Nightingale, & Yegros-Yegros, 2012), and yet he and others like Sclove have produced few students and adherents to develop their ideas. Although STS owes an intellectual debt to the trailblazing works of CTS, its key contributors’ methods and insights are marginalized in the field today. These scholars too often persist in the literature mainly in the form of ceremonial or perfunctory citations. We need new work in STS that explains the relative dearth of more critical technology scholarship as a consequence of a history of misreading important critical texts and uncharitable treatments of their arguments. Carefully revisiting and redeploying CTS would help STS better engage with the most pressing issues within technological civilization. Without a concerted effort to carry on their intellectual lineage, the contributions of scholars such a Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Langdon Winner and Richard Sclove risk becoming historical footnotes to a progressively more politically aloof and less radical STS.

References:

Bhupatiraju, S., Nomalerb, Ö., Triulzi, G., & Verspagen, B. (2012). Knowledge Flows: Analyzing the Core Literature of Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Science and Technology Studies. Research Policy , 41, 1205-1218.

Feenberg, A. (1999). Questioning Technology. New York, NY: Routledge.

Martin, B., Nightingale, P., & Yegros-Yegros, A. (2012). Science and Technology Studies: Exploring the Knowledge. Research Policy 41 (2012) 1182– 1204 , 41, 1182-1204.

Mumford, L. (1964). Authoritarian and Democratic Technics. Technology and Culture , 5 (1), 1-8.

Sclove, R. E. (1995). Democracy and Technology. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Winner, L. (1986). The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.