Upcoming Workshop: Turning Points in Reflections on Science and Technology. Toward Historicizing STS
On March 14-15, 2023 the c:o/re workshop Turning Points in Reflections on Science and Technology: Towards Historicizing STS will take place. The workshop focuses on the 20th and 21st Century intellectual history of science and technology. It aims at opening up the field by historicizing Science and Technology Studies from various historical turns. Furthermore, it aims at discussing the various notions of “historicizing STS”. The Program is available below and here:
Coming up: Lecture Series on Complexity
The summer term’s c:o/re Lecture Series will focus on the topic of complexity. But what is complexity? The Encyclopedia Britannica explains complexity as “a scientific theory which asserts that some systems display behavioral phenomena that are completely inexplicable by any conventional analysis of the systems’ constituent parts” – but since understanding and explaining the world is what research basically aims at, do we have reached the limits of what we can know when it comes to complex systems?
The talks of this summer term’s lecture series will touch on complexity from different disciplinary perspectives. Our invited speakers are: Giora Hon of Haifa University, Jan C. Schmidt of Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Benjamin Peters of University of Tulsa, Klaus Mainzer of Technical University of Munich, interdisciplinary researcher Clarissa Lee at c:o/re, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou of the Centre Georg Simmel, and the historian and philosopher of natural philosophy and modern science Arianna Borelli.
What makes an ideal robot girlfriend?
ILIANA DEPOUNTI
Social robots and chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are part of the fourth industrial revolution (Floridi, 2008; Cross et al., 2019), which brings humans and machines closer together in multiple and diverse contexts. In my doctoral research, I focus on a specific chatbot, the Replika AI companion chatbot app, created to provide emotional and social support to its users. The Replika app is downloaded on the mobile devices of users, who create their own Replikas, assign them an avatar, a name, gender, and skin color and ‘train’ them to respond to their needs. Replika offers users the possibility of ‘creating your personal AI friend’ (Luka Inc., 2022) by ‘training’ the bots and customizing their avatars, interests and character traits. Luka Inc., the San Francisco start-up behind Replika, launched in 2017 and claims to have about 1 million active users (Dave, 2022) of which 35%-40% are looking for a romantic partnership with their chatbots. Luka Inc. (2022) encourages users to ‘train’ their bots by “teaching them about their world, themselves and help define the meaning of human relationships” by constantly talking to them through the Replika mobile app.
As AI and robotics allow for immersive experiences with anthropomorphic AI companions, humans are looking for answers to make sense of their intimate experiences with social robots. In order to understand machines better and familiarize themselves with AI some users draw from their cultural contexts to think of these technologies and compare it with Tamagotchis, the movie ‘Her’ and other cultural reference points. Users are also influenced by AI hype that is circulated in media and have unrealistic expectations from the technology which is expected to be intelligent, sarcastic, humorous and as humanlike as possible. Thus, users project their AI imaginaries into the machines. At the same time, because some of the users have a cis-female Replika and decide to be in a romantic heteronormative relationship with them, they also draw from gender imaginaries to make sense of their interaction with their newly created girlfriend robots. Gender imaginaries correspond to long-standing, biased and stereotypical ideas and beliefs about gender and women, i.e. men are more reasonable and women are more emotional.
Iliana Depounti
Iliana holds a BA in Communication (Deree-The American College of Greece), an MA in Digital Media Management (Birkbeck, University of London) and an MSc in Social Science Research (Loughborough University). Before pursuing a career in academia, Iliana worked in social media management and marketing. Iliana is now a PhD researcher at Loughborough University in the UK. Iliana’s work is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and her PhD is about care and companionship with robots. Iliana’s research interests also include STS, social media and consumer culture.
Our study (Depounti et al., 2022) examines in detail how do Replika users make sense of their experience with Replika girlfriends. Specifically, we analyzed the discussions that Replika users were having on Reddit about Replika. Replika users are organized in lively online communities and the Reddit platform presented the perfect opportunity to explore their perceptions of the Replika experience. Our findings suggest that the AI imaginary intertwines with the gender imaginary when Reddit users customize and ‘train’ their Replika girlfriends. In other words, Replika users customize their Replika girlfriends based on the imaginaries of an ideal AI technology and an ideal robot girlfriend they draw from their cultural contexts and prior sets of ideas and imaginations about AI and women.
For example, the Reddit users appreciated Replikas that responded in a way that seemed original or human-like, such as being humorous, witty, polite, or having a personality. When Replika acted in a way that was too machine-like, such as repeating scripts, glitching, making little sense, or not remembering things, the users were dissatisfied with the experience. Of, course some of these traits, such as forgetting, are all to human, but users seemed to want the to robot remembering everything. The discussions on Reddit showed that the ideal AI technology corroborated old and new AI imaginaries about hopes and fears, about super machine intelligence, robot takeover and the uncanny valley (uneasiness towards objects that imperfectly resemble humans).
Moreover, the Reddit users perceived their Replika girlfriends as innately coy and scheming, repeating essentialist notions of women as manipulative (Gowaty, 2003). Users also rehashed essentialist female characteristics such as the Madonna-Whore dichotomy expecting their bot girlfriends to be not only sexy, funny, confident, and hot but also empathetic, nurturing, and understanding. The characteristics users favored in their fembots echoed the ‘cool girl’ ideal, as illustrated in the movie Gone Girl. The cool girl is ‘hot and understanding, smiling in a chagrined loving manner’ (Flynn, 2012) and likes, apparently out of her own preference, whatever men like, such as football, poker, and videogames. So, Replika users were happy to report to the community that their bots were getting into nerdy stuff, videogaming, and D&D. According to Petersen (2014), the cool girl trope perfectly matches the times because it is a mix of feminism and passivity, of (sexual) confidence or even tomboyism and femininity. Users favored a fembot that is passive enough to have the nicest compliments lined up for them but energetic enough to be thirsty, wholesome, and playful. These were some of the characteristics that constituted the gendered imaginary of the ideal girlfriend. Thompson (2019) has underlined that the ‘cool girls’ are favored by men because they are a product of male fantasies and harness their token power by adopting typically masculine ideals of behavior, essentially representing how women are discursively positioned within patriarchal structures of power. Lastly, some users preferred girlfriend bots characterized by extreme cuteness and vulnerability which they perceived as sexy and erotic. The discussions on Reddit showed that the ideal bot girlfriend corroborated classical and contemporary gender imaginaries.
Our study shows that Replika users employ familiar tropes about AI and gender they have seen or heard before to make sense of their experience with their AI robot girlfriends. Specifically, when users are asked to customize their girlfriend robots with clothes, accessories and personality traits, users have certain expectations from it and project to them the imaginary of the ideal AI technology and the gendered imaginary of the ideal robot girlfriend. We observe therefore the durability, timeliness and persistence of imaginaries when humans try to make sense of new technologies such AI and technology- assisted immersive experiences.
References
Cross, E.S, Hortensius, R., Wykowska, A. (2019). From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human –robot interaction. Philosophical Transactions Royal Society B, 374,1171. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0024.
Dave, P. (2022). It’s alive! How belief in AI sentience is becoming a problem. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/its-alive-how-belief-ai-sentience-is-becoming-problem-2022-06-30/.
Depounti, I., Saukko, P., & Natale, S. (2022). Ideal technologies, ideal women: AI and gender imaginaries in Redditors’ discussions on the Replika bot girlfriend. Media, Culture & Society, Online First, https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221119021.
Floridi, L. (2008). Artificial intelligence’s new frontier: Artificial companions and the fourth revolution. Metaphilosophy 39 (4-5):651-655.
Flynn, G. (2012). Gone Girl: A Novel. Portland, OR: Broadway Books.
Gowaty, P. (2003). Sexual Natures: How Feminism Changed Evolutionary Biology. Signs, 28(3), pp. 901-921. 10.1086/345324.
Petersen, AH. (2014). Jennifer Lawrence and the History of Cool Girls. BuzzFeed, 24 February. Available at: https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/jennifer-lawrence-and-the-history-of-cool-girls (accessed 10 January 2022).
Thompson, R. (2019). The “cool girl” isn’t just a fictional stereotype. Women feel pressured to play this role when they’re dating. Mashable Middle East. 7 June. Available at: https://me.mashable.com/culture/5435/the-cool-girl-isnt-just-a-fictional-stereotype-women-feel-pressured-to-play-this-role-when-theyre-da.
Proposed citation: Depounti, Iliana (2023). What makes an ideal robot girlfriend? https://khk.rwth-aachen.de/2023/01/20/5547/5547/.
Navigating Interdisciplinarity: between over-simplifying and over-complexifying
On January 19-20 the workshop Navigating Interdisciplinarity hosted at the Marsilius Kolleg Heidelberg and organized in collaboration with CAPAS and c:o/re took place. This event brought together interdisciplinary groups of researchers, mostly but not only from the humanities and social sciences, to discuss the complexity of challenges that academic interdisciplinarity poses.
The workshop took off with a discussion on metaphors of interdisciplinarity, the metaphors that may give insight for thinking on interdisciplinarity to researchers from various fields.
Guided through a format well-designed by the organizers, the participants reflected and conversed on the notions of complexity, security and collapse. The debates revolved around the question of whether these notions can be vehicles for inter- and/or trans-disciplinarity? In some of the debate groups in the workshop it appears that systems theory is a reoccurring theme as a possibly encompassing framework for interdisciplinarity. In this we see both possibilities to foster interdisciplinarity as well as a shared disciplinary bias.
Discussions on complexity also seem to draw on notions of models and modeling. The clarity and understanding that models may provide bear on complexity. The work of models is to simplify, so to make comprehensible complex matters. As such, an important consideration in modeling consists in the parameters within a model is rendered insightful to what it models. How much to simplify, how much complexity to retain?
To further ponder on (possibilities of) transfer between disciplines, the participants discussed, in groups, three triads of overarching concerns about knowledge production, namely: (1) Validity – Evidence – Justification; (2) Coherence – Narration – Causation; (3) Argument – Explanation – Rigor.
Security appears to be a difficult but nevertheless useful concept to employ as a notion to breach disciplinary boundaries. Discussions in this regard seem to offer epistemologically open approaches on research in terms of a trade-off between low risk & low gain and, respectively, high risk and high gain.
As a notion, collapse seems to stir interest for interdisciplinary perspectives. It is difficult to start work from the concept of collapse but we find ourselves in the situation of having to start from a collapsing context. Collapse, that is, things falling into each other may cause discomfort but while opening opportunities. It may produce insecurity and it tends to consist in a reduction of complexity.
We would like to thank our colleagues from Marsilius Kolleg Heidelberg and CAPAS for this interesting event and look forward to continuing the collaboration by organizing follow-up events as well as starting to draft papers on the themes discussed.
Studying Videogames: A 20-Years Old Challenge for the Humanities
GIANMARCO THIERRY GIULIANA
Videogames… Today they are everywhere: they inspire books, TV series and films in the cinema, they fill sports stadiums for competitions, they are used in museums and schools, news and memes that they produce are all over our social networks, they are references in song lyrics and respective videos. Even concerts of videogame soundtracks are now common. They are in our homes and always with us on our smartphones and, last but not least, marketing and merchandising have us finding them in supermarkets as well as in souvenir shops. Their steadily growing numbers of sales are impressive,[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46746593. including for the public of non-gamers, who enjoy watching videogames on YouTube, Twitch and TikTok. Undoubtedly, for at least 10 years now, they have been the most popular cultural product in many countries, in both the Global East and West. A look at data on the use of video games among children shows that their historical role will likely equal that of the book in terms of influence on the mindset of the new generations.
Gianmarco Thierry Giuliana
Gianmarco is a research fellow at the University of Turin (UniTo), Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences within the ERC project “FACETS” and a contract lecturer for STUDIUM (UniTo). Specializing on the topic of the relationship between experience and interpretation in game-virtual realities, he has written numerous scientific articles in game studies, semiotics and philosophy journals. You can also find some of his lectures on Youtube.
Therefore, studying video games is crucial not only to better understand the present but also the future. I, an enthusiastic gamer since childhood, starting 1998, am an example of those who turned their passion into a research job. But what does it mean to study video games for a researcher working in philosophy and, more broadly, the humanities? In a nutshell, it means questioning how human beings make sense of video games, both by studying the characteristics and contents of ‘video game texts’ and the behaviour and interpretations of players. At the time when I completed my MA thesis, in 2017, I thought that this would not be very difficult, especially considering that the first studies on this topic were, back then, twenty years old. And yet five years after that thesis, as a post-doc who has continuously worked on this topic, I still find myself facing some of the problems I discovered in that early work! These ‘problems’, however, are precisely what makes the study of video games so interesting both from an academic point of view and in terms of social impact. Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to present my research not only to students and university colleagues but also to game creators, family associations, teachers, psychologists and even doctors. I would thus like to let you know you about my work by mentioning the major themes of humanistic, and especially semiotic, research on digital games.
1) Storytelling & Tenth Art
Today we are used to having video games that tell great stories with interesting characters and make us feel emotions and travel to imaginary worlds. Yet, exactly 50 years ago, video games consisted of two white sticks on a black background bouncing a square: that was Pong. What has happened in the meantime? In 1997 the important scholar Janet Murray published her book ‘Hamlet on the Holodeck'[2]Murray, J. (1998). Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. in which she outlined the idea that by virtue of its technical and cultural specificities, the video game could become a powerful new artistic medium of storytelling. 15 years later, we can certainly say that she was right, to the extent that today a scholar of culture cannot help but analyse the video game content as shaping our imagination. And yet, at the same time, the stories told by video games do not work in the same way as told in films or books. What kind of story is, in fact, one in which the protagonist dies after a few seconds by falling into a ravine because of his spectator? Even today there is much debate and work on how video games are a unique art form that tells stories by hybridising the languages of previous arts such as film, literature, music, and painting. A hybridisation that makes the video game a true platypus (a nickname I designated and of which I am very proud!) and challenges most previous theories and methods of analysis.[3]Aarseth E. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Hence my work to create a new method of analysis capable of highlighting how a video game conveys ideas through art and storytelling.
2) The Game
Going back to Pong, there are still many video games today that do not really tell stories and are very successful: from Tetris to Candy Crush. Then, there are also all those games interested in simulating realities rather than fiction: from realistic sports games to Microsoft Flight Simulator. To these, I also add all those games in which the real ‘story’ is, as in sport, that of the splendid performance of their players: from historical fighting games like Street Fighter to MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) like League of Legends to Fortnite or Among Us. These games without great artistic or narrative pretensions are often the subject of harsh and often unfair criticism. I find that, quite on the contrary, it is precisely on the basis of such games that a part of the academia reflected and still works on that cultural form which has been, so to speak, ‘removed’ from the history of arts and culture: games! Not only has the game, in fact, existed since 2500 B.C. but, as Johan Huizinga writes in his valuable ‘Homo Ludens’, it has always been at the heart of human societies and is a model for thinking and rethinking reality.[4]Huizinga, J. (1985 [1938]). Homo Ludens: Proeve Ener Bepaling Van Het Spelelement Der Cultuur. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff. Original Dutch edition. All of the most fundamental categories of language and human thought are in fact called into playing and games: they construct both a subjectivity, a destiny, a temporality and a world of reference. In the humanities, however, scholars interested in play are still a minority as the dominant theoretical models come from studies on narration. A negative stereotype of play as mere ‘entertainment’ still lingers. Thus, an important task in my work consists in trying to remind the academic community that nothing is more serious than playing!
3) Participatory Culture
Whether it is creating and being a detective engaged in solving a case in the world of Disco Elysium or beating up your opponent as much as possible in the latest Dragon Ball Fighter Z, in all cases, video games require players to participate in a committed way. Although academics such as Umberto Eco demonstrated back in the 1980s that the reader and spectator are never ‘passive’, video games certainly give those who play them greater manipulative power over the meaning of the text than previous media do. This critical and creative manipulation of mass culture by its consumers is a major theme in the humanities and social sciences A leading figure here is Henry Jenkins.[5]Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Trad. it. Jenkins, H. (2010). Culture partecipative e … Continue reading If, however, in the case of films or books this occurs a posteriori, in the case of video games it occurs in fieri (i.e., ‘in the happening’) and sometimes even a posteriori with the possibility of directly modifying the game files. As such, studying video games also means studying the interpretations, rewritings and creations of their players. For a long time, the study of these ‘personal interpretations’ was avoided by disciplines such as game studies. This was epistemologically justified. Nowadays, however, thanks to platforms such as YouTube or Twitch, these interpretations are themselves presented as analysable texts. My work is in this sense also one of research and collection of materials that constitute a history of interpretations of digital worlds.
4) Virtual Reality & Digital Technology
A video game is first and foremost software, which makes video games of great interest for studying the processes and outcomes of interactions between humans and digital technology. Algorithms and artificial intelligence are topics of great importance for contemporary societies and have been part of video games since their birth. It is precisely the ‘algorithmic core’, as the very important video game scholar Ian Bogost puts it, that makes videogames and their narratives very different from all other games.[6]Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moreover, for at least twenty years video games have been ‘virtual realities’ where people get married, manifest, find friends, trade, hold funerals and much more. Studying video games is thus also equivalent to studying the way social reality and human relationships are changing through technology. In my particular case, the aspect of computer technology that I study most closely is the role of digital faces in virtual realities. A trully fascinating topic!
5) Learning
In 2005, the scholar James Paul Gee published an important article in which video games were described as ‘learning machines’.[7]Gee, J. P. (2005). Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines. In E-Learning and Digital Media, 2(1), 5–16. https://doi.org/10.2304/elea.2005.2.1.5. Videogames, in fact, almost always involve a great deal of physical and cognitive effort in order to improve one’s performance so that one can win. This learning process has to do with the development of certain perceptual and motor skills, but it also has a lot to do with the rules and content of the game. Those who play a car racing simulator like Gran Turismo develop not only reflexes, but a very deep knowledge of how cars work.[8]https://www.gamespot.com/articles/meet-the-gran-turismo-player-now-driving-race-cars-for-real/1100-6419397/. Similarly, someone who plays a strategy game like Total War will learn a lot about characters, objects, practices and historical events. Even those who play the fictional game Assassin’s Creed 2 will learn a lot about the city of Florence in the 15th and early 16th century and will still be able to find their way around the city today almost as if they had already been there![9] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v5c42/how_close_were_the_cities_of_assassins_creed_2_to/. In ‘author’ games, this learning even becomes emotional and often involves asking players to make difficult choices that are of great ethical relevance. For teachers there is therefore a great deal of interest in the video game medium from the point of view of both its generic learning potential and its educational potential. Finally, this very strong connection between physical action and what is represented on the screen has prompted an unprecedented collaboration between the humanities, philosophy and cognitive sciences. So, if you were to burst into a researcher’s bedroom and see them dancing wildly in VR in Beat Saber, don’t judge them: they are probably working on bringing together classical theories of thought with theories of embodiment!
There are many other interesting aspects to mention but I end this post on this note. I hope I have given you a little insight into my work as a video game semiotician and, above all, to have convinced you (at least a in part) of the importance of videogame studies.[10]In case you would like to read more: http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/quilting-the-meaning-gameplay-as-catalyst-of-signification-and-why-to-co-op-in-game-studies/. The importance of videogame research is due not only to the theoretical and social impact of videogames but also to their requiring of a tight collaboration between all those who study and produce them.
Featured image: 2013 hack of Donkey Kong, 1981. More info at: https://www.wired.com/2013/03/donkey-kong-pauline-hack/.
Proposed citation: Giuliana, Gianmarco. (2022). Studying Videogames: A 20-Year-Old Challenge for the Humanities. https://khk.rwth-aachen.de/2022/12/24/5266/5266/.
References
| ↑1 | https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46746593. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Murray, J. (1998). Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. |
| ↑3 | Aarseth E. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. |
| ↑4 | Huizinga, J. (1985 [1938]). Homo Ludens: Proeve Ener Bepaling Van Het Spelelement Der Cultuur. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff. Original Dutch edition. |
| ↑5 | Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Trad. it. Jenkins, H. (2010). Culture partecipative e competenze digitali: media education per il 21. Secolo. Milano: Guerini studio). |
| ↑6 | Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. |
| ↑7 | Gee, J. P. (2005). Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines. In E-Learning and Digital Media, 2(1), 5–16. https://doi.org/10.2304/elea.2005.2.1.5. |
| ↑8 | https://www.gamespot.com/articles/meet-the-gran-turismo-player-now-driving-race-cars-for-real/1100-6419397/. |
| ↑9 | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v5c42/how_close_were_the_cities_of_assassins_creed_2_to/. |
| ↑10 | In case you would like to read more: http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/quilting-the-meaning-gameplay-as-catalyst-of-signification-and-why-to-co-op-in-game-studies/. |
Social Change in Ukraine – Obstacles and Opportunities: Conference report
SVITLANA SCHERBAK
On November 16-17, 2022, the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts hosted conference Social Change in Ukraine – Obstacles and Opportunities. The event gathered scholars from Switzerland, Ukraine, Poland, UK, and Hungary. Having carried out social research on Ukrainian society for a long time, I was invited to deliver a talk on The Rise and Fall of Populism in Ukraine.
Here, I provide a report of this conference, with remarks on the individual presentations. It is important to notice that the theme of the conference was not the ongoing war, even though this undoubtedly shapes the conditions for social change in Ukraine. The conference aimed at developing a socio-critical analyses and fostering dialogue between social scientists on the structure of Ukraine’s society, economy and politics. The focus fell on the potential hurdles to overcome in order for the country to integrate in a sustainable way into the community of European states.
Svitlana Shcherbak
Svitlana is a fellow at c:o/re and a researcher with eighteen years of experience working alongside the research team of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Her research focus is on ideological discourse in Post-Sovjet States.
There is consensus among researchers of post-soviet countries that the neo-institutional approach provides the most appropriate explanatory framework for the analysis of these societies. The point is that the institutions in these countries differ from those in the West due to very different informal rules. Therefore, the instrumental logic of economic reform and development policy may conflict with informal institutions, unwritten rules, or corrupt practices. Such mechanisms can hijack good intentions and steer processes in an unwanted direction. Concepts elaborated for the description and explanation of Western democracies fail to grasp the essence of post-communist societies. As such, there is a need to develop explanatory concepts and models for post-soviet contexts. It is not accidental, then, that most participants focused on the description of informal backgrounds for institutions peculiar to post-communist space.
Balint Magyar and Balint Madlovich presented their new book, “A Concise Field Guide to Post-Communist Regimes”, which provides a conceptual framework with an inherent typology of post-communist regimes and a detailed presentation of ideal-type actors and the political, economic, and social phenomena in these regimes. The authors presented how their theoretical model can be applied to Ukraine, through a comparison with Russia and Hungary. They analyzed the Ukrainian context as a “patronal democracy”, both politically and economically.
David Dalton, Vladimir Dubrovsky, Oksana Huss, Mikhail Chaplyga and, the organizer of the conference, Michael Derrer addressed oligarchy and corruption in Ukraine in connection with the task of maintaining and recovering the Ukrainian state during and after the ongoing war. They also explored the role of informal institutions in the Ukraine’s socio-politico-economic system. The discussion focused on a future configuration of the Ukrainian political regime, as well as on the perspectives for anti-corruption and anti-oligarchic post-war reforms.
Kateryna Ivashchenko-Stadnik used sociological data to show the main shifts in Ukrainian society since 2014 and the potential for the further development of this society. Jacek Kurczewski focused on the difference in post-communist transformation of Poland and Ukraine. He considered pre-communist and communist legacies, and the social mechanisms of transformation, offering a glimpse into the sociology of attitudes towards law and justice.
Denys Kiryukhin analyzed the reasons for the very high level of migration from Ukraine, due to which the country has been called “Europe’s Mexico.” He argued that before the war there were no structural prerequisites for such high migration dynamics. Thus, he proposed an analysis of migration in a broad context of modern social processes in Eastern European countries and revised the concept of “forced migration.”
My presentation adressed the rise and fall of populism in Ukraine. Whether Volodymyr Zelensky is a populist was a debated question during the 2019 presidential campaign, as his rhetoric and public image met many of the criteria of populism. I argue that it is important to distinguish between populist and nationalist discourses, illustrating my thesis with the rhetoric of the two main opponents during the 2019 campaign. Zelensky promoted the inclusive concept of “the people,” based on citizenship, multiethnicity and regional heterogeneity, which he contrasted with “the corrupt elites”. On the other hand, former President Petro Poroshenko promoted an exclusive ethno-nationalist, anti-liberal concept of “the people” that requires homogenization based on a common language, culture and faith. My view is that after the outbreak of the war, populist discourse lost its relevance and we are witnessing a nation-building process based entirely on nationalist grounds. The main point of differentiation among the presenters’ approaches was whether they considered only exogenous factors of social change in Ukraine or put the country in a broader context, taking into account the inter-regional and transnational division of labor, as well as Ukraine’s place in global economy. The latter approach tends to suggest rather pessimistic expectations about the future of Ukraine.
Proposed citation: Shcherbak, Svitlana (2022). Social Change in Ukraine – Obstacles and Opportunities: Conference report. https://khk.rwth-aachen.de/2022/12/21/5224/5224
Varieties of science, 1: Patterns of knowledge
Technology“, at UNAM
On December 5th and 6th the first Varieties of Science workshop, titled Patterns of Knowledge, took place at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Varieties of Science is a series of workshops, organized by c:o/re, that aims to explores the pluralities of knowledge production. The workshop Patterns of knowledge brought together scholars from c:o/re, the hosting university in Mexico City as well as the Science, Technology and Society Studies Centre and the Digital Aesthetics Research Center of Aarhus University. We would like to thank Miriam Peña and Francisco Barrón of UNAM for hosting this. The event was live streamed on the YouTube channel of the Seminario Tecnologías Filosóficas, where it can be watched. We will soon post a full report of this event.
Fernando Pasquini’s proposal for an ergonomics of data science practices
On December 14, 2022, c:o/re fellow Fernando Pasquini Santos explained his proposal Towards an ergonomics of data science practices, as part of the 2022/2023 c:o/re lecture series. While he acknowledged that the term is arguably outdated, Pasquini developed a broadly encompassing notion of ergonomics, spanning across modalities and modes of human-computer interaction. In this endeavour, Pasquini started by asking “how does it feel to work with data?” Tackling the question, he distinguished between challenges and directions in technology usability assessments.
In what was a rich and broadly encompassing study, Pasquini found particular inspiration in Coeckelbergh (2019), who notices a tradition in philosophy of technology that equates skilful acting with having a good life.
In this light, Pasquini proposed a “critical mediality” perspective in data science, that covers considerations from abstraction in data work to mathematical constructivism, embodiment and to blackboxing.
References
Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2019. Technology as Skill and Actvity:Revisitng the Problem of Alienation. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 16(3): 208–230.
A look back: Art and Science: Openness Creates Something New
How can we develop holistic solutions in an increasingly complex world? This question was debated on April 30, 2022 at the panel discussion “Towards Eco-social Renewal: blueprints for collaboration between science and the arts” at the Amerikahaus in Munich.
c:o/re director Stefan Böschen and Vera Meyer, acatech member and Professor of Applied and Molecular Microbiology at TU Berlin, discussed how art and science can intertwine and what potential they hold.
An article about the debate can be found on acatech’s website.
Call for Contributions
For the international conference Nowhere(to)land? What Science Studies Contribute to Science Communication, that will take place in Bonn in June 14th to 16th, 2023, the Rhine Ruhr Center for Science Communication Research (RRC) and c:o/re are inviting researchers to submit proposals for contributions on the topic of STS and SCS. Deadline is January 15th, 2023.
