[Interpretationandmethods] cfp 4s

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

I'm putting together a panel together on interpretative policy  
analysis centering on information/internet policies for 4s if anyone  
is interested.  However, the general call is below:

Ways of Knowing
http://www.4sonline.org/meeting.htm
This year the Call for Papers is earlier than usual. Abstracts for  
sessions or papers will be due on February 1, 2007.

Submit session proposals.

Submit abstracts.

The theme for the conference is ways of knowing. By this we mean  
several things: implicitly, that there are many ways of knowing any  
particular object, process, or event; that some of these ways of  
knowing have historically been more valued than others; and that  
processes of adjudicating ways of knowing have usually been neither  
nice nor neutral. So we are interested in processes of valuation  
(from the language of debates to acts of censorship) that result in  
one way of knowing as “the right one” or “the natural one.” We are  
interested in how people, groups, or cultures hold more than one way  
of knowing, and whether this is stable, durable, or problematic. When  
different ways of knowing are triangulated, how is this actually done  
in practice? What is lost and what is gained in the triangulation  
process?

We are interested in how certain ways of knowing are deemed to be  
“non-scientific,” (for example, magic, divination, astrology, etc).  
Several other interesting areas spring from this mixture of  
questions: historically, what is kept, or what is ignored, in studies  
of knowledges and paradigm shifts? (Including here questions of  
collective memory and collective forgetting.) How do new regimes of  
record keeping, such as the electronic patient record or the full  
text data base, affect what is remembered and what is forgotten?  
(This may be true across a large numbers of fields.) All sorts of  
questions about translation arise in discussing these issues – Who  
chooses what is to be translated? Who does the translation? Does the  
quality of the translation impact the nature of knowledge, and if so,  
how? In Howard Becker's famous concept, "hierarchy of credibility,"  
he claims that, for a well-socialized member of a hierarchical  
organization or institution, information coming from "the top" is de  
facto more credible than that coming from "the bottom." So, a bank  
president, regardless of what she says, is more credible than a  
temporary janitor. However, within science studies, and following  
many sorts of principles of symmetry, we do not take members'  
hierarchies for granted, especially as questions of voice and  
position are precisely the matters under analysis.

Given that our conference will be in Quebec, one of the sites where  
language (as a marker) of difference was bitterly disputed, we must  
examine the idea that language carries powerful politics. In some  
cases, as with Aboriginal children, the attempt to suppress a  
language is linked with the destruction of culture and even with  
genocide. Finally, there are different ways of knowing that are  
formed by gestures, by ways of pronouncing words, or by how names are  
heard and understood. Sometimes ways of knowing are different with  
respect to quantitative vs. qualitative; visual vs. textual, or  
statistical vs. enumerative. These only suggest the ways knowledges  
may frame findings, thus mirroring a final finding.

A final word about themes: these are posed in order to help frame  
related research. As always, themes are meant to suggest and  
encourage, not provide an iron cage. So, the Program Committee  
welcomes work that is outside the sketches drawn here; submissions  
are welcome from any of the variety of areas normally addressed by 4S  
(or even those not normally addressed, but which need to be).

Program Practices
Given the growing size of the 4S conferences and the desire to be as  
inclusive as possible, the program committee will need to make full  
use of the available time slots. Therefore, individuals may be listed  
for a paper presentation and one other activity (such as session  
chair or discussant but not a second paper) for a maximum of two  
appearances.

Session proposals should be based on the assumption of two-hour time  
slots with fifteen minutes per presentation. A typical session may  
have six papers, one discussant, and a fifteen-minute open discussion  
slot. Proposals for double and triple sessions on a single topic may  
receive a request to consolidate the topic into one panel or to break  
the multiple sessions into different topics. The program committee  
may need to assign additional papers to sessions in order to  
accommodate the number of submissions and reduce the rejection rate.



jeremy hunsinger
Assistant Professor
Pratt Institute
www.cddc.vt.edu
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