The conference
"Techniques of the Corporation" will take place on May 4-6, 2017, at the University of Toronto, hosted by the university's Technoscience Research Unit.
The call for papers explains:
Over the last 150 years, corporations, like universities and laboratories, have generated an abundance of knowledge-making techniques. . . . As dominant forms of the last century, corporations are assembled with instruments, infrastructures, and interventions that arrange and rearrange the dynamics of capitalism. These techniques of the corporation have filtered into our daily lives, influencing everyday understandings of self, inequality, environment, and society. . . . This conference aims to foster a timely conversation between Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches and the recent histories of capitalism. . . . The conference takes as its starting place North American corporations with the understanding that corporations are multinational forms with complex transnational histories. Building from the recent history of capitalism, we attend to the entangled genealogies of corporations with slavery, exploitation, environmental destruction, colonialism, and inequality. . . . [the] event will be an intimate multi-day conversation between established and emerging scholars in the fields of STS, history of science, and the history of capitalism.
"Techniques of the Corporation" will be headlined by keynote speaker Joseph Dumit, and features invited talks by Dan Bouk, Elspeth Brown, Deborah Cowen, Orit Halpern, Louis Hyman, Michelle Murphy, Martha Poon, and Elise Thorburn. Both emerging and established scholars in diverse fields (including business history; labour history; anthropology; geography; economic sociology; media studies; critical race studies; architecture studies; feminist and sexuality studies; environmental studies; and cultural studies) to explore the techniques, epistemologies, and imaginaries of corporations. For a more extended description of the conference goals, please see the
full call for papers.
In addition to traditional papers, the conference encourages creative methods to query corporate forms, including art installations, videos, interactive multimedia projects, and role-playing games. Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a CV should be submitted to the conference organizers (Justin Douglas, Bretton Fosbrook, Kira Lussier, and Michelle Murphy) at
corporatetechniques@gmail.com by
January 13, 2017.