Aalborg Universitet When Doors are Removed for Our Own Safety A Historical Case Study of the ‘Failed’ "Question Mark" Telephone Booth Abildgaard, Mette Simonsen Publication date: 2017 Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication from Aalborg University Citation for published version (APA): Abildgaard, M. S. (2017). When Doors are Removed for Our Own Safety: A Historical Case Study of the ‘Failed’ "Question Mark" Telephone Booth. 123. Abstract from 4S: STS (In)Sensibilities , Boston, Massachusetts, United States. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. ? Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. ? You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain ? You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Downloaded from vbn.aau.dk on: October 01, 2021 4S 2017 STS (In)Sensibilities August 30-September 2 Sheraton Hotel Boston, Massachussetts, U.S. Join the discussion Twitter: Use the hashtag #4S2017 when tweeting from the meeting. We will be monitoring the feed and retweeting. Facebook: mention @4SPage in your post. We'll share selected posts. 4S 2017 President’s Welcome to 4S 2017 The cover image of the program that you hold in your hands is a ‘heat map’ depicting the most photographed locations in Boston. Created by data artist and software developer Eric Fischer using the rendering tool Mapbox, the image is derived from geo‐tagged photos uploaded to the photo‐sharing website Flickr over a ten‐year period. It translates those data as a diagram, which we’re invited to read as evidence for those locations in the city of Boston that have been judged the most photogenic. Aesthetically pleasing and conceptually suggestive, this diagram stands as an index of our conference theme, STS (In)sensibilities. It invites us to consider how STS sensibilities can help us to read data‐ based renderings critically, not only for the sociotechnical infrastructures that enable them and the signs of sociomaterial life that they document, but also for that which escapes data capture by either the methods of data sciences, or our own. The lead‐up to our gathering here in Boston for the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science has been fraught with troubling developments across a world that seems ever more threatened, and the United States is arguably among the greatest contributors to that precarity. In the face of these troubles, 4S has joined with sister societies internationally to reaffirm the importance of evidence‐based knowledge‐making practices in the humanities, social and technosciences, and of the freedom of scholars and activists to speak, travel, and assemble. Through the 4S Ad Hoc Committee in Support of non‐US Travelers, headed by our incoming President Kim Fortun, we’ve worked to assemble resources to mitigate the reprehensible policies of President No. 45 with respect to US border crossings. I hope that none of you who’ve had to make that crossing have suffered harassment, and want to acknowledge those who haven’t made it due either to questions of conscience or difficulties surrounding visas or other concerns regarding their smooth passage into the US. In response to a suggestion from Maurizio Meloni, Becky Mansfield, and Martine Lappe, we have moved towards pluralizing languages at this year’s conference – thanks to the volunteer translators who enabled us to extend this invitation in 12 languages! While framed in this instance by the particular concerns that many of us have about the outcomes of the US Presidential election and the UK referendum on Brexit, this is an initiative with relevance beyond those immediate events. It is a small step towards recognizing what it means to be an international association of scholars, with the aim of displacing hegemonic languages and more equally distributing the hard work of communicating within difference. Beginning Wednesday morning and continuing throughout the day on Saturday, this year’s conference offers a rich and varied program in what is the largest of our gatherings to date. Our opening plenary addresses the question of how we might Interrogate “the Threat,” bringing STS sensibilities to bear in critical analysis of dominant framings of matters of concern, and generative reframings that can help us to find alternate spaces 1 4S 2017 for thought and action. Those spaces comprise the focus of our second plenary on Friday evening, exploring a range of initiatives and forms that an Engaged STS has taken, and might yet take. This opportunity to come together to regenerate our intellectual energy and to connect with colleagues and friends is due to the extraordinary efforts of the core group of committed STS scholars who form this year’s Program Committee. There are no words that can fully express our gratitude to Heather Paxson in particular. With only a gentle arm‐twisting Heather agreed to take on the role of Program Chair, bringing her exemplary mix of creative direction and conscientious attention to the seemingly endless tapestry of interconnected detail that comprises a conference. Working with Heather have been our indomitable Program Officer/Chief Negotiator Wes Shrum and 4S Administrator/Web Maestro Steve Coffee, Volunteer Coordinator Rick Duque, Travel Grant administrator and 4S Treasurer Paige Miller, Mentoring Program coordinator Matthew Harsh, and Exhibits and Prizes coordinator Wenda Bauchspies, along with all of the members of the Program Committee (thanked in more detail in Heather’s message to follow). But most importantly none of this could have happened without all of you – this is your conference, and I look forward to joining you in the four full days ahead of us. Lucy Suchman, 4S President 2 4S 2017 From the Program Chair Welcome to Boston for the 42nd meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science! Since January 1, the submission deadline for open session proposals, the task of piecing together this admittedly jam‐packed program has been immense — and immensely collaborative and collective. The core of any academic conference is its line‐up of paper presentations. This year, organizers who proposed 119 open panels reviewed and ranked 1,143 individually submitted papers, which eventually coalesced into nearly 200 sessions. I’m grateful to those organizers (named at the end of this program) for their creative and generative ideas, judicious reviewing, and patience as we all sorted things out. Meanwhile, the Boston‐based Program Committee (named below) accepted 82 closed session proposals and reviewed additional paper abstracts, gathering accepted papers into topically coherent sessions. Sara Wylie chaired a committee to review proposals and prepare for Thursday’s Making and Doing session. My profuse thanks to everyone who helped craft the more than 300 panel sessions and workshops — spanning the breadth of STS scholarship — to be held over our four days together. Argentinian anthropologist and science studies scholar Hebe Vessuri will deliver the 2017 Bernal Lecture, “Of Geographies, Imagined Kinship, Denials, and Utopias: Science and Scientists in the ‘Rest of the Rest of the World,’” on Thursday afternoon. The Awards Plenary that follows will additionally recognize Judy Wajcman, winner of this year’s Fleck Prize, and Adia Benton, winner of the Carson Prize, along with Kellie Owens for the Mullins Award, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff for the Edge Prize, the Editors of the four Handbooks of Science and Technology Studies for the Infrastructure Award, and Andrew Webster for the Mentoring Award. Author Meets Critics panels discussing the Fleck and Carson prizes will be held earlier in the day. Thanks go to Kim Fortun, Abby Kinchy and Daniel Breslau, prize committee chairs for the Bernal, Fleck, and Carson prizes respectively, for organizing these sessions. Three awards for excellence in Making and Doing will be presented at the close of Friday's plenary. Wednesday’s Presidential Plenary, “Interrogating ‘The Threat,’” will be joined on Friday by a committee‐organized Plenary, moderated by incoming President Kim Fortun, addressing the challenges and possibilities of an Engaged STS. Program Committee members have in addition convened two open‐format discussion sessions: on Reproductive Justice and Injustice (chaired by Banu Subramaniam on Friday) and on Data Ethics (chaired by Mary Gray on Saturday). We hope these interactive sessions will spark questions, conversations, and collaborations that will carry forward to future meetings and actions. In a similar vein, this year we’re elaborating the informal gatherings that have cropped up at previous meetings by introducing a series of Lunchtime Workshops, some staged as formal panel discussions, others as hands‐on workshops led by experts, and still others as 3 4S 2017 venues for gathering around a topic of shared interest. Check them out! Two workshops are paired with guided tours: a visit to an exhibit at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, and an urban foraging walk. Many thanks to the volunteer organizers of these interactive events! My deepest gratitude is to those with whom I’ve had the real pleasure to work on a daily basis these past months: Steve Coffee, the 4S Administrator who manages the website, tracks registration, produced this program, and does much more, all with unflagging good humor; and Wes Shrum, our stalwart Program Officer who negotiates with hotels and sets in place the intricate infrastructure to enable our meetings, and is irreplaceable.