Our division is planning one paper session and one workshop session, described below.

Deadline for abstracts (300 words): September 1, 2009 (submission guidelines below).

“Fallen into the Wrong Hands”: Misuses and Misreadings of Technology The obsession with technological progress and regulation, from anti-trust suits against cell phone companies to digital television, has led to a wide variety both pointed and accidental readings of technology against the grain. This panel will discuss these projects from a wide variety of historical, practical, and theoretical frameworks. Possible topics include, but are certainly not limited to:

Technology and activism Visual and performance practices Economic, cultural, political appropriations of technology Hacker and gaming culture Theoretical revisionism (feminist, psychoanalytic, racial, post-colonial, anthropological, etc.) Discourse of the public and private spheres Surveillance and security practices Terrorism and technology Identity politics Posthuman analysis The military-industrial complex and its opponents Pop cultural conceptions and portrayals of technology

Workshop: Technology/Historiography Discourse on technology in the cultural imagination tends to focus on teleological idealizations such as progress and the shock or benefit or wonder of the “new.” SCHOTT. This working group is seeking papers that reframe, contextualize, and historicize technologies with historiographic analysis. Possible topics include, but are certainly not limited to:

Remediation Historical tropes and precedents for contemporary technologies The construction of Nature Utopian/dystpian worlds Artistic influences upon technology Technology and linguistics Technology and the body The archive and the digital Social relations through technology Globalization and neo-imperialism Popular entertainment