Many of our activities take place in the RUSTlab. For information please see: https://rustlab.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/

EASST-4S Conference 2024: Making and Doing Transformations

16^th – 19^th July 2024, Amsterdam
The CUPAK team will join the EASST-4S conference “Making and Doing Transformations” in Amsterdam and contribute to a diverse set of panels. Leman Çelik, Mace Ojala and Fabian Pittroff will chair the panel “Transforming data practices in the humanities: virtual research environments revisited”, which focuses on virtual research environments as explicit or implicit sociotechnical frameworks and imaginaries that structure the transformation of data within the humanities, where postdigital practices intersect with fictional research objects. Mace Ojala will also chair the “Hacker Cultures” Podcast Panel together with Paula Bialski (University of St. Gallen) and Andreas Bischof (TU Chemnitz). The format of this panel will be a dialectical conversation with the speakers which will be recorded and published as a podcast.
Estrid Sørensen and Stefan Laser will be convenors of the panel “Planetary Data Infrastructures” together with Nancy Mauro-Flude (RMIT) and Steven Jackson (Cornell University). With the concept “planetary data infrastructures”, the panel explores expanded engagements with networked infrastructures, both concrete and speculative, that help foster more response-able, aesthetic, cooperative, and sustainable planetary relations. Estrid Sørensen will contribute a talk on „Cuddling with servers: how to experience the planetary relations of data processing?“ to this panel, which discusses the developing of a virtual reality application to generate bodily experiences of servers. Stefan Laser will also give a contribution on “Writing predictions to perform different futures: reflections from a book collective” in the “Futures work” panel. It explores the critical and liberatory potential of predictions and discusses diverse forms of performing predictions based on an STS book project.

Liminal Excavations

24th June 2024
Drawing on their work within the CRC subproject Virtual Infrastructures, Sandra Abels, Leman Çelik, Stefan Laser, Estrid Sørensen and Lynn Werner have published a contribution to the ICT4S Zine "Liminal Excavations". The zine explores alternative visions, ideas and critiques on the topic of sustainability and ICT. The contribution is titled "A Good Enough Data Centre?" and takes a look at different perspectives on data centres, building on interview material with scientists, procurement and data centre operators.
More information and the full zine can be found here.

RUSTlab Opening Celebration

13th June 2024, 16 hrs., MB 4/165 at Ruhr University Bochum
Since 2019 the RUSTlab - Ruhr University Science & Technology Studies Lab - has been a vibrant place for more-than-academic exchanges about the social and cultural inscriptions and agencies of knowledge and technologies in times of uncertain futures. The RUSTlab has become a space for experimenting with collective dreams for how knowledge practices and (mostly digital) technologies can be infrastructured in more caring and responseable ways. Beyond the international RUSTlab Lectures, we have organised data walks, DIY data workspaces, book launches and more: rustlab.rub.de
But we have never officially opened, nor celebrated the lab. Recently, the RUSTlab moved to wonderful new locations in the MB building on the RUB campus, which we take as an occasion to officially open the lab with a celebration on Thursday 13 June 2024 16 hrs in MB 4/165 @RUB Campus. If you want to join, we would appreciate a notification on rustlab@rub.de by 8 June.

Machine Listening and Human Listening

5th June 2024, 15 hrs., Quartiershalle, Stühmeyerstraße 33, Bochum
The lecture and talk "Machine Listening and Human Listening" with Mace Ojala and Marja Athi is dedicated to a reality in which technology is inexorably taking over more and more functions and tasks. The speakers want to compare the characteristics and potential of machine listening with the traditional capabilities of human listening. Are we aware of the difference between data-driven analysis and contextual understanding, between objective and subjective listening? How can we combine the two in a critical, collaborative and emancipatory way? Could listening help to resist, reject and subvert the narrow roles that our alienating consumer culture imposes on us, and instead re-tune our more-than-human ears to open-ended, democratic, poetic and careful relationships within the entangled more-than-human world on which we depend? The event is part of the festival Blaues Rauschen and will take place on 5 June 2024 at 3 pm in the Quartiershalle, Stühmeyerstrasse 33, Bochum.

Please Go Away… We’re Reading. A Practice Approach to a Taken-for-Granted Academic Craft

31st May 2024
An article on the academic craft of reading, written collectively by the RUSTlab, has been published in On_Culture's Issue 16 "Ways of Reading". Reading is not only a mental decoding activity but also a social, material, bodily, and affective practice. It is learned; changes over time; varies across situations; and is crucial for academic institutions. Nonetheless, academics practice reading largely individually. Yet, reading remains an undervalued part of how professional research (work) is done. In this paper, the author collective takes a practice-oriented approach: How is reading enacted as a seemingly self-evident academic technique? The paper argues that reading is a craft that requires care and companionship, and that it matters who gets to read, when and where reading is done, and what the legitimate excuses for not reading are. The author collective polemicizes that academics would do well to bring reading practices from the individualized margins to the heart of collective exchange.
The full article can be read here.

Book Review: Müll. Eine schmutzige Geschichte der Menschheit

14th May 2024
In a book review for Soziopolis, Stefan Laser discusses Roman Köster's monography "Müll. Eine schmutzige Geschichte der Menschheit" (2023). He argues that the strength of the book is Köster's foresight and his critical interventions in the public discourse surrounding the “waste problem”. Stefan Laser also comments on the discussion of global conditions, as some of Köster's central concepts imply fundamental assumptions and, on closer examination, have far-reaching implications.
The full German review can be read here.

Book Launch: "Die private und die verteilte Person: Studien zu Personalisierung und Privatheit in Zeiten der Digitalisierung"

24th April 2024, 16 hrs., MB 4/165 at Ruhr University Bochum
RUSTLab cordially invites you to the launch of Fabian Pittroff's book "Die private und die verteilte Person: Studien zu Personalisierung und Privatheit in Zeiten der Digitalisierung". The monograph was published this year by transcript.
The “person” is not a synonym for ‘human’, but a social mode of existence for human and non-human beings. While the person of modernity is bound to the private sphere, it is being repositioned with digitalization. Fabian Pittroff analyses this development in a series of studies dedicated to comprehensive aspects: the social theory of the person, the history of the private sphere, the crisis of democratic institutions, the avant-garde post-privacy movement, the digitalization of friendship, the production of selfies and the predictions of the data economy. Two modes of personalization are emerging: While the private person is oriented towards a center, the distributed person exists decentrally.

RUSTlab Lectures Summer Term 2024

Summer Term 2024, MB 4/165 at Ruhr-University Bochum and Zoom
The programme for the 11^th round of the RUSTlab Lecture series is now available. The lectures will take place on site in MB 4/165 and online via Zoom. This semester's guiding theme is "Replacement" and speakers include Ronja Trischler (TU Dortmund), Klaus Høyer (University of Copenhagen), Robert Queckenberg (Ruhr-University Bochum) and Leman Çelik (Ruhr-University Bochum). Please find more information here. Everyone is most welcome!

Inaugural Conference of stsing: Leakage

19th – 22nd March 2024, TU Dresden
The CUPAK team travels collectively to the inaugural conference of ststing Leakage at the TU Dresden to present their current research.
In their presentation „On Becoming an Infrastructure: Personas of Participation and Intervention“, Mace Ojala and Fabian Pittroff will draw on their ongoing projects within the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Virtual Lifeworlds to investigate practices of data handling and their infrastructures. Their presentation will also review how participatory and interventionist research can benefit from the deployment of practical personas—virtual characters that STS ethnographers and infrastructure caretakers can enact to become effective and creative agents of a common research environment.
Estrid Sørensen, Leman Celik and Stefan Laser will chair a panel on „Planetary Data“, focusing on the question of how to live well with data on a damaged planet. Drawing on their work within the CRC subproject Virtual Infrastructures, they will also give a presentation on „Planetary Knowledges: How Data Infrastructures Link Science with the Planet“ together with Sandra Abels and Lynn Werner. The presentation will discuss current STS literature and how it engages with (1) extractive and other planetary relations including their local and geopolitical effects, (2) scientific data infrastructures, and the care for planetary matter in operation and maintenance, and with (3) scientific data practices and their dependencies on data infrastructures.

Chip Rush? Semiconductors in Vietnam as a Public Controversy

5th March 2024, Mipec Tower Hanoi
As a part of the CRC subproject Virtual Lifeworlds Stefan Laser will organise a workshop on semiconductors in Vietnam as a public controversy together with the local architectural office and research team Hanoi Ad Hoc.
Semiconductors are coming to Vietnam. But not without uncertainties and controversies. What are the regulations, prominent voices, allies, and opponents shaping the "chip rush"? What are the affected communities and their interpretations of the matter? Together with Hanoi Ad Hoc, Stefan Laser investigated company data, legal developments and the public discourse in order to find an approach to the complex situation. The workshop will include a presentation of preliminary findings, reports from stakeholders, and a group discussion.
More information can be found on the website of the CRC.

Quo Vadis kulturwissenschaftliche Digital Humanities?

28th February 2024, University of Passau
As part of the DHd conference "Quo Vadis Digital Humanities?" at the University of Passau, Estrid Sørensen will present a talk on cultural studies perspectives in the German-speaking digital humanities together with Ina Dietzsch, Lina Franken, Sabine Imeri, Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda and Libuše Hannah Vepřek. 
Even ten years after the first DHd conference, cultural studies and, in particular, empirical cultural studies perspectives are still an exception in the German-speaking digital humanities (DH). The panel will discuss how cultural studies DH is organised and which directions can be taken in the future.  Specific methodological developments will be presented and combined with conceptual-theoretical considerations. The panel will examine what relevant areas of DH are or can be in the empirical cultural studies disciplines and what role DH currently plays in cultural studies. Linked to this is the question of how this could change in the near future, which steps are expedient for this and what is currently preventing cultural studies from being more closely integrated into DH. Closely related to this is the identification of new perspectives that bring empirical cultural studies research into the DH and develop it further. The aim is to identify methodological potential as well as theoretical-conceptual perspectives that further differentiate cultural studies DH.
More information on the talk and the conference paper can be found here.

Data Journey in Scientific Practices

22nd-23rd February 2024, Goethe University Frankfurt
Leman Çelik will present her research on "Data Journey in Scientific Practices" at the workshop "Data Stops Data Flows: Exploring Methods for Researching (with) Data", organized by the project group "Tracing Data Politics" at Goethe University Frankfurt on 22-23 February. You can find more information about the workshop here.

Authors' workshop: Knowledge production, data infrastructures and planetary matter

23rd - 24th November 2023, Collaboration Space GB 8/129 at the Ruhr-University Bochum
How does scientific knowledge production through its engagement with data and data infrastructures come to have planetary effects? How does planetary matter through its transformation into data and data infrastructures contribute to shaping particular (new) modes of knowledge production? This is a follow-up workshop where we discuss contributions to a special issue in preparation.
Please find the poster for this workshop here.

Everyday scientific data practices and their planetary matter

4th October 2023, 15:15 hrs., Dietrich-Keuning-Haus, Dortmund
The environmental impacts of "Big Tech" and "Clouds" are well documented in the literature, but narratives about the entanglement of scientific data practices and the ecological environment through data infrastructures are lacking. Leman Celik and Estrid Sørensen have conducted interviews with scientists in data-intensive research fields that show an increased expansion of scientific data infrastructures. They present the results at this year's conference of the German Society for Empirical Cultural Studies (DGEKW) and focus on the few but important moments of everyday scientific data practices that relate data infrastructures to energy consumption and hardware production.

RUSTlab Lectures Winter Term 2023/24

Winter term 2023/24, Ruhr-University Bochum and via Zoom
The programme for the 10^th round of the RUSTlab Lecture series is now available. The lectures will take place on site and online. The guiding theme this semester is "Best Futures" and speakers include Nancy Mauro-Flude (RMIT University, Australia), Stefan Laser (Ruhr-University Bochum), Hannes Krämer and Dominik Gerst (University of Duisburg-Essen), René Tuma (TU Berlin) and Femke Snelting (The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest). Please find more information here. Everyone is most welcome!