EASST Congress. Call for abstracts!

As we have posted a couple of weeks ago, next summer will take place in Barcelona the  big congress about STS. POBICS will be convinor in one of the tracks, and we are looking for researchers that want to participate. The track is pleasant to receive all kind of material, so this is not a normal congress. The track' name is: " Biorisk Intelligence otherwise: Scenarios, Visual Knowledge and new Mechanisms of Surveillance". Here the whole info.:

CfP 4S/EASST 2016 Conference in Barcelona 2016

Track Title: Biorisk Intelligence otherwise: Scenarios, Visual Knowledge and new Mechanisms of Surveillance 

The outbreaks of Ebola and Avian Flu have shown that epidemics as socio-material phenomena have undergone crucial changes. Simultaneously the way we gain, use and reinvest knowledge about such epidemics has changed. Within this context especially the transformations of technologies of epidemiology and preventive medicine are mentionable. Furthermore, the typical statistics-based risk analysis has become replaced by different practices and discourses that we can trace in three dimensions: 

a) First, the relation between knowledge production and fictional scenarios has become redefined. Risk analysis appears rather as a product than as a starting point for the development of knowledge and strategies with respect to epidemics.

b) Second, there is massive production of images that relate different actors on different levels and link different scales of epidemics. 

c) Third, new technologies such as smartphone apps or computer software facilitate the registering of cases of contagion in real-time and allow to track in a visual format the different fluxes of illnesses. 

Interrelated, new practices of biosurveillance, for instance, syndromic surveillance, have become fashionable in the biomedical world. Such new forms of surveillance do not only allow to register symptoms of a disease or to track the movement of sick population or individuals; instead, it is now possible to collect information about signals of anormality that are assembled in big syndromes and not in real diseases. 

These changes might point at a deeper transformation of power and the rise of a new intelligence related with a new form of governing society through biorisk and future threats that needs to be discussed. 

We invite people (scholars, writers, artists, designers, programmers, developers, etc.) from all kinds of disciplines and disciplinary backgrounds to apply for the presentation of their relevant papers, videos, animations, posters, artworks in which they discuss, critically question or engage with this epistemic field that has been opened up by these latest transformations, if possible by taking into account an STS perspective

Looking forward to your proposals. Contact and abstracts to. portraitsbioscontemporary@gmail.com

More info at the official Congress webpage: http://www.sts2016bcn.org/

Photo Credit: darwin Bell