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The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
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Call for papers: Practicing Sovereignty conference
The Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society is organizing its 2022 annual conference on the subject of “Practicing Sovereignty. Interventions for open digital futures” and invites interested scholars and artists to submit papers and abstracts for presentations and workshops. The conference will take place at the venue „Alte Münze“ in Berlin on Thursday, 9 June and Friday, 10 June 2022.
The international conference and exhibition will investigate new opportunities for digital participation and policymaking and discuss alternative technological and social practices from various fields and disciplines. We frame digital sovereignty as a right to be claimed and a process constantly in the making, as a condition of the ability to critically partake in the digital transformation.
The conference will provide a transdisciplinary platform for scholars, artists, activists, and human rights advocates who develop transformative practices spaces to foster digital involvement. Grassroots initiatives, community projects, and participatory practices in design, art and activism appear as collective counter strategies and bottom-up interventions that challenge the normalization of inequalities and insecurities and push back against threats to an open society. They lay the groundwork for new forms of agency, paving novel ways of practicing sovereignty – both in the sense of collective activities as well as in terms of public education and experimentation.
To investigate the notion of digital sovereignty while respecting the plurality of its notion and approaches, the conference and exhibition offer four different tracks with shifting focuses:
- Digital sovereignty: terms, concepts, limitations
- Datafication and democracy
- Digital literacies and inequalities
- Digital sovereignty and scientific autonomy
Important Dates
- Deadline for submission: 15 February 2022
- Notification for acceptance: 15 March 2022
- Conference: 9 & 10 June 2022
For more information:
https://www.weizenbaum-conference.de/call-for-papers-3/