The 19th annual Aleksanteri conference explores interactions between technologies, societies, and cultures across Eurasia. We will bring together leading experts in Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian studies, as well as researchers from digital humanities to examine how said interactions are reconfigured in the context of past and future technological change.
What impact does technology have on societies and cultures across Eurasia and vice versa? Which inventions historically provoked major disruptions in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia, and how did these societies then respond? What are the major challenges posed by the rapid spread of digital technologies and media? How will emerging technologies – such as Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, or the Internet of Things – change politics, social interactions, egalitarian processes, and forms of cultural production in the future?
Aleksanteri Conference 2019 is an invitation to discuss how technologies are constructed, conditioned, adopted, maintained, abolished, and repaired across the Eurasian space. We welcome critical approaches, interdisciplinary, and comparative perspectives to explore technologies and their interaction with important questions of power, knowledge, sustainability, privacy, securitization, and inequality. Digital technology has resulted in the emergence of a wealth of new (big) data sources, such as digital archives, social media, and various kinds of digital media outlets. These advancements allow us to further investigate Eurasian societies, histories, and cultures with the help of novel digital tools. Hence, this year we introduce a dedicated digital humanities stream aimed at addressing the methodological, linguistic, legal, and ethical challenges of working with digitized research materials and big data from Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia.
The conference committee invites papers in the following thematic streams:
Technology and Politics
Including #digital_democracy, #technopolitics, #elections_tinkering, #post-truth, #civic_tech
Technology and Economics
Including #innovation, #network_industries, #data_economy, #platform_economy
Technology and Culture
Including #new_media, #algorithmic_culture, #digital_art, #moral_machines, #convergence_culture
Technology and Society
Including #mediatization, #infrastructure, #digital_divide, #datafication
Digital Humanities
Including #DHareastudies, #big_data, #digital_archives, #researchethics, #coding_skills
On behalf of the Aleksanteri Conference Organising Committee, we have great pleasure in inviting you to submit your proposal to any of the five themes. We kindly ask you to do so in accordance with the instructions provided in the electronic submission form. All abstracts will be reviewed by scientific experts for rating of abstract quality and presentation content.