Donnerstag, 08. Mai 2025, 17:00 - 18:30 iCal

Vienna STS Talks

Vienna STS Talks x IPW Talks by Kean Birch

Do Artefacts Have Political Economy?

'Seminar room STS', C0602
Universitätsstraße 7 / II / 6th floor, 1010 Wien

Antrittsvorlesung, Public Lecture, Vortrag

Do Artefacts Have Political Economy?

Kean Birch, York University

Abstract

Harking back to Langdon Winner’s now classic article, ‘Do artifacts have politics?’, my aim in this paper is to ask a very similar question – namely, do artefacts have political economy? Following Winner and with the same objective in mind, I analyse artefacts that: (1) have been designed in ways that embed particular political economies; or (2) are compatible with particular political economies. I illustrate the former using Winner’s own example of Robert Moses and the design of bridges in New York City. For the latter, I illustrate a strong and weak version of the compatibility claim with the strong version characterized by the adoption of both a particular technology and political economy, while the weak version is characterized by the adaptation of the social context to a particular technology and political economy. I use the example of advertising technology (‘adtech’) and generative artificial intelligence respectively to illustrate these two versions. I frame this discussion within an approach I define as constructivist political economy sitting at the interface of science and technology studies (STS) and political economy, which can provide a useful analytical tool to analyse and address the vagaries of contemporary technoscientific capitalism.

Biography

Kean Birch is a Professor at the Department of Science, Technology & Society at York University, Toronto, and the Director of the Institute for Technoscience & Society. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and the Munich Center for Technology & Society, Technical University Munich, Germany. His research focus is on assetization and rentiership in the context of techno-economic change and the digital economy.

Veranstalter

Department of Science and Technology Studies & Department of Political Science

Kontakt

Katrin Hackl
Institut für Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung
01427749607
katrin.hackl@univie.ac.at

Erstellt am Mittwoch, 23. April 2025, 09:29
Letzte Änderung am Dienstag, 13. Mai 2025, 14:30