Aaron Shapiro, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Jessa Lingel, University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication; Diogo Pereira Henriques, Aarhus University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
This panel explores the politics and poetics of templates. Like formats, protocols, and standards, templates can be found in nearly all domains of knowledge and practice, imposing uniformity, reducing complexity, and allowing for the proliferation of communicative and material forms. Templates are crucial to organization and work across a range of professions, including architecture, publishing, genetic engineering, and nursing. Accordingly, templates vary in degree of elaboration, institutionalization, visibility, and consequence. They surface in struggles over legitimacy, inclusion, and authenticity, if only to recede again into the technological unconscious. Templates establish norms of consistency and deviation, configuring our classifications and evaluations, our sense of sameness and difference, self and other.
This panel solicits proposals in English, Spanish or Portuguese that grapple with templates across contexts and from a range of interpretive perspectives. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Templates as organizational, managerial, or bureaucratic technologies
The relationship between templates and other aesthetic classifications (e.g., genre or style) in film, architecture, music, literature, visual arts, etc.
“Template” as rhetorical device
Templates as representations of inequality
The use of templates in projects of carcerality and/or state violence
The role of templates in the history of computing
Templates in urban governance and planning
Templates as ludic and improvisational forms
Templates in finance, economics, or marketing
Templates in academic knowledge production, scientific discovery, or publishing
Across these different topics, we are particularly interested in perspectives and analysis that draw from the Global South and/or BIPOC knowledge practices.
