CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A SPECIAL ISSUE OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, & HUMAN VALUES
THEME: “INTER-ASIAN TECHNO-CAPITALISMS: MODELS, NETWORKS AND FUTURES”
GUEST EDITORS: CANAY ÖZDEN-SCHILLING AND EMILY CHUA
CLOSES: 14 SEPTEMBER 2023
The editors of Science, Technology, & Human Values and guest editors Canay Özden-Schilling and Emily Chua are calling for proposed papers for an upcoming Special Issue. The abstract for the Special Issue is available below. Interested scholars should send proposals for full papers (200-250 word abstract, plus 100-150 word biographical note) to sthvjournal@gmail.com before Thursday 14 September 2023. Scholars based outside the US, UK and EU are particularly encouraged to submit proposals. Applicants will be informed of the outcome in October 2023, with full manuscripts expected in March 2024 (unless otherwise negotiated). Individual manuscripts should be no more than 8,000 words including endnotes and references.
Abstract:
From peer-to-peer lending platforms and on-demand cloud-work, to algorithmically optimized supply chains and robo-invested pension funds, Asia’s economies are being transformed by a dense succession of technological innovations. Outpacing established cultural, political and legal frameworks, the novel arrangements and practices that are emerging in these contexts bring individuals and institutions into new kinds of relational terrains. This special issue explores the remaking of capitalist relations in and across Asia through a focus on the entwined questions of economic opportunity creation and governance, and the techniques and technologies that make both kinds of endeavor possible. Asian nations through the “long twentieth century” (Arrighi 1994) looked to “the West” as a model and guide on what successful modern economies and societies should be like. The rise of China and India’s economies, the prosperity of the four “East Asian tigers” and the growth of Southeast Asia’s middle class, however, have reoriented many enterprises, industries and governments to markets and models that are emerging within Asia itself. Today’s inter-Asian techno-capitalisms involve novel, understudied modes of economic activity that center on locally and regionally constructed conceptions of value, exchange and opportunity. In contrast to earlier images of development and growth, these approaches do not stake themselves in idealized notions of freedom, fairness, and plenty, but rather, hone in on conditions of constraint and competition, and focus on negotiating and harnessing these conditions through concepts such as “efficiency” and “disruptiveness,” “leanness” and “optimality.”
Through ethnographically informed engagements with the conceptual, material and virtual infrastructures and “devices” (Muniesa, Millo and Callon 2007) that enable and shape these economic endeavors, the articles in this SI address a series of interrelated questions: How are innovations in digital technology contributing to the construction of new concepts and standards of value, and new problems and processes of valuation? What practices of governance are being formulated in response to these developments? How are new models of enterprise being transferred across political and jurisdictional boundaries? And what relations among markets, monies, persons and things are being fostered and forged in and through these networks? In examining the intersections of technology, economics and governance that are forming around these issues as they play out across Asia’s diverse and dynamically interconnected contexts, the SI offers timely insights into a zone of enterprise, labor and industry where the futures of contemporary capitalism are being reimagined.
Published: 08/02/2023