Exploring Socio-Technical Research - A Multi-Method and Transdisciplinary Workshop
Call for Papers - download document here
Striving to understand the dynamic and ambivalent relations in contemporary societies, both social scientists and IT researchers increasingly explore socio-technical approaches, multi-method designs and cooperative work. Socio-technical approaches and theories, such as Grounded Design, experience an upswing across disciplines while they profit from varying views. Social scientists eventually learn about APIs, data security and mental models that technology design. Vice versa, IT experts gain perspectives on the specific logics of everyday media uses in dynamic media environments or the datafication of networks and social relations.
This workshop assembles academics from IT and social sciences, in particular communication and media studies as well as sociology. It offers a unique occasion to learn from socio-technical research projects, exploring relations between digitalization and datafication with everyday human action. Its aim is to discuss contemporary socio-technical approaches, multi-method designs and interdisciplinary research, in terms of methods and processes. Though collaborations between IT and social sciences bear great potentials for improving theories and methods, practical joint work embodies multi-faceted pitfalls, misunderstandings and challenges. For socio-technical researchers, understanding and exploring multiple methods and approaching alternative viewpoints is a prerequisite for successful researching a multimodal and dynamic world.
Via intense workshop sessions with experienced socio-technical researchers, presenting projects on smart cities, living labs or diving into digital anthropology, this workshop offers work-in-progress insights into interdisciplinary and multi-method empirical work bringing together social and computer sciences. Experienced and innovative socio-technical researchers open their labs and invite to learning from and debating their work. Consequently, the workshop offers room for discussions and interaction.
Guests across disciplines and methodological expertise are welcome. Participants that intend to present own contributions on questions related to socio-technical work are invited to submit discussion statements referring to one of the below listed key questions (2.000 words, excluding references) until August 30 2022 via . Discussion statements or give insights into own multi-method and/or transdisciplinary research project or provide a sound (critical) comment on particular challenges of socio-technical research and work. Discussion papers can address the following questions,
- advances in socio-technical approaches and theory,
- multiple methods designs,
- multi-disciplinary work challenges and opportunities,
- future directions for social sciences, in particular communication & media studies and sociology,
- future directions for IT research.
This workshop is an initiative of the research project “Disruptions of Networked Privacy” (DIPCY). It is realized in cooperation with and generously funded by TU Dresden Excellence Research Action for Disruption and Societal Change (TUDiSC) and the Media Sociology Division of the German Association for Communication and Media (DGPuK).
