A direct result from the workshop on Valuation Studies, hosted by CSTMS in December 2014, an open session at 4S has been accepted and is now open for submissions!

Please see 4S Open Session #56: “Valuation Studies: The Processes and Politics of Valuing in the World.”  This session is co-organized by Freyja Knapp (CSTMS, University of California, Berkeley) Claes-Fredrik Helgesson (Linköping University) Kristin Asdal (TIK, University of Oslo), and Francis Lee (Linköping University).

You can find instructions for submitting abstract and other information about the annual meeting here.

Is it good, bad, valuable, fair? Professors, student essays, market goods, projects, agreements, and nature itself are among the diverse entities that are, sometimes repeatedly, subject to practices of valuation. By what means and procedures are values established, by whom, to what ends, and to what consequence?  This open panel on “valuation studies” examines diverse social practices where the value or values of something is established, assessed, negotiated, provoked, maintained, constructed and/or contested. While the emerging interest in valuation studies can be related to the increased focus within STS on “the economy” and economic practices, it also allows for examining the enactment, ordering, and displacement of values in a variety of settings.  The study of market devices has illustrated the sociotechnical devices or “dispositives” through which actions are made to be economic in nature. As well, the notion “judgment devices” has been suggested as a framework for grasping processes of singularisation, enabling particular goods to stand out among others.

Valuation studies re-engages with sites well-known to traditional STS, such as the laboratory, now seen as immersed in practices of valuation along with producing facts. This new focus further opens inquiry into how distinctions, such as the one between economic and non-economic, are established as part of a valuation practice: It brings into light the politics embedded within the practices of ascribing and modifying value. For example, expertise and technical knowledge are a critical input not only into particular valuations, but also in regimes of valuation at different scales of governance, raising familiar concerns about deficits of democracy and due process. The panel welcomes both empirical studies of valuation practices as well as contributions that develop approaches for examining the agencies, means, and consequences of such practices.

* Image Credit: www.science20.com