4S/EASST Conference Barcelona 2016

Valuation Practices at the Margins

Conveners: Kristin Asdal, C-F Helgesson, Freyja Knapp, Francis Lee, Steve Woolgar

The growing interest in the study of valuation has resulted in a plurality of studies exploring by what means and procedures values are established, by whom, to what ends, and to what consequence (see, e.g., the journal Valuation Studies). It has, in short, opened a space for studies about various social practices and settings where the value or values of something are established, assessed, negotiated, provoked, maintained, constructed and/or contested.

This track follows a fruitful suggestion by Andrea Mennicken and Ebba Sjögren* to attend to the margins of valuation, where valuation practices are problematized, introduced or met by limitations. Margins are different across places and settings. Margins can appear in the form of subjecting new phenomena to practices of valuation. Margins can appear in the bringing in of new techniques and tools to reform established valuation practices. Margins can, finally, appear in asymmetric struggles over valuations, or in encounters between dominant techniques and other means of valuating performed in the shadow of more influential techniques or modes of valuing. Attending to the margins of valuations may also tease out the conditions for manufacturing values at the “core” and how these are sometimes challenged and transformed by way of new and emerging techniques.

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.

CFP open from 7th December 2015 – 21st February 2016

You can find the abstract submission portal and more information about the annual meeting here: http://www.sts2016bcn.org

Feel free to direct any questions to the co-chairs:

Kristin Asdal (University of Oslo), kristin.asdal@tik.uio.no

Claes-Fredrik Helgesson (Linköping University), claes-fredrik.helgesson@liu.se

Freyja Knapp, (University of California, Berkeley), freyja@berkeley.edu

Francis Lee (Linköping University), francis.lee@liu.se

Steve Woolgar (Linköping University), steve.woolgar@liu.se