When: Thursday, 8 May 2025, 17:00 - 19:00
Where: Seminarraum STS, Department of Science and Technology Studies, NIG, 6th floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna
Speaker: Kean Birch (York University, Canada)
Moderation: Katharina T. Paul (Department of Political Science, University of Vienna)
Cohosted with STS Department
Abstract
Harking back to Langdon Winner’s now classic article, ‘Do artifacts have politics?’, my aim in this paper is to ask a very similar question – namely, do artefacts have political economy? Following Winner and with the same objective in mind, I analyse artefacts that: (1) have been designed in ways that embed particular political economies; or (2) are compatible with particular political economies. I illustrate the former using Winner’s own example of Robert Moses and the design of bridges in New York City. For the latter, I illustrate a strong and weak version of the compatibility claim with the strong version characterized by the adoption of both a particular technology and political economy, while the weak version is characterized by the adaptation of the social context to a particular technology and political economy. I use the example of advertising technology (‘adtech’) and generative artificial intelligence respectively to illustrate these two versions. I frame this discussion within an approach I define as constructivist political economy sitting at the interface of science and technology studies (STS) and political economy, which can provide a useful analytical tool to analyse and address the vagaries of contemporary technoscientific capitalism.
