Keynote Speakers
Nerea Calvillo (she/they) is an architect-scholar, based at the research Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick, UK), director of spatial design office C+ arquitectas and funder of In the Air, an ongoing collaborative project to sense air(pollution). She works at the intersection between spatial design, feminist technoscience, queer and environmental studies, and her current research is on toxic politics, pollen, atmospheres and queer urban political ecologies. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Royal Academy of Arts, Canadian Centre for Architecture or the Shanghai Biennale; and published in interdisciplinary journals like Social Studies of Science, Journal of Extreme Events or Public Culture. She is author of Aeropolis: Queering air in Toxicpolluted worlds.
Air defies contention. It fills-in, permeates, escapes, evaporates, absorbs. By default. Everything. Air challenges leaking as a concept, both materially and symbolically. Then, what does leaking mean in Aeropolis, the city of airs? From a feminist technoscience and queer perspective I speculate how it might allow us to re-think sensing, the urban, design and relationality more broadly.
Amade M'charek
Amade Aouatef M’charek is Professor of Anthropology of Science at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. M’charek is finalizing the RaceFaceID Project (www.race-face-id.eu), an ERC-consolidator project on forensic identification and the making of face and race in forensic practices, and co-Principal Investigator of the NWA project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums. Through her research on migrant death, she has developed an interest in forensic methods for studying (post)colonial relations, circulations and extractions, which has resulted in the ERC-Advanced project Vital Elements and Postcolonial Moves: Forensics as the Art of Paying Attention in a Mediterranean Harbour Town.
Since 2014 more than 26.000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. They have been attended to as “border death” (Last & Spijkerboer 2014), crucially, drawing attention to the militarization of Europe’s borders and its migration policy. But what if we would make a decolonial move and cross the Mediterranean, from Europe to Africa? What if we would attend to death, not in relation to borders that kill, but in relation to life and livelihood? The starting point for this talk are the beaches of Zarzis, a southern Tunisian harbour town, where dead bodies have been washing ashore since the mid-nineties. I ask “how did these bodies end up here?” A forensic question that I will not engage in any self-evident way. I reconfigure forensics, from an art of finding evince and closure, to an art of paying attention. A mode of opening up and articulating complex entanglements. Inspired by forensics, its attention to materialities and temporalities as well as its tenet of following heterogeneous traces, I query the relation between death and the possibilities for life and livelihood by trailing what I call vital elements; materialities that are crucial for fostering live or causing death in their absence. Think of phosphorus, salt, water, or, sea sponges. Moving with, and being moved by these materialities and the way they have been part of extractivist practices, I will tell two stories to attend to the durability of unequal, (post)colonial relation, (1) underscoring what can flow easily and what is being stopped between Europe and Africa, (2) contributing to a conceptualization of neglect.
Thao Phan
Thao Phan is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She is a Research Fellow in the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society and the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Thao has published on topics including the aesthetics of digital voice assistants, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Big Data & Society, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technosocience, Science as Culture, Cultural Studies, and more. Thao is a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s National Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science and is the co-founder of AusSTS—Australia’s largest network of STS scholars.
What is the sound of racialisation? How might we listen to misrecognition? What does machine error tell us about the precision of racism? And how can the tools of a racist system be used to transcribe new forms of resistance? This presentation is a collaboration between feminist STS researcher Thao Phan and Machine Listening, an ongoing investigation and experiment in collective learning, instigated by artist Sean Dockray, legal scholar James Parker, and researcher, curator and artist Joel Stern. Part lecture and part performance, this event brings together critical work on race and algorithmic culture with artistic and experimental techniques for dissecting and analysing automatic speech recognition, applied to personal and public archives drawn from Thao’s life and research. It features an extended demonstration of the Machine Listening Word Processor, an art-based tool developed in 2021 by the Machine Listening team and Reduct, a US-based tech company co-founded by the artist Robert Ochschorn.
Performing Artists
In collaboration with the Technische Sammlungen Dresden we will present
This double feature takes place at the Technische Sammlungen Dresden and shows how artistic practices engage global transformation processes in ways that scientific research and common ways of communicating science facts cannot achieve. While the filmmaker and installation artist Rosa Barba, Schaufler Residency@TU Dresden 2023, explores in her films "Bending to Earth" (2015) and "Radiant Exposures - Facts Run on Light Beams These Days" (2022) how inscriptions and transformations of society manifest themselves in the landscape, the sound performance „The Matter of the Soul“ by Kat Austen with live visuals from Dongjoo Seo draws on melted ice from polar regions to make climate change audible. These multi-media explorations of a planet in transformation try to make sense of our leaky earth at the intersections of art, science, and the humanities.
with Rosa Barba & Kat Austen with live visuals from Dongjoo Seo.
Program
Download the updated program here.For more detailed information on panels, talks, and workshops please
download the latest version of the Book of Abstracts here.
Venue
Find the conference on Maps.Accessibility
We endeavor to make the Leakage conference as inclusive and accessible as possible.- All rooms are wheelchair-accessible.
- All-gender bathrooms are available.
- Automatic captioning will be enabled for every presentation, both in-person and online.
- Food served during the conference will include vegan and gluten-free options throughout.
- A quiet space is available on-site.
- You can recognize peers that are open to help conference first-timers and that are comfortable being approached for conversation or just for company by a sign on their name tag.
Awareness
The Awareness-Team is approachable during the time of the conference. You can reach out to them if you need help, feel overwhelmed, unsafe and/or experienced or observed discriminatory behavior. You can also reach out to them if you just need someone to talk to. You will find them in the designated room and also walking through the corridors .They can be recognized by their light blue armbands. They speak German, English and Spanish.Practicing awareness is a constant learning process for all of us, and we strive towards providing safer spaces throughout the conference. Feedback or questions to: leakage.accessibility@tu-dresden.de
Conference Etiquette
As an academic conference dedicated to critical scholarship in science and technology studies and adjacent fields, Leakage brings together a community of scholars of diverse backgrounds, experiences, cultures, and identities. The Leakage orga team, stsing e.V. and conference participants hold a shared responsibility towards its communities. As conference organizers, we are committed to establishing good relations on site.We want to create encounters where everyone can feel welcome, appreciated, safe and comfortable to contribute their work and their mind. Each conference participant is encouraged to reflect their own positionalities and privileges, especially before taking the floor or voicing criticism, carefully attending to the ways power differentials affect people and influence their willingness and ability to participate. We are striving towards a conference that is free of abuses of power, discrimination and harassment (be it intentional or unintentional) and seeks to promote scholarly exchange and professional development without bullying, exploitation, intimidation, and victimization. We do not tolerate discriminatory or abusive language or behavior. This includes sexism, racism, antisemitism, anti-Muslim racism, ableism, classism, homophobia, trans*phobia and any other form of discrimination. The list of unacceptable behaviors covers both in-person and online participation and may be verbal or written.
Working towards a respectful environment of non-discrimination and safety of all participants at Leakage we ask you to adhere to principles of respectful communication, non-violence and non-reactivity. This means as a speaker, we ask you to keep in mind to speak from your own positionalities, use non-violent modes of communication, do not react to violence with violence, do not reciprocate or escalate. As a listener, listen to and value the positionalities of others and practice non-reactivity. Do not take people’s words out of context and do not use them inappropriately.
Despite the current climate of intensifying polarization in scholarly debates and environments, we are committed to principles of academic freedom. We reiterate that we do not tolerate antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism as well as incitement of hate or violence against, bullying of, or negative stereotyping against any individuals or groups of people.
In drafting this Etiquette we relied on various resources and followed examples from other events and conferences. The ‘critical questions’ we included are based on the awareness concept that was developed by Sara Bahadori and Vanessa Fuguero for the membra(i)nes conference (annual conference of the gender studies association, 2023). Additionally, some of our paragraphs are based on the carefully drafted texts that can be found on the transmediale 2024 website.
Accommodation
We have blocked off rooms at 4 hotels in Dresden at a discounted conference rate.100 rooms (single or double) are available:
Single: €85 per night / Double: €105 per night
(breakfast included, prices not including city accommodation tax)
Address: Prager Straße 5, 01069 Dresden
Website
To reserve, contact reservierung@ibis-dresden.de, Tel.: +49 351 48564856, and use keyword ‘Leakage.’
13 rooms are available:
6x double rooms / 4x 3-bed rooms / 3x wheelchair-accessible rooms
All €94,32 per night
(breakfast and city accommodation tax included)
Address: Weberplatz 3, 01217 Dresden
Website
To reserve, contact info@gaestehausweberplatz.de, Tel.: +49 351 4679300, and use keyword ‘Leakage.’
60 rooms (40 single and 20 double) are available:
Single: €89 per night / Double: €109 per night
(breakfast not included, prices not including city accommodation tax)
Address: Postplatz 5, 01067 Dresden
Website
To reserve contact dresden-am-zwinger@motel-one.com, Tel.: +49 351 43838-10, and use keyword ‘Leakage.’
100 rooms (single or double) are available:
Single / Double: €99 per night
(breakfast included, prices not including city accommodation tax, free cancellation until 48 hours before arrival)
Address: Prager Straße 2c, 01069 Dresden
Website
To reserve go to https://l.ead.me/befgo1 , dates adjustable
If you are looking for more affordable accommodation options, Dresden also has many high-quality hostels (such as Mondpalast or Louise20). If you are interested in sharing a room and splitting the costs, we've set up a google sheet to connect participants looking to share here.
Call for Papers
Leakage reveals cracks and holes; it signifies porosity, the transgression of a boundary, and a rebuke to fantasies of closure and containment. Unlike a sudden spill or a violent burst, leaks are sites of a slow and steady subversion. They corrode and accumulate over time, calling for a reckoning with temporalities of latency and a readjustment of perceptual scales. Leaks are evidence of hidden complexity and unacknowledged others, both human and nonhuman. They draw attention to the material unconscious, submerged histories, and enabling conditions of cities, bodies, ecologies, technologies, and social systems.Whether through the registers of excess, loss, abjection, entropy, or sacrifice, leakage can be understood as that which cannot be contained by hegemonic economies of distribution and circulation. Something seeps through that should have stayed behind walls, cordoned off to prevent contamination, mixture, or mediation. Sites of leakage are paradigmatic for the environmental and social costs of resource industries and extractive colonialism but also create liminal zones where ecologies and architectures intermingle. Integral to challenges of bounded individualism in critical disability studies and material feminisms, conceptions of leakage articulate bodies and systems open to the contingencies of environmental exposure and socio-technical enmeshment. Framed by critical data and security studies, leakage speaks to the intersections of surveillance capitalism, digital justice, and hacking. Leaks disturb and redistribute regulated flows of matter, capital, information, and power; they create diversions and bifurcations with nonlinear, unpredictable, and protracted effects. From toxic spills to data leaks, leakage is inherently political. The politics and materialities of leakage raise questions about vulnerable and permeable ecologies, architectures, technologies, bodies, and knowledge systems. Fears of leakage—leaky bodies, leaky pipes, leaky borders, leaky servers, leaky arguments—reinforce regimes of hygiene and security that are quick to produce a techno-social fix or reactionary containment strategy. At the same time, leakage can be leveraged as both an instrument of geopolitical violence and a counter-hegemonic tactic of generative disruption and emancipatory disclosure.
Thinking with leakage promotes a shift in analytical gears and new alliances across disciplines and reference fields. What would a generative politics of leakage look like it? How might an engagement with leakage inform a critical analysis of black boxing, colonial infrastructuralism, spatial design, hetero-patriarchal biopolitics, or technoscientific worldmaking? Who and what is feeding (on) the leak, and what emerges in its wake? Engaging leakage through the lens of science & technology studies (STS) requires self-reflexivity about epistemic instabilities, interdisciplinary diffusion, and unintended consequences. We invite scholars, activists, and artists to defamiliarize, disrupt, or otherwise explore the generative potential of leakage as a variegated paradigm for STS, whether engaged as a physical phenomenon, a material metaphor, an analytical tool, or a political strategy.
We welcome contributions that engage STS from a plurality of disciplines and fields, including art, anthropology, sociology, politics, literature, cultural studies, design, media studies, history of technology, political geography, migration studies, medical humanities, digital humanities, film studies, and environmental & energy humanities. We are specifically committed to promoting expansions and intersections of STS with emancipatory discourses such as critical race theory, feminist materialisms, decolonial criticism, co-futurisms, queer and trans studies, critical posthumanisms, environmental justice, and critical disability studies.
Presentations can be held either in English or German. We strive for a diversity of voices and perspectives from any and all disciplines and career stages. While papers on any subject in STS are welcome, we especially encourage topics that resonate with the overall conference theme by addressing the politics, technoscientific imaginaries, and environmental entanglements of what may count as leakage, leaky, or leaking with respect to topics that include but are not limited to:
· Toxicity, radiation, and pollution
· Embodiment, metabolisms, and subjectivity
· Environmental, digital, and social justice
· Data systems and information flows
· Security policies and surveillance systems
· Movement and accessibility
· Systems of power and oppression
· Machines and energy systems
· Architectures and infrastructures
· Places, topologies, and geographies
· Ontologies and epistemologies
· Atmospheres and geological strata
· Modernities and narratives of progress & development
· Temporalities, histories, and futurisms
· Translations and transformations
· Hacking, hegemonies, and activisms
· Value chains and circulations
· Exclusion and inclusion
· …
It is possible to submit proposals for individual presentations and preformed panels in English or German. Non-traditional formats (roundtables, artistic research, participatory formats, etc.) are welcome. For individual presentations, we ask for an abstract of 300 words and a short bio (150 words). For preformed panels we require a proposal (single file) that includes a 300-word summary of the panel topic, abstracts of 200 words for each contribution, and bio notes (150 words) for all participants. Please indicate the format you envision for your contribution. Every contributor is allowed to submit a maximum of one individual contribution and one panel. We are planning with standard time slots of 90 minutes that can accommodate a variety of formats.
Keynote Speakers
Nerea Calvillo (University of Warwick)“Aeropolis or the Words of Leaking Airs”
Amade M'charek (University of Amsterdam)
“Percolating Presence: Trailing Life and Death in a Postcolonial Landscape”
Thao Phan (Monash University)
“Listening to Misrecognition”
Performing Artists
In collaboration with the Technische Sammlungen Dresden we will present “LEAKY EARTH. Multi-Mediations of a Planet in Transformation”with Rosa Barba & Kat Austen with live visuals from Dongjoo Seo.
Program
Download the program here.For more detailed information on panels, talks, and workshops please download the Book of Abstracts here.
Venue
Find the conference on Maps.Accessibility
All rooms are wheelchair accessible, all-gender bathrooms and wheelchair accessible bathrooms are available. Automatic captioning will be enabled for every presentation, both in-person and online. We are planning to make quiet and safer space available on site. If you have any questions about accessibility please conact: leakage.accessibility@tu-dresden.deAccommodation
We have blocked off rooms at 4 hotels in Dresden at a discounted conference rate.100 rooms (single or double) are available:
Single: €85 per night / Double: €105 per night
(breakfast included, prices not including city accommodation tax)
Address: Prager Straße 5, 01069 Dresden
Website
To reserve, contact reservierung@ibis-dresden.de, Tel.: +49 351 48564856, and use keyword ‘Leakage.’
13 rooms are available:
6x double rooms / 4x 3-bed rooms / 3x wheelchair-accessible rooms
All €94,32 per night
(breakfast and city accommodation tax included)
Address: Weberplatz 3, 01217 Dresden
Website
To reserve, contact info@gaestehausweberplatz.de, Tel.: +49 351 4679300, and use keyword ‘Leakage.’
60 rooms (40 single and 20 double) are available:
Single: €89 per night / Double: €109 per night
(breakfast not included, prices not including city accommodation tax)
Address: Postplatz 5, 01067 Dresden
Website
To reserve contact dresden-am-zwinger@motel-one.com, Tel.: +49 351 43838-10, and use keyword ‘Leakage.’
100 rooms (single or double) are available:
Single / Double: €99 per night
(breakfast included, prices not including city accommodation tax, free cancellation until 48 hours before arrival)
Address: Prager Straße 2c, 01069 Dresden
Website
To reserve go to https://l.ead.me/befgo1 , dates adjustable
If you are looking for more affordable accommodation options, Dresden also has many high-quality hostels (such as Mondpalast or Louise20). If you are interested in sharing a room and splitting the costs, we've set up a google sheet to connect participants looking to share here.
Call for Papers
Leakage reveals cracks and holes; it signifies porosity, the transgression of a boundary, and a rebuke to fantasies of closure and containment. Unlike a sudden spill or a violent burst, leaks are sites of a slow and steady subversion. They corrode and accumulate over time, calling for a reckoning with temporalities of latency and a readjustment of perceptual scales. Leaks are evidence of hidden complexity and unacknowledged others, both human and nonhuman. They draw attention to the material unconscious, submerged histories, and enabling conditions of cities, bodies, ecologies, technologies, and social systems.Whether through the registers of excess, loss, abjection, entropy, or sacrifice, leakage can be understood as that which cannot be contained by hegemonic economies of distribution and circulation. Something seeps through that should have stayed behind walls, cordoned off to prevent contamination, mixture, or mediation. Sites of leakage are paradigmatic for the environmental and social costs of resource industries and extractive colonialism but also create liminal zones where ecologies and architectures intermingle. Integral to challenges of bounded individualism in critical disability studies and material feminisms, conceptions of leakage articulate bodies and systems open to the contingencies of environmental exposure and socio-technical enmeshment. Framed by critical data and security studies, leakage speaks to the intersections of surveillance capitalism, digital justice, and hacking. Leaks disturb and redistribute regulated flows of matter, capital, information, and power; they create diversions and bifurcations with nonlinear, unpredictable, and protracted effects. From toxic spills to data leaks, leakage is inherently political. The politics and materialities of leakage raise questions about vulnerable and permeable ecologies, architectures, technologies, bodies, and knowledge systems. Fears of leakage—leaky bodies, leaky pipes, leaky borders, leaky servers, leaky arguments—reinforce regimes of hygiene and security that are quick to produce a techno-social fix or reactionary containment strategy. At the same time, leakage can be leveraged as both an instrument of geopolitical violence and a counter-hegemonic tactic of generative disruption and emancipatory disclosure.
Thinking with leakage promotes a shift in analytical gears and new alliances across disciplines and reference fields. What would a generative politics of leakage look like it? How might an engagement with leakage inform a critical analysis of black boxing, colonial infrastructuralism, spatial design, hetero-patriarchal biopolitics, or technoscientific worldmaking? Who and what is feeding (on) the leak, and what emerges in its wake? Engaging leakage through the lens of science & technology studies (STS) requires self-reflexivity about epistemic instabilities, interdisciplinary diffusion, and unintended consequences. We invite scholars, activists, and artists to defamiliarize, disrupt, or otherwise explore the generative potential of leakage as a variegated paradigm for STS, whether engaged as a physical phenomenon, a material metaphor, an analytical tool, or a political strategy.
We welcome contributions that engage STS from a plurality of disciplines and fields, including art, anthropology, sociology, politics, literature, cultural studies, design, media studies, history of technology, political geography, migration studies, medical humanities, digital humanities, film studies, and environmental & energy humanities. We are specifically committed to promoting expansions and intersections of STS with emancipatory discourses such as critical race theory, feminist materialisms, decolonial criticism, co-futurisms, queer and trans studies, critical posthumanisms, environmental justice, and critical disability studies.
Presentations can be held either in English or German. We strive for a diversity of voices and perspectives from any and all disciplines and career stages. While papers on any subject in STS are welcome, we especially encourage topics that resonate with the overall conference theme by addressing the politics, technoscientific imaginaries, and environmental entanglements of what may count as leakage, leaky, or leaking with respect to topics that include but are not limited to:
· Toxicity, radiation, and pollution
· Embodiment, metabolisms, and subjectivity
· Environmental, digital, and social justice
· Data systems and information flows
· Security policies and surveillance systems
· Movement and accessibility
· Systems of power and oppression
· Machines and energy systems
· Architectures and infrastructures
· Places, topologies, and geographies
· Ontologies and epistemologies
· Atmospheres and geological strata
· Modernities and narratives of progress & development
· Temporalities, histories, and futurisms
· Translations and transformations
· Hacking, hegemonies, and activisms
· Value chains and circulations
· Exclusion and inclusion
· …
It is possible to submit proposals for individual presentations and preformed panels in English or German. Non-traditional formats (roundtables, artistic research, participatory formats, etc.) are welcome. For individual presentations, we ask for an abstract of 300 words and a short bio (150 words). For preformed panels we require a proposal (single file) that includes a 300-word summary of the panel topic, abstracts of 200 words for each contribution, and bio notes (150 words) for all participants. Please indicate the format you envision for your contribution. Every contributor is allowed to submit a maximum of one individual contribution and one panel. We are planning with standard time slots of 90 minutes that can accommodate a variety of formats.
This conference inaugurates stsing e.V., an association (“Verein”) doing Science and Technology Studies (STS) in and through Germany, established in 2020. STS is an interdisciplinary field of research and activity interested in how science and technology are practically done and socially embedded. The association is informed by international discussions and brings together networks of senior and early career researchers. stsing e.V. currently has over 100 members from a broad range of disciplines in German-speaking countries, universities and research institutions, with working groups engaged in inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. Find more information on the stsing e.V. website: www.stsing.org
TU Dresden
March 19-22, 2024
Sandra Buchmüller, Michaela Büsse, Kristiane Fehrs, Moritz Ingwersen, Anja H. Lind, Johanna Mehl, Judith Miggelbrink, Michelle Pfeifer, Susann Wagenknecht
Chair of Micro-Sociology and Techno-Social Interaction
Chair of North American Literature and Future Studies
Chair of Human Geography
Chair of Digital Cultures
Chair of Thermodynamics
If you have any questions please direct them at sts.leakage@tu-dresden.de
Partners:
