Hope to see some of you there, and please note that the identifier
should also read 'Visiting Professor, MIT Anthropology'!
best,
Lucy
On 7 May 2009, at 10:15, Amberly Steward wrote:
Please join us for…
Media Lab Colloquium Series
WHAT:
Lucy Suchman (Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University):
"Agencies at the Interface"
WHEN:
Monday, May 11, 2009 4:00pm - 6:00pm
WHERE:
Wiesner Room, MIT Media Lab (2nd Floor)
SUMMARY:
This talk considers how capacities for action are currently figured
at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively
and materially reconfigured. Drawing on examples from recent
scholarship in anthropology, science and technology studies, and
media arts and design, Suchman argues for research aimed at tracing
differences that matter within specific sociomaterial arrangements,
without resorting to essentialist human-machine divides. This
requires expanding our unit of analysis, while taking
responsibility for the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which
technological systems are made.
BIO:
Lucy Suchman is professor of anthropology of science and technology
in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, and co-
director of Lancaster's Centre for Science Studies. Before taking
up her present position she spent twenty years as a researcher at
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where she was a founding member
and manager of the Work Practice and Technology area. Her research
included ethnographic studies of everyday practices of technology
design and use, as well as interdisciplinary and participatory
interventions in new technology design. Her publications include
Human-Machine Reconfigurations (Cambridge University Press 2007),
which includes an annotated version of the text of her earlier
Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine
Communication. The sequel adds six new chapters, looking at
relevant developments since the mid-1980s both in computing and in
social studies of technology. She served as program chair for the
second Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in 1988,
and for the first Conference on Participatory Design of Computer
Systems in 1990.
http://www.media.mit.edu/events/eventpage.php?event=talk-693
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