Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy CFP 2020

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Stanford–Leuphana Summer Academy

on Humanities and Media 2020

Technologies of Bureaucracy: Before and After the Digital Turn

Media invariably have organizational effects: They shape the ordering of the social. Yet to become
operative as media, they need to become part of institutional, organizational, managerial, or entre-
preneurial contexts. While a very old story, this intimate relation between media and organization
has been updated and exacerbated by the so-called »digital turn«. In organizations and in the so-
cio-technical organization of economic, social, political and cultural life, what counts can increas-
ingly (and literally) be digitally stored, distributed, replayed, augmented, and switched.
Contemporary debates around »social media« and the »digital economy«, »digital labor«,
»platform capitalism«, »surveillance capitalism«, or »algorithmic governance« therefore tend
to present a new organizational landscape that is conditioned by digital technologies. Similarly,
popular debates on technology and organization are largely framed in terms of ahistorical and pre-
sentist notions of »innovation«, »disruption«, »flexibility«, and »post-bureaucracy«.
The second Stanford – Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media poses the question
of how media technologies do the work of organization. In doing so, however, the Summer Acad-
emy seeks to take a step back from familiar terms and images of epochal change and radical new-
ness. For instance, in addition to its supposedly novel powers of sociotechnical disruption, the com-
puter can be understood in much more traditional terms: it can be seen as a fundamentally bureau-
cratic medium, its logics as primarily administrative ones. In Cornelia Vismann’s words, »the com-
puter implements the basic law of bureaucracy according to which administrative techniques are
transferred from the state to the individual«.
To understand how »technologies of bureaucracy« have shaped organization before and after the
digital turn, the Summer Academy specifically invites historical studies of the relation between me-
dia and organization, technology and bureaucracy. How do genealogies of media and organization
allow us to understand the digital turn, its pasts, presents, and potential futures? What were the
main institutional contexts, figures of thought, and thinkers that came to shape the organizational
prehistory of »digital cultures«? What might inquiries into pre-modern or early modern entangle-
ments of media technologies and social ordering teach us about the present condition? Are there
other historical and non-western cultures of organizational technologies that allow us to understand
the present, such as the long tradition of Chinese bureaucracy (and the way it might shape contem-
porary »social credit systems«), medieval and ecclesiastic European bureaucracies formed by spe-
cific material technologies of the codex or cartularies, or the administration of colonial empires and
the vagaries of translation? How can we then decenter and rethink presentist and often hyperbolic
notions of »social media«? Moreover, the Summer Academy invites »grounded« investigations
of the very materialities and immaterialities that shape technological ordering before and after the
normalization of digital technologies. What were, have been and are the specific, and specifically
mediating, objects that determine the practices and effects of organization?

Date:
June 22 – 26, 2020

Location:
Stanford H.G. Will Center, Berlin, »Haus Cramer«, Pacelliallee 18, 14195 Berlin
Faculty and guest speakers:
Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
Wendy Chun (New Media, Vancouver)
Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Monika Dommann (History, Zurich)
Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Comparative Literature, Stanford)
Robin Holt (Organization Studies, Copenhagen)
Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Hito Steyerl (Experimental Film and Video, Berlin)
Peter Stohschneider (Medieval Studies, Munich) tbc
Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)

Application:
All applications must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Please submit your CV
(1-2 pages) along with a 500-word abstract of your topic, and a short letter of intent explaining why
you would like to attend this Summer Academy.
Please use the following naming convention for your application files: Lastname_CV.pdf, Last-
name_Abstract.pdf, Lastname_Letter_of_Intent.pdf.
Please email your applications to timon.beyes@leuphana.de.
The deadline for applications for the summer school is February 15, 2020. All applicants will be
informed about the selection of participants by end of February 2020. The working language of the
Summer Academy will be English.
The organizers will cover travel (economy) and accommodation costs for the time of the summer
school. No additional fees will be charged.

Contact:
Marisa Galvez (mgalvez@stanford.edu)
Claus Pias (pias@leuphana.de)
Timon Beyes (timon.beyes@leuphana.de)

General information:
The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy addresses the intersection between individual humani-
ties disciplines and studies of media and technology from historical, systematic, and methodologi-
cal perspectives. As we live in a time when new technologies are emerging at an increasingly rapid
pace, the Academy seeks to address vital questions about how different media can drive political
and social change, but it also inquires into the assumptions and values that produce technological
artifacts. Media studies and media theory intersect with various disciplines in the humanities and
social sciences that treat the transmission of information, the formation of social networks, and the
embodiment of knowledge in technological artifacts. Therefore, the Academy will bring together
faculty and students from various branches of the humanities and social sciences to think about
how »mediality« permeates these disciplines in distinct ways; we will approach these issues not
only from a robustly interdisciplinary vantage but also by way of comparative cultural and historical
perspectives. In this way, the Academy will contribute to our understanding of the fundamental
ways that forms of media and technological mediation inform disciplinary knowledge across the
humanities, as well as the ways that these disciplinary knowledge formations are an essential pre-
condition to any serious thinking about mediality.

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