[Sci-tech-public] Media Lab Colloquium Series - Lucy Suchman - May 11 @ 4pm

[Lucy Suchman]

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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