[EASST-Eurograd] CfP: P8. Should we smash our keyboards? Ethnographic interventions and/in the algorithmic age | Interventions: Swedish Anthropological Association Conference 2026

[Proshant Kumar Chakraborty via Eurograd]

Dear colleagues,

 

I warmly invite you to submit an abstract for a panel I am organising at the Swedish Anthropological Association’s 2026 Conference, which will be held at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, from 22-24 April 2026.

 

If you are working on issues related to technology, education, pedagogy and research, and are based at a Swedish or Scandinavian university or work in the region, I encourage you to submit a proposal and share this call with your colleagues and students (master students are encouraged to apply!).

 

Please submit a 250 word abstract, indicating the following panel number and title (see below), to sant...@globalstudies.gu.se.

 

You can find further information about the conference, keynote, fees, etc. here: https://www.gu.se/en/globalstudies/sant-conference-2026-interventions#call-for-panels-papers.

 

Abstracts are due on 23 February 2026. Please note that this is an already extended deadline.

 

P8. Should we smash our keyboards? Ethnographic interventions and/in the algorithmic age

 

As algorithmic models increasingly intervene in human creative, cognitive, and social encounters—from good music recommendations or degenerative AI slop, to our students and participants using GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) tools—how might ethnographers reassert and reappraise socializing and relational modes of scholarly (re)production (see, Sanjek 2014; Willis 2000)? Furthermore, how can we ethnographically intervene toward—or, perhaps, against—such algorithmic encroachments, whilst attending to both social and technical dimensions of the algorithmic moment (Sadowski 2025; Seaver 2022)?  

 

This panel invites ethnographic interventions on, about, and against, how algorithms like GenAI tools intervene in the domain of everyday life. In particular, this panel encourages contributors to experiment with a techno-graphic genre of representation, that is, use technical, ethnographic, auto/biographic registers to discuss human-technology/society-tech relations (see Maguire & Winthereik 2022; Vauhini 2025; Sadowski 2025). Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1983) essay on Utopian thinking, where she intends to put a pig on the tracks of capitalism’s one-way growth narratives, this panel asks contributors’ interventions to engage with the following questions.  

 

First, reckoning with the fact that ethnographic engagements have always entailed some form of human-technology relations, how do algorithmic logics intervene in these domains, and to what effects? Second, drawing on our commitment to both cultural critique and representation, how might our interventions problematize extractive logics that undergird the development of algorithms? And finally, reflecting on the structural inequalities and violence of this contemporary moment—much of which is facilitated by, and facilitates, algorithmic interventions—what might the nature of our ethnographic interventions be—or ought to be?  

 

Works cited 
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1983. “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be.” The Yale Review.  
Maguire, James, and Brit Ross Winthereik, eds. 2022. Reclaiming Technology: A Poetic-Scientific Vocabulary. Ctrl+Alt+Delete Books. 
Sadowski, Jathan. 2025. The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Capitalism and Technology. University of California Press. 
Sanjek, Roger. 2014. Ethnography in Today’s World: Color Full Before Color Blind. University of Pennsylvania Press. 
Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. University of Chicago Press. 
Vara, Vauhini. 2025. Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. Harper Collins. 
Willis, Paul. 2000. The Ethnographic Imagination. Polity Press. 

 

Best,

---

Proshant Chakraborty, PhD (he/him/his)

School of Global Studies, 

University of Gothenburg

Box 700, 405 30 Göteborg

Academia.edu | LinkedIn | ResearchGate

Read my latest articles:

“How Kolkata’s citizens are trying to revive the city’s 152-year-old tramways.” Blogal Studies

“Infrastructural Repair, Ruins, and Caring for Trains in Late Industrial Mumbai.” kritisk etnografi: Swedish Journal of Anthropology

“Infrastructural Care: Repairing Railway Trains, Maintaining Mumbai's Lifeline.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology