Aus STS 2025: CFP closes in 10 days; keynotes and collaborations announced
Carina Truyts
Dear Aus STS friends
The Call for Proposals for presentations, posters, meet-ups, making and doing installations, and pre-submitted papers for the Australlasian Science and Technology (AusSTS) 2025 conference closes in 10 days, on Friday the 14th March.
Theme: Signals and Noises
When: 9-11 July 2025
Submissions: 14 March 2025, 11:59 PM
Where: Naarm/Melbourne: National Communication Museum (Hawthorn) and Deakin Downtown (Docklands)
Submit: here, learn more here [abstract below]
Confirmed keynotes and collaborations
We are excited to announce a collaboration with the ‘Signal to Noise’ exhibition at the fantastic new National Communication Museum (NCM) in Hawthorn, Naarm, for day 1 of the conference. The day 1 activities will draw on the creative archives, exhibitions and interactive spaces in the NCM and have been made possible thanks to generous support from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).
Day 1 will include a keynote panel on infrastructures of noise with Dang Nguyen, (RMIT), Ranjodh Dhaliwal Singh, (University of Basel), Kate Mannell (Deakin) and Fabian Offert (University of California, Santa Barbara), as well as a series of workshops and a public event in the evening with Eryk Salvaggio and further international and national artists (to be announced soon!).
Day 2 and 3 will take place at Deakin Downtown in Docklands. On day we look forward to a keynote on technologies of reproduction by Elizabeth Stephens (University of Queensland), in discussion with Jaya Keaney (University of Melbourne). The keynote will kick off a day of presentations, pre-submitted paper workshops, and ‘Making and Doing’ sessions, which include a poster format and short, timed tours where presenters will have a few minutes to introduce their installations.
The keynote for day 3 on noise within health includes Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney), Kari Lancaster (UNSW), and Christopher O’Neill (Deakin).
For more information and details about the conference theme, ‘Signals and Noises’ please check out the AusSTS website.
‘SIGNALS AND NOISES’
AusSTS 2025 seeks to bring the broad scope of STS subjects, skills, practices and politics into conversation with a core problematic of information theory - the problem of noise.
Noise (as distortion, as error) is a problem for communication - it corrupts and contaminates communication signals (as they fly along wires or along undersea cables for example). But to eliminate noise entirely is to shut signals down, to sever communication. To perfectly silence noise would also mean perfectly silencing the signal to which it belongs. Signal and noise are intimately, iteratively bonded in their material production, reception and translation. What questions then might signals and noises ask of STS? Is it simply a case, as it was for Shannon and Weaver (1949) of eliminating noise as far as possible in the service of signal? Or can we listen to ‘noise’ differently? Can the difference between what we seek to understand or convey on the one hand, and the ‘unintended things’ that trouble our efforts on the other, be illustrative? How might we work creatively with the flotsam and jetsam of research, or trace the twisting journeys of signals?
We encourage submissions that grapple with the entwined nature of signals and noises in our efforts to understand the world and listen to noise differently. We invite generous readings of the theme. For more information and suggestions on engagements with the theme, see <https://aussts.org/> or get in touch at <ausst...@gmail.com>.
Sponsored by: ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S), Deakin Science and Society Network, Science, Technology, & Human Values, and the National Communication Museum.
Please circulate the call in your networks. A flyer is attached!
We look forward to seeing you in July
Best,
Carina Truyts and Christopher O'Neill (2025 Convenors)