Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Ethics of Big Data, Oxford Internet Institute associated with a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship at St Cross College University of Oxford Grade 7: £29,837 – £36,661 p.a.

We are a leading world centre for the multidisciplinary study of the Internet and society, looking for a full-time Researcher to work on a funded project, “The Ethics of Biomedical Big Data”, led by Professor Luciano Floridi.

The analysis of large datasets (Big Data) has become a major driver of innovation and success in biomedical research. However, the use of Biomedical Big Data raises serious ethical problems, which may threaten the huge opportunities it offers. This pilot project will formulate a blueprint of the ethical aspects, requirements and desiderata underpinning a European framework for the ethical use of Big Data in biomedical research.

Applicants should hold a PhD in a relevant discipline, have a strong interest in information/computer ethics and proven experience in ethical and policy analysis and writing papers based on qualitative and/or quantitative research. The successful candidate will work with Prof. Floridi and a multidisciplinary team of researchers, and will be able to take a lead in project management, conceptual analysis, and the dissemination of results.

Based at our OII North office at 34 St Giles, Oxford, this position is available from 1 October 2014 for 1 year, with a possibility of extension beyond that date, depending on funding.

The post is associated with a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship at St Cross College for its duration. Details of the College and its facilities are available on the College website at: www.stx.ox.ac.uk.

Applications for this vacancy are to be made online.

To apply for this role and for further details, including a job description and selection criteria, please click on the link below:

https://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk/pls/hrisliverecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.jobspec?p_id=113435

The application deadline is 12.00 midday on Thursday 26 June 2014.

Interviews for those shortlisted are currently planned to take place in the week commencing 21 July 2014.

Workshop: Marx’s Labour Theory of Value in the Digital Age

COST Action IS1202 “Dynamics of Virtual Work”, http://dynamicsofvirtualwork.com/ The Open University of Israel

June 15-17, 2014

Recent developments in digital technology, from “social media”/”web 2.0” such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Weibo, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Foursquare, etc to mobile devices, have spurred new forms of production.

A variety of terms has been used to describe new production practices and new products enabled by the Internet: participatory culture, co-creation, mass collaboration, social production, commons-based peer production, mass customization, prosumption, produsage, crowdsourcing, open source, social production, user-generated content, user participation, folksonomics, wikinomics, collaborative innovation, open innovation, user innovation.

These terms and debates are often over-optimistic, celebratory and lack a critical understanding of “social media” – they do not engage with the social problem-dimension of the “social”. The multiplicity of neologisms is also a symptom of a “technologistic” outlook, which assumes that each technical innovation brings about a paradigmatic change in culture and in society and more democracy and a better society. While such multiplicity of terms attests to a phenomenology of technological innovation and diversity, it is also an analytical and theoretical liability. Concurrent with this dominant approach, there have been attempts for a systematic critical analysis of new forms of online production, digital labour and commodification on social media through the prism of the labour theory of value. Such theoretical approaches attempt to apply a unified conceptual framework in order to gain better understanding of the socio-economic foundations of digital media and the social relations, power relations and class relations that they facilitate. They also help to connect these new productive practices with a longstanding theoretical tradition emerging from Marxian political economy.

The role of Marx’s labour theory of value for understanding the political economy of digital and social media has been a topic of intense work and debates in recent years, particularly concerning the appropriateness of using Marxian concepts, such as: value, surplus-value, exploitation, class, abstract and concrete labour, alienation, commodities, the dialectic, work and labour, use- and exchange-value, General Intellect, labour time, labour power, the law of value, necessary and surplus labour time, absolute and relative surplus value production, primitive accumulation, rent, reproductive labour, formal and real subsumption of labour under capital, species-being, collective worker, etc.

The critical conceptualization of digital labour has been approached from a variety of critical approaches, such as Marx’s theory, Dallas Smythe’s theory of audience commodification, Critical Theory, Autonomous Marxism, feminist political economy, labour process theory, etc. In this workshop we explore current interventions to the digital labour theory of value. Such interventions propose theoretical and empirical work that contributes to our understanding of the Marx’s labour theory of value, how the nexus of labour and value are transformed under virtual conditions, or they employ the theory in order to shed light on specific practices.

The Israeli location will provide an opportunity to explore some issues pertinent to digital technology in the local context, including a lecture on the Palestinian Internet and a tour exploring techniques of separation and control along the separation wall in Jerusalem.

Keynote talks:

Noam Yoran: The Labour Theory of Television, or, Why is Television Still Around Christian Fuchs: The Digital Labour Theory of Value and Karl Marx in the Age of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Weibo Anat Ben David: The Palestinian Internet

The programme features the following talks:

* Andrea Fumagalli: The concept of life subsumption in cognitive bio-capitalism: valorization and governance

* Bingqing Xia: Marx’s in Chinese online space: some thoughts on the labour problem in Chinese Internet industries

* Brice Nixon: The Exploitation of Audience Labour: A Missing Perspective on Communication and Capital in the Digital Era

* Bruce Robinson: Marx’s categories of labour, value production and digital work

* Eran Fisher: Audience labour: empirical inquiry into the missing link of subjectivity

* Frederick Harry Pitts: Form-giving fire: creative industries as Marx’s ‘work of combustion’”

* Jakob Rigi: The Crisis of the Law of Value? The Marxian Concept of Rent and a Critique of Antonio Negri`s and his Associates` Approach Towards the Marxian Law of Value

* Jernej Prodnik: Media products and (digital) labour in global capitalist accumulation: A preliminary study

* Kylie Jarrett: The Uses of Use-Value: A Marxist-Feminist contribution to understanding digital media

* Marisol Sandoval: The Dark Side of the Information Age – Arguments for an Extended Definition of Digital Labour

* Olivier Frayssé: Cyberspace ground rent, surplus value extraction, realization, and general surplus value apportionment

* Sebastian Sevignani: Productive prosumption, primitive accumulation, or rent? Problematising exploitation 2.0

* Thomas Allmer: Digital and Social Media Between Emancipation and Commodification: Dialectical and Critical Perspectives

* Yuqi Na: Capital accumulation of targeted advertising-based capitalist social media. What do people in the UK and China think about it and why? A Marxist perspective

If you wish to attend the workshop, please contact RSVP Eran Fisher: eranfisher@gmail.com

TRANSLATION ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS

The Fifth Summer School in Cognitive Sciences : Web Science and the Mind.
Organized by the UQAM Cognitive Science Institute in Montréal (Canada), from July 7th to 18th.

Theme of the Summer Institute: Web Science and the Mind.
This summer school will present a comprehensive overview of the interactions between the web and cognitive sciences, with topics ranging from social network analysis to distributed cognition and semantic web.

The Summer School will feature a poster session.
Information about this poster session is available at:
http://www.summer14.isc.uqam.ca/page/affiche.php
Deadline: April 11th 2014

Registration for the Summer School is open (”Early Bird” Registration fees until May 9th).

Note that the lowest fee is for students that will attend the Summer School as a credited activity (worth 3 university credits). Details:
http://www.summer14.isc.uqam.ca/page/inscription.php

Scholarships
Scholarships for travel, accomodation and/or registration will be available for students registered in a Quebec University (CREPUQ).
http://www.summer14.isc.uqam.ca/page/bourses.php

Want to stay in touch? Follow us on Twitter! @iscUQAM

We hope to see you there in July.

Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy

Duquesne University

Dept. of Philosophy

Pittsburgh, PA

Call for Applications

We are pleased to announce the 2014 Pittsburgh Summer Symposium in Contemporary Philosophy, held at Duquesne University. Details for the program are as follows:

Formalism and the Real: Ontology, Politics, and the Subject

August 4 – 8, 2014

(Optional Participants’ Conference, August 2-3)

“The real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization.”

— Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX

“We need a theory of the pass of the real, in the breach opened up by formalization. Here, the real is no longer only what can be lacking from its place, but what passes through by force.”

— Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject

Seminar Leaders:

Prof. Bruno Bosteels (Cornell University)

Prof. Tom Eyers (Duquesne University)

Prof. Paul Livingston (University of New Mexico)

Course Description:

Philosophy in the twenty-first century has seen an extensive reconsideration of formalistic methodologies and theoretical structures. This is heavily influenced by the formalism developed by a number of mid-twentieth century French thinkers who rejected humanist philosophies of experience or consciousness typified by dominant forms of existentialism and phenomenology. Insights derived from Marxism, Freudianism, and philosophy of science were argued to undermine central tenets of the latter, including the priority of description and the emphasis on first-person experiences. Rather, stress was placed on the priority of construction, an emphasis on the concept, and a rethinking of the nature of knowledge and the object of science.

The recent history of formalist approaches is framed in important ways by Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. As is well known, Althusser rejected historicist and humanist readings of Marx in favor of a structuralist approach, which was amenable to the conception of science developed by thinkers like Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Canguilhem. Simultaneously, Lacan rejected ego-psychological readings of Freud, forming interpretive, theoretical, and clinical bases for psychoanalysis that drew on Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics and Claude Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology. This led him to a methodological formalism, particularly when addressing the Real and the psycho-dynamics in which it is involved. The presence of Althusser and Lacan at the École Normale Supériere during this time formed the intellectual milieu in which students such as Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière would begin to develop their own thought. An important forum for this was the journal the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966-69). The current project to translate it into English has prompted a surge in research related to these themes. In the Cahiers, efforts were made to reconcile Marxist politics with a Lacanian account of the subject. Lacan’s notion of the Real was essential to this and, along with the other elements of his thought, came to be developed by Badiou to address political and ontological domains.

More recently, formalism in philosophy has expanded to address issues beyond these origins. For instance, formalistic reconstructions of Heideggerian and Husserlian thought have proved intensely productive and have problematized the opposition of philosophies of the concept to phenomenological philosophies. Moreover, recent efforts to address questions in aesthetics and politics with formal approaches has further expanded the boundaries of formalism’s theoretical scope. Paul Livingston’s book, The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism, examines the landscape of political criticism and change given the results and paradoxes of 20th century projects of formalization in mathematics and logic. Following this, his current project focuses on Heidegger’s philosophy, and will reexamine our inherited notions of sense and truth. After writing a book on Lacan’s concept of the Real, Tom Eyers has analyzed the intellectual foundations of structuralism in 1930s and 1940s French epistemology and philosophy of science. He is presently writing a book entitled Speculative Formalism: The Poetics of Form in Literature, Science, and Philosophy which will bring that work to bear on poetics and literary theory. In addition to translating Badiou’s Theory of the Subject and Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, Bruno Bosteels has devoted numerous books to Badiou and issues in political thought. In his recent Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror, Bosteels investigates ways art and literature provide insight into processes of subjectification at the core of Marxist and psychoanalytic concerns.

This summer symposium will bring together interested graduate students, postdoctoral students, and junior faculty for a week of discussion, lecture, and close textual study. Together, we will pursue questions regarding formalism and its relation to the Real in contemporary ontology, politics, and theories of the subject and their consequences for understanding knowledge, history, state, language, art, and literature. Lacanian and Badiouian thought will form a key theoretical backdrop. Yet, we expect our studies will include work by a number of other figures, including Plato, Marx, Nietzsche, Frege, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lautman, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Macherey, Miller, Butler, Jameson, Žižek, Hägglund, and Malabou.

All texts and discussion will be in English.

Application:

We invite current graduate students, postdoctoral students, and junior faculty in philosophy or related disciplines to submit an application composed of a C.V. and a short letter of intent (500 words maximum) to pghsummersymposium2014@gmail.com. The deadline for applications is Friday, April 25th, 2014. We expect to respond with notifications regarding acceptance to the symposium by Thursday, May 1st, 2014 to help facilitate summer plans. The seminar will be limited to 30-40 participants. For more information as it becomes available, we have created a website for the symposium: http://pghsummersymposium6.wix.com/pghsummersymp2014

Participants’ Conference (August 2-3):

In order to facilitate a further exchange of ideas and research, a participants’ conference will be held the weekend before the seminar begins. Applicants who receive notice of acceptance as participants will be asked – if interested – to submit an abstract of up to 500 words on any theme related to the topic of the seminar. The participants’ conference will take place on Saturday and Sunday, August 2-3, 2014.

Financial Information:

There will be a $200 registration fee for each participant of the seminar. This money will be used for event expenses like a conference dinner, celebration, daily coffee, etc. Please note that participants will be responsible for arranging their own housing as well as financing most of their own meals for the duration of the symposium. However, with respect to lodging, we expect a limited number of arrangements with graduate students will be available on a first come, first serve basis.

Organizers:

The Post‐Graduate Program in Philosophy, Science and Values (University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, and National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM) and the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) invite PhD students to apply for the interdisciplinary and international Summer School:

The Regulative Capacity of Knowledge Objects: Opening the Black Box of Knowledge Governance

Think of Climate Change, Wikileaks, nanotechnology, Responsible Innovation, neural implants, Linux, GMOs or the German Energy Transition. But when we think about it, do they actually exist? And if they do what should they be like in the future? What exactly are they? Are they symbols, technical artifacts, discourses, constellations of actors, scientific disputes? Are they political issues, societal problems, human-nonhuman-hybrids, modifiers of existence, problems for governance and regulation? In a way, they are all of these things and less – and probably more.

They are what this Summer School refers to as “knowledge objects”. These objects are peculiar, blurry, constantly unfolding and transforming entities that increasingly challenge contemporary societies and sciences and our understanding of knowledge. The knowledge in knowledge objects is always plural: scientific, public, mundane, interdisciplinary, speculative, uncertain. It is heterogeneously produced about, with, through or in them and contributes to their identification, contestation and transformation.

Yet, knowledge objects are also enablers of such knowledge productions and the societal controversies that go along with them. This intricate entanglement of knowledge objects and society poses various normative and regulative questions – which are part of these objects and due to them the problems societies face. This entanglement could be viewed as a fundamental challenge for knowledge governance. To address these complex challenges to societies and sciences, the Summer School aims to bring together two strands of science and technology studies (STS) which so far haven’t combined: the focus on “knowledge objects” and the perspective of “knowledge governance”.

The starting point of this summer school is the assumption that knowledge objects are subject and object of knowledge governance. They create the need for and they enable various forms of knowledge governance. In a way, this synchrony is a black box of knowledge governance. The Summer School proposes that this “governance black box” can be opened by focusing on an extended concept of knowledge objects and by analyzing their governance dimensions.

Keynotes by:
David Guston, PhD, Professor of Political Science, Arizona State University, US
Graham Harman, PhD, Professor of Philosophy, American University, Cairo, Egypt
Karin Knorr-Cetina, PhD, Professor emeritus of Sociology, University of Constance, Germany, and George
Wells Beadle Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, US
Noortje Marres, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Goldsmiths University of London, UK

Applications are due by 28th March 2014.

Find out all the details at: http://www.itas.kit.edu/english/events_2014_summerschool.php

The Forum Scientiarum of the University of Tübingen, Germany, is organizing a one-week International Interdisciplinary Summer School on “The Neurobiology of Emotions and Feelings” with António Damasió and Sabine Döring.

Time: June 2nd –  June 6th, 2014.

For further information please see http://www.unseld-lectures.de/cfa

Call for applications: UL2014_Call4Applications.

Deadline for the receipt of complete applications (application form,  CV, essay) is February 31th, 2014.

We are delighted to announce that the twelfth Oxford Internet Institute (OII) Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) will be held at the OII from 7-18 July 2014.

The aim of the program is to bring together up to 30 advanced doctoral students engaged in dissertation research relating to the Internet and other ICTs. By sharing their work and learning from leading academics in the field, students can enhance the quality and significance of their thesis research and create a peer network of excellent young researchers. There will also be an opportunity to connect with alumni from previous years, ensuring that the benefits of the OII SDP network are passed on to this year’s cohort.

The 2014 Summer Doctoral Programme will build upon the research strengths of the OII, involving many of our Fellows from across multiple disciplines as well as bringing in guest speakers from a variety of institutions. It will emphasize methodological innovation and good practice in research design, and will expose students to the benefits of discussing their research in a multi-disciplinary teaching environment. The overall aims are to help improve students’ dissertations and to develop a cohesive peer network for future collaboration and support.

For further information on this year’s SDP, including application instructions, please see our website.

Here you can find more general info, the SDP blog and a great video by the 2013 crowd.

If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail: victoria.nash@oii.ox.ac.uk

AIAS-COFUND_Fellowships_CALL Guide_for_applicants_AIAS_Fellowship_2014

Please see the attached call for fellowships at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS). The call is for fellowships of up to three years (6 -36 months) for junior researchers  (with 2 years of experience after their PhD) and senior researchers. Fellowships in all fields of research are given out. Having established contacts to, or collaboration with, Aarhus University researchers is an advantage.  (So please contact me if you plan to apply!)

Deadline for applications is March 21 2014.

On behalf of Center on Autobiographical Memory Research (CON AMORE), Aarhus University

An interesting article from “Inside Higher Ed” on writing a good cover letter for an academic job at a teaching institution.