Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Tadeusz Józef Rudek
(Jagiellonian University)
Monika Wulz (Leuphana University)
Aleksandra Wagner (Jagiellonian University)
Sebastian Pfotenhauer (Technical University of Munich)
Anna Lytvynova (ETH Zürich)
Oliwia Mandrela (Jagiellonian University)
Alexander Wentland (Technical University of Munich)
Margarita Boenig-Liptsin (ETH Zürich)
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Tadeusz Józef Rudek
(Jagiellonian University)
Margarita Boenig-Liptsin (ETH Zürich)
Oliwia Mandrela (Jagiellonian University)
- Discussant:
-
Shun-Ling Chen
(Academia Sinica)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract
Democracy on the “Edge” explores how Central and Eastern Europe’s liminal position shapes sociotechnical transformations—from energy to digitalization. Through panels and workshops, it rethinks imaginaries, transitions, and failed promises that define life, knowledge, and democracy on the edge.
Description
Central and Eastern Europe has long lived “on the edge” of empires, political cultures, economic systems, and ways of knowing. Today, it again occupies a liminal position in global socio-technical transformations, from energy transitions to digitalization. Through a thematic panel, and co-creative workshops, Democracy on the Edge invites researchers from and beyond CEE to examine forms of life, value, and imaginaries on the edge.
Here, the “edge” is both metaphor and method: a site of instability and creativity for exploring implicit norms of sociotechnical progress. The sessions draw on STS scholarship that links political cultures and institutions with science and technology (Ezrahi on democracy and imagination, Sunder Rajan and Petryna on citizenship, Jasanoff on co-production). They also engage with concepts central to CEE experience—imitation, precarity, performance, and development.
Participants will reflect on transitions, the role of computing in CEE pasts and futures, and the (failed) promises shaping regional imaginaries. Themes include:
• 1989 ↔ 2025: cyclical transitions, generational imaginaries, constitutional moments
• Infrastructure: political, scientific, and technological layering over time
• Geography & identity: borders, peripheries, rescaled belongings
• Materialities of transition: from energy grids to neural networks
• Temporal edges: anticipation, delay, suspension
Structure
1. Paper session (1 h): Democracy on the Edge: Science, Technology and Political Promise in CEE and beyond
2. Two workshops (90 min each):
• Session I – Transitions in CEE: What are/ and for whom are transitions in CEE and how to observe them? Are there failed promises of those transitions? innovation, peripheries, futuring, and the politics of knowledge.
• Session II – Computing CEE Pasts and Futures: digitalization, AI imaginaries, affective economies of failure.
3. Outside-the-conference meet-up: informal reflection and network-building.
4. Follow-up: special issue and interdisciplinary research network Living on the Edge.