CFP: Digital Worlds: A Virtual Workshop

The Center for Collaboration and Ethics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley invites submissions for a virtual workshop to be conducted remotely on April 10 & 11, 2021. We seek papers that interrogate the way modern digital technology enhances, hampers, or alters our experience of our lived worlds.

The distinction between “being on the internet” and “being in the real world” is eroding.  People can increasingly be said to “live on their phones” or other devices. This workshop aims to interrogate the meaning and structure of the world as mediated by such devices.

For example, Google Maps changes what it means to get lost and Air BnB changes who our neighbors are. Texting and social media change what it means to be close to or far from our loved ones, while dating apps dominate the way many of us evaluate and meet romantic partners. Online shopping disrupts the institutional structures of commerce while augmented reality fractures our collective experience of a shared environment.

We invite submissions on these and other themes from a variety of perspectives such as environmental philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of technology, or social and political philosophy. Papers might address such questions as:

•How is the world given through the mediation of digital technology? 

•What notions of self are deployed or instantiated? 

•How are structures of intersubjectivity shaped or assumed by digital technology? 

•How is our sense of place enhanced, diminished, or altered? 

•What sorts of groups become possible and what sorts disappear? 

•What underexamined implications for social justice are raised by new technologies?

The purpose of this workshop is to collaboratively develop works-in-progress with an eye toward publication, possibly in a collected volume (details to follow). This is a pre-read workshop with each paper having a designated commenter to lead the conversation, rather than formal conference presentations. We invite extended abstract submissions of approximately 500 words by January 15th. We also invite expressions of interest to be a commenter on a paper, independent of a submission (it is not necessary to submit a paper to provide commentary). The discussion draft of the papers will be required one month in advance of the meeting for everyone to pre-read and for commenters to review and prepare feedback

Abstracts and questions should be submitted to: [email protected]