Fabrication – winter 23/24

We use this site to present brief reflections of the lectures, asking how they relate to this winter term’s theme Fabrication.

Click here to unroll and learn more about the theme

While this summer’s series revolved around the theme of Replacement, this coming winter we want to talk about Fabrication – that is, processes of making in, with and of this world.

We’re not so much interested in exposing what’s fake about it, but rather curiously tracing multiple modes of fabrication out there. The material assembly of structures is as relevant to us as the semantic processes of fabulation.

The talks will therefore look at the fabrication of facts and artefacts from more than one angle. We’ll discuss feminist modes of fabricating knowledge through the infrastructures of Wikipedia and examine how these are political and contested. We’ll hear how researchers in the humanities fabricate spirited knowledge in material data practices. We’ll ask who cares about data in organisational practices. And finally, we’ll learn what might be good enough when it comes to making software products.

Download the PDF file of this text.

Hannah Schmedes (Ruhr University Bochum)Reweaving Knowledge: Feminist Interventions and Infrastructural Biases in WikipediaComment to be followed
Fabian Pittroff (Ruhr University Bochum)Data Spirits: On the Fabrication of Geist in the HumanitiesComment to be followed
Stefanie Büchner (Leibniz University Hannover)Who cares about data? Data Care Arrangements as Accomplishments in Everyday Organisational PracticeComment to be followed
Paula Bialski (University of St. Gallen)Good Enoughing at Middle Tech: An Ethnography of Corporate Software CultureComment to be followed