Event organisers: Professor Scott Veitch, Dr Connal Parsley, Dr Conor Heaney, Professor Margaret Davies
Event partner: Hong Kong University Faculty of Law
A two-day workshop investigating the normativity of technology in social systems
The second workshop in the series, organised in partnership between the University of Kent with UKRI funding and the Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong, turns to the theme of the normativity of technology. From the point of view of technosocial systems, technologies are inherently normative since they are inextricable from broader social systems and their practices, behaviours and meanings (Kudina and van Poel 2024). Attention has recently been given to the interaction of technical and social aspects in such systems, their basic building blocks, and the disruptive potential of AI. This workshop will build on research into the diverse modalities of the normativity of technology and of specific technosocial systems and processes (Hui 2023, Campolo and Schwerzmann 2023). While researchers have underlined the stark differences between machinic, data-driven, code-based normativity and legal normativity understood as ‘human’ and linguistic, an econormative approach encourages us to interrogate the plural, overlapping and potentially incommensurable layers or registers of normativity in technosocial systems. This workshop will explore those registers, the politico-legal dynamics of their interrelation, and their connection with value and evaluation in an evolving technical milieu (Gilbert Simondon).
Participants were invited for the relevance of their work to diverse aspects of this overall frame. Recognising that ‘econormativity’ is not an established disciplinary term, participants were invited to present existing work, alongside their reflections on one or more of the following questions:
What conceptions of rules, principles, norms, models, and examples are in circulation in your work?
How does your work speak to the transformation of social, technical and environmental relations, and questions of value and evaluation?
How does attention to specific technologies or technical processes enable a more detailed understanding of normativities and how they function?
What are the different layers or registers of normativity that emerge from your work, and how do they interact?
What are the important theoretical tools in your work for understanding the normativity of techniques and technologies?
In what ways do the technical processes in your work—and their normativity—connect with broader ecologies and life processes?
Participants:
Rhys Aston (Waikato Law School, NZ)
Jenna Burrell (Yokohama)
Herman Cappelen (Philosophy, HKU)
Anthony Chamboredon (Law, University of Paris)
Margaret Davies (Flinders Law School, Adelaide)
Samantha Frost (Political Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Jake Goldenfein (Melbourne Law School)
Conor Heaney (Kent Law School, UK)
Yuk Hui (Philosophy, Erasmus University, Netherlands)
Connal Parsley (Kent Law School, UK)
Thao Phan (Sociology, ANU)
Rachel Siow Robertson (Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University)
Rachel Sterken (Philosophy, HKU)
Scott Veitch (Law, HKU)
Zhenbin Zuo (Essex Law School/ Peking U Law)