IN-PERSON Lisbon Livable Cities. Section A
Abstract
This paper will present and launch an edited volume, The Smartification of Everything: critical analyses of a ubiquitous reality across social sciences, humanities and the arts (University of Toronto Press, publication spring 2025). The book aims to rectify an urban bias in scholarship on smart systems while also showcasing the potential of a transdisciplinary dialogue between the arts and sciences on this subject. The works of art and academic essays we will share in our presentation all take up the bounded concept of ‘smartness’ as open to inquiry, to push beyond the obsolete urban-rural division too often reproduced in smartness discourses. Through contributions across various arts and research disciplines including science studies, anthropology, geography, urban studies and architecture – the presentation will use four stories to illustrate how smartness is partial, messy, and contested, while bound to specific sociocultural, historical, spatial and political realities. Our presentation will work through two provocations: How is “smartness” manifested in geographies and sectors beyond and in connection to the urban? What boundaries around technoscientific “smartness” do actors draw and contest, and what can be learned when opening up smartness to specific cultural, historical and geographic contexts?
Kelly Bronson is t Canada Research Chair in Science & Society at University of Ottawa in Canada. She has a background in biology but is a social scientist studying the social justice implications of controversial technologies—from GMOs to big data and AI. She has intervened into technology governance and regulation and has publishes her academic work in a variety of disciplinary journals (Science Communication, Journal of Responsible Innovation, Big Data & Society). Her recent book is titled, Immaculate Conception of Data: Agribusiness, activists and their shared politics of the future.
Mascha Gugganig is a social and cultural anthropologist, a science & technology studies (STS) scholar, and a curator for research exhibitions that have covered such issues as agricultural biotechnology in Hawai’i, controversial technologies in human-environment relations and processes of ‘smartification.’ Her most recent research is concerned with grassroots innovation and (digital) technologies for agroecology and agrobiodiversity, and how such developments can be made accessible to a broader public through audiovisual and virtual science communication, exhibition work and the arts. She is an Affiliate Researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (LMU), where she is currently preparing her Habilitation entitled “Humans – Food – Environments: Contributions to the Environmental Humanities from Science and Technology Studies and Sociocultural Anthropology”, and Senior Research Associate at the Department of Science, Technology & Society (Technical University Munich).;
Vincent Mirza conducts research in the new wave of urban anthropology. He is interested in the relationship between urban processes and the Anthropocene in order to conceptualise the issues and challenges of an anthropology of contemporary worlds and the global. Themes such as the transformation of work, everyday life in neighbourhoods, markets, art and architecture allow him to reflect on contemporary urban processes and the way in which they recompose and decompose spaces.
9:00 am - 10:30 am
Friday 11th July, 2025