Call for Workshops

At the upcoming UNITOPIA conference we aim to open a discussion about the risks, but also the potentials that digital transformation brings for our democracies. What forms of regulation, or governance are necessary to align digital technologies with a common good? How would we envision future digital democracies? Which political theory concepts of democracy need to be adapted to the technological development and vice versa? How can we sustain and further develop central premises of democracy in a new socio-technical order? And how could we enable processes to build socio-technical institutions and orders for our future democracies? These are just some questions we want to tackle at the conference. We understand the digital transformation as a democratic moment. It forces and enables us to rethink and reconceptualize how we understand democracy in the digital age.

At the conference we want to go beyond the classical panel discussion. As part of a more in-depth discussion and community building the conference also hosts different workshop formats at the conference.

• Conceptual and academic workshops are aimed at discussing specific challenges and issues and to provide a space, where explorative research is enabled. Instead of presenting a finished paper, these workshops encourage early-on and experimental thinking about conceptual and academic perspectives on the conference topic.
• Skills Workshops are envisioned as a transfer and training area, where young scholars are learning often implicit or unaddressed skills needed to survive in the academic landscape. Hands-on, young scholars can learn how to present themselves in the public, how to write successful grant proposals or how to deal with writing habits. If you have skills that you would like to share with fellow young researchers we are looking forward to your contribution.

To foster an in-depth conversation about digital transformation as democratic moment, we invite workshop contributions for UNITOPIA 2022. The workshops should take 1,5h and address one of the two described formats. We especially encourage creative and innovative approaches that exceed standardized workshop formats. The number of participants is limited to 25 persons per workshop due to room capacity.

UNITOPIA 2022 will be hosted at the University of Graz from May 12-14, 2022. The conference language is English.

The abstracts (max. 1000 words) should contain a short introduction to the topic, the central question tackled in the workshop, a short description of the workshop’s format (eg group discussion, paper workshop, etc), needed infrastructure for hosting the workshop, and how it contributes to an ongoing discussion. Since the conference understands itself as an interdisciplinary event, these are just some guiding bullet points. However, we highly encourage you to keep a diverse audience in mind when formulating the abstract.

If you are unsure if your idea fits into one of the proposed tracks please get in touch before submitting your abstract with unitopia@uni-graz.at

To submit your Workshop´s idea, please use this template and send it to unitopia@uni-graz.at

Deadline: March 22, 2022. You will receive information on the acceptance of your contribution until April 13, 2022.