Fundamental interdisciplinary questions between CS and SSH

Description:
This is an international workshop organised by the Social X group. Initiated in 2022, Social X is a predominantly Dutch collective led by a group of scholars based at the universities of Tilburg and Eindhovenm which conducts seminars, conference interventions and writing projects on a collaborative basis. We investigate the rapidly dissolving ontological and epistemological borders between computer science and the social sciences and humanities, and the ways in which CS has become as a societal actor involved in governing society, intermediating social processes, and optimising social systems for particular outcomes.

Aims:
The aims of this workshop are threefold: first, to invite in a broader set of participants to investigate radical forms of interdisciplinarity. Second, to stabilise the collaboration and develop it further into possibilities for more formal collaboration, for instance around research projects and education. And third, to formally articulate what possibilities our work has for structural collaborations among institutions and fields, especially data science; software engineering; law; critical data studies, and philosophy. In the workshop we will focus on pinning down and further developing the core concept that has driven our collaboration over the last two years: that of generative friction. This is a process the group has developed both to find commonalities among the paradigms we use in our different fields, and to analyse shared experiences of dysfunctionality that lead to power struggles between fields. Examples of the latter could include the often combative debates about the meaning of terms such as ‘fairness’, ‘trust’ and ‘progress’, each of which not only has profoundly different meanings in different fields, but leads to different ways of addressing both the development and the governance of technology, as well as the education of the next generations of scientists.