December 2019 – ConJunction

Together with Bernadette Loacker (Lancester University) and Randi Heinrichs (Lüneburg) I co-edited and ephemera special Issue (PDF) on truth-telling and whistleblowing in digital cultures. The issue opens a space for discussing the specific ‘conditions of possibility’ of truth-telling and the multiple technologies, which mediate it in contemporary digital cultures.

The notion of the ethico-politics of whistleblowing is introduced to address the irreducible entanglement of questions of ethics, politics and truth in the practice of ‘speaking out’. The special issue brings together a set of papers, acknowledging that forms and mediations of truth-telling are complex and contested. The contributions discuss questions such as: Who is, in digital cultures, considered to be qualified to speak out, and about what? Under which conditions, and with what consequences can ‘the truth’ be told? How do digital infrastructures regulate the truth, and the process of making it heard? How is the figure of the whistleblower constructed, and how do whistleblowers constitute themselves as political and ethical subjects, willing to take risks and pose a challenge, to others and themselves?

Check out the full text of the Special Issue at ephemera.

Last Friday, the 4^th OS ConJunction Students and Alumni Day took place at the Kaiser Leopold Saal at the University of Innsbruck. The theme for this year’s event was “Organizing Creativity and the Creativity of Organizing”.

After an introduction by Richard Weiskopf and Leonhard Dobusch, Birthe Soppe gave a talk on “How organizations make creativity valuable”. She provided insights from her empirical research on game development in the creative industry. She raised the topic of competing logics of market and creativity. This topic was revisited in a lively panel discussion, with five invited panelists, moderated by Katharina Zangerle.