The Tensions of Europe conference is organised biennially by an interdisciplinary community of scholars who study the shaping of Europe through the lens of technology and material culture.
Decoding Europe: Technological Pasts in the Digital Age investigates the way in which our approach to European technological pasts is influenced, shaped and may even be transformed in the digital age, and, conversely, how the digital present and future of Europe is the result of long-term historical trajectories and patterns.
In the current narrative, digitisation is a process profoundly shaped by US visions. This conference also aims to rediscover European influences in this process, alternative EU visions, etc. Although Europe will be at the centre of most of the analyses, some presentations will compare global, national, regional and/or local approaches and combine several scales and trajectories to shed light on technological pasts in the digital age.
Along with the impact of digitisation on historical archives, resources and practices, the writing and shaping of European history will also be explored in a critical, experimental and interdisciplinary way: retro-digitised and born-digital heritage, new tools and digital practices of European historiography, digital narratives and teaching methods in the field of European history.
The conference aims to encourage a process of cross-fertilisation by including contributions from a wide variety of historical disciplines as well as from archivists and fields such as geography, digital humanities, science and technology studies, Internet studies, media studies, information and communication sciences, and infrastructure, platform and code studies.
More information and a detailed programme are available on the conference website:
www.toe2019.org