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Hacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast
As Covid-19 turned most conferences virtual, so to combat Zoom-fatigue, at 4S/EASST 2020 we decided to try another format and turn a conference session into a podcast. Among hundreds of panels, papers and sessions, our panels rounded up all sorts of researchers who study what it is to be a hacker, and what hacking, programming, tinkering and working with computers is all about. We have continued biennally for full three seasons.
The newest season comes to you from the 2024 join Society for Social Studies of Science/European Association for the Study of Science and Technology conference (4S/EASST) in Amsterdam, titled "Making and Doing Transformations".
The second series was from EASST 2022 titled "The Politics of Technoscientific Futures" held in Madrid in July 2022. Our panel was titled "Hacking Everything. The cultures and politics of hackers and software workers". The first series was from 4S/EASST in "virtual Prague" in August 2020, titled "Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and agency of STS in emerging worlds".
We the hosts are Paula Bialski, who is an Associate Professor at the University of St. Gallen, Andreas Bischof who is a Research Group Leader at Chemnitz University of Technology, and Mace Ojala, a PhD scholar at Ruhr-University Bochum. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records. The theme track of first series is "Rocky" by Paula & Karol. Heights Beats produced the theme track of the second series. Funding for the editing of this first series comes from University of St. Gallen, the second from Chemnitz University of Technology.
Episodes
21 episodes
Extra episode (2024) Paula, Andreas and Mace talk about the podcast
Your hosts Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala look back on three seasons of this podcast panel format. How did this get started, how does it work, and what has been fun so far?This episode is a live recording from
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Episode 4 (2024) Victoria Neumann and Ana Custura: What does it mean to be part of a network? From silent contributor to engaged activist: the volunteer relay operators behind the Tor Project
Who is operating the Tor network, and why? Victoria Neumann from Lancaster University tells us.Tor (acronym for The Onion Router) is one of the most famous projects focusing on online privacy and anonymity. Using the Tor Browser, one ca...
Episode 3 (2024) Sylvain Besençon: Information security and the care of open cryptography technology
We are happy to hear back from Sylvain Besençon from University of Fribourg, who wraps up research we learned about in 2020 about caring for open source cryptography.This...
Episode 2 (2024) Janis Lena Meißner: From “makers-in-the-making” to “empowering hacks”
Janis Lena Meißner from The Vienna University of Technology shares stories and insights from practical work with people who are usually not included in the Maker movement.Despite its promises of technology democratization, the Maker Mov...
Episode 1 (2024) Charles Berret: Metis and the hacker
In this episode we hear Charles Berret from Linköping University characterize the cunning and craftiness via a concept from ancient Greek.The concept of 'metis' offers an especially effective means of characterizing the intelligence and...
Episode 7 (2022) Ola Michalec - Engineer-as-a-service. What is the future of engineering professionals in the digital world?
We have the pleasure to chat with Ola Michalec, a Senior Research Associate at University of Bristol. Don't miss on our discussion with Ola in 2020.For decades, nuclear p...
Episode 6 (2022) Annika Richterich - Chaos reigns. Hacktivism as health data activism
We speak with Annika Richterich from Maastricht University where she works as an Assistant Professor in Digital Cultures at the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Annika was with...
Episode 5 (2022) Maja Urbanczyk - Hacking decision-making
This episode brings us Maja Urbanczyk who is a PhD Candidate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology.On more and more occasions, political decision-makers decide over software that is to be used by the public. In these situati...
Episode 4 (2022) Jan Schmutzler and Estrid Sørensen - Playing with fire. Re-identification hacks and organisational micro-politics
We hear from research by PhD Candidate Jan Schmutzler and Professor Estrid Sørensen, both from Ruhr University Bochum.Data anonymisation has long been the central measure for social scientist to protect the privacy of the subjects from ...
Episode 3 (2022) Tim Cowlishaw - Tiny tools and little loops. Software art as care-ful software practice
We speak with Tim Cowlishaw, BAU, Doctoral Candidate at College of Arts & Design Barcelona.Whether as part of giant technology corporations or open-source software projects, software developers are increasingly responsible for defin...
Episode 2 (2022) Cansu Güner - Hack the house! Reconfiguring domesticity in co-living spaces
This episode is with Doctoral Candidate Cansu Güner from School of Social Sciences and Technology at Technical University of Münich.This podcast is about hacking houses. Entrepreneurs with engineering backgrounds who live in co-living s...
Episode 1 (2022) Maja-Lee Voigt - CTRL + F_eminist futures_. Hacking algorithmic architectures of cities to come
In this episode we are joined by Maja-Lee Voigt, a Research Associate at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.To this day it remains a question of power who is granted the right to visibly take up and claim...
Episode 1 (2020): Morgan G. Ames - Throwback Culture: The Role of Nostalgia in Hacker Worlds
This session's guest is Morgan G. Ames, who joins us from UC Berkely. There she is an assistant adjunct professor in the School of Information and interim associate d...
Episode 2 (2020): Minna Saariketo & Mareike Glöss - In the grey zone of hacking? Two cases in the political economy of software and the Right to Repair
Minna Saariketo is a postdoc at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University. Mareike
Episode 3 (2020): Annika Richterich - Forget about the learning: On (digital) creativity and expertise in hacker-/makerspaces
Annika Richterich is an assistant professor in Digital Culture at Maastricht University (NL). Her research focuses on practices of collaboration, learning and innovation in hacking communities.Annika explains that hackers and makers are ...
Episode 4 (2020): Alex Dean Cybulski - Hacker Culture Is Everything You Don't Get Paid For In the Information Security Industry
Alex Dean Cybulski is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information. Presently, he is writing a dissertation on capture the flag competitions, play and games in hacker culture and the information security industry.
Episode 5 (2020): Jérémy Grosman - Algorithmic Objects, Algorithmic Practices
Jérémy is a PhD student at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Namur in Belgium His work sits between computer science on the one hand and philosophy on the other. Jeremy’s talk today takes a deep dive into the daily prac...
Episode 6 (2020): Stéphane Couture - Hacker Culture and Practices in the Development of Internet Protocols
Stéphane Couture is a Professor at the Faculté des arts et des sciences - Département de communication at the University of Montreal. Referring to previous work done on hacker culture and free and open source software, S...
Episode 7 (2020): Ola Michalec - Hacking infrastructures: understanding capabilities of Operational Technology (OT) security workers
Ola is a research associate at the University of Bristol and is interested in the 'making of' technology, science and policy, specifically about the Cybersecurity of Critical National InfrastructuresFacilities like power plants, water pi...
Episode 8 (2020): Sylvain Besençon - Securing by hacking: maintenance regimes around an end-to-end encryption standard
In this session, we interview Sylvain Besençon a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Fribourg. In his presentation, he talks about internet standards, which are elementary and powerful bricks of the Internet infrastruc...
Episode 9 (2020): R. Stuart Geiger & Dorothy Howard - “I didn’t sign up for this”: The Invisible Work of Maintaining Free/Open-Source Software Communities
R. Stuart Geiger calls himself an Ethnographer of computation and computational ethnographer, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Communication