International workshop organized by Ingmar Lippert (IT University Copenhagen) and Susann Wagenknecht (Technical University Dresden)
at Technical University of Dresden 2-3 September 2021

Program Extract: “[…] As formality is made and unmade (Smart et al. 2017), forms help organize far-flung coordination and gain salience as prerequisite of accountability. They furnish the yardsticks of critique. With this workshop, we draw attention to the situated relation of form and critique that emerges from the ever changing tangle of practice. We suggest exploring “infra-critiques”—critiques ‘from within’ shifting forms of life (Verran 2014, Jaeggi 2018). Analyses of critique ‘from within’ emphasize the multiplicity and limitations of formal assessment. They help examining how in/form/alities boost and marginalize different modes of benchmarking and evaluation, denunciation and appraisal, determination and indetermination (Boltanski & Thévenot 1999). Requirements for specific in/form/ation, e.g., can feed authoritative regimes of control while effectively undermining accountability and attenuating critique (Lippert 2018). Against this backdrop, we are interested in formographic inquiries that problematize the enactment of form as a fixed, detached point of reference. […]
The workshop will take place at the Technical University Dresden, Germany, September 2-3, 2021. The workshop is designed as collective learning process, focusing on submissions that rely upon ethnographic materials to engage in the nexus of form, practice, critique, and accountability. To this end, we ask participants to circulate workshop papers (2,000w), accompanied by a digitally reproducible object (with permissions), prior to the workshop.”
Link to the complete presentation