Author Archives: Nicholas

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About Nicholas

Professor of Sociology, Environmental Studies, and Science and Technology Studies at Penn State, Nicholas writes about scientific study of states and the future.

Christine Hine on virtual ethnography’s E3 Internet

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Hine, ethnographer-extraordinaire.

Heather Ford's avatarEthnography Matters

christine_hine_thumbnailChristine Hine is an early pioneer of virtual ethnography and has been at the forefront of movements towards redefining ethnography for the digital age. She is currently a Reader at the University of Surrey’s Sociology Department.

Editor’s note: In this post for our Being a student ethnographer series, I talked to Christine Hine about her forthcoming book, ‘Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday’ due out next year. In this interview, Christine talks about the current phase in virtual ethnographic practice, about what are her latest research interests, and about a framework that she believes can help ethnographers understand how to adapt their practice to suit multi-modal communication environments. 

HF: What do you think are the key challenges that ethnographers face in trying to study the Internet today?

CH: Robinson and Schulz, in their 2009 paper, describe evolving forms of ethnographic practice in response to the Internet…

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Fixing Peer Review

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broken_window

This post is about fixing peer review. dmfant, who some of you might know from synthetic_zero, commented on a recent post on the state of STS scholarship, asking:

have you been following: http://www.cplong.org/2013/11/the-peer-review-coordinator-and-the-collegiality-index/ ?

Which is a discussion about making reviewers and reviews public (rather than granting reviewers anonymity). The idea is that we could improve reviewing scholarly work through a process of making it public and creating, in the process, a “reviewer score” for reviewers that would be known, esteemed, and productive. My response was so long, I will post it here for further consideration.

My response was (also, I write as a faculty member and about faculty issues, so it is a bit myopic in that way):

I’ve been critical of peer review for a long time, probably ever since I was “subjected” to it early on in my career. This new approach is not nearly as much of a solution as I think it is being presented as:

First, one of the few things that I like about PR is exactly that it is NOT a game of hierarchy. You might get a reputation with an editor, but that editor will be replaced eventually, so the influence of “being a good researcher” over “being a good reviewer” was primary.

Second, my guess is that this is just something that will further hurt in-coming scholars, meaning, it is precisely newer scholars that will need to be deemed “good reviewers” and it is senior scholars with tenure who are the most free to not care about being deemed a “good reviewer.”

Third, another problem will be: is this yet another thing I have to do in order to get tenure? Again, the young scholar is held to a higher standard than the senior scholars that will oversee their tenure file, and, again, the senior scholar hold the younger scholar to a higher standard for tenure than they themselves were held to. That, however, depends a lot on how university administrators see such activities: will young scholars be expected to be “good reviewers” as a part of the tenure decision OR will young scholars be rewarded directly for being deemed “good reviewers” in the form of larger raises? I would imagine that rather than being directly awarded for this hard work, it will be just another expectation for young scholars; it will be, in effect, just something that can held against a scholar (i.e., being deemed “bad reviewer”) than something rewarded (i.e., we expect our faculty to be “good reviewers”).

Fourth, the predictable counter-argument would look like this: “oh, silly Nicholas, don’t be so cynical, if we can “fix” the peer review process, then you’ll be able to publish even more research and publish it through a process that is more fair.” We all know that the publication process is unfair. It is a reality. We all come to grips with it one way or another. When I consider the work of my peers, I am able to keep this in mind. However, if we “fix” it, it will still be unfair (i.e., instead of a tyranny of advanced/high-prestige researchers having a strong voice in the review process, we will trade one tyrant for another, the good reviewer, and soon we will be forced to publish what they will accept) and there is no reason to think that “good reviewers” are going to be more fair, promote innovation, or let the author’s voice come through. We will just trade one set of intrenched values for a new set of values that will be intrenched later on.

Fifth, all of this would not work even if, by some magical coincidence it did align university officials, faculty members, and folks that populate promotion and tenure committees … its called “the internet.” Of course, whenever I get a paper, I could determine the author with stunning frequency by just looking-up the title of the paper, which was likely presented in some professional society’s annual meeting that I probably attended, moreover, most of the papers I get to review these days, I know them as soon as I see them because, if you’re an expert in a small area, you know all the main players already. If you want to promote their work, then you can. If you want to thwart their work, then you can. There is no reason to think that a new system should change this. We already know whose papers they are; anonymity for the author seems long dead among specialists. Then comes reviewers: “There seems to be widespread skepticism that peer review without anonymity can be both rigorous and fair” to quote the blog. The idea that anonymity allows one to be “fair” (i.e., fair being defined primarily in terms of being able to say difficult comments plainly) is just BS. There is no reason to believe that in the professional game of science that I (or any other reviewer) cannot be fully honest in a review. Some folks use it to be a jerk. I understand that. I am fine with that. The reason is that some people are jerks. They are jerks in the classroom. They are jerks in their correspondence. I guess I am open to the range of personalities and am not entirely sure that erasing this variation or marginalizing folks that don’t quite have strongly developed social skills or promoting reviewers with glycerine tongues (by rewarding them with higher education’s favorite currency, status) makes much sense. People fail. Editors fail scholars by not taking this into account. This is a human enterprise and because it is I think we need to embrace a level of uncertainty, improve the processes that we have instead of upending a tradition.

In the end, if you want to fix one thing, I would say that we need NOT better reviewers (after all, reviews are just what they are, reviews), but better EDITORS. Show me an editor with a real vision, one capable of making tough decisions, one that is not a total tool of the reviews, an editor that is not constantly looking for ways to reduce their workload and simply embraces the huge responsibility of selecting one paper over another or encouraging the work of a young scholar to develop or reject the sloppy work of a senior scholar whose work is popular among reviews.

NOTE: the picture is from http://kennyjonesradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/broken_window.jpg

Is STS a bordello or cabinet of wonders?

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This is based on some ruminations over the last year, which I’ve mentioned a while back casually and which our now full-time blogger Stef Fishel discussed more recently.

Here goes: Is STS a bordello or cabinet of wonders? (I write in the plural because Jan-H. and I were writing this together)

In STS:

… we recognize the unorthodox and outlandish agency of “nonhumans” like scallops, microbes, Portuguese sea-going vessels, and British military aircrafts. In fact, the way we just listed those example case studies into the minutiae of STS scholarship is more telling than it might immediately appear. You see, STS is populated by intriguing micro case studies, and, from a far, STS appears to outsiders like a “cabinet of curiosities.” Because our research is punctualized into individual case studies, and these case studies were so routinely juxtaposed with one another during the era of great edited volumes of the 1980s, a look back through history of STS research is akin to opening the door to a cabinet whose contents were filled with every manner of wonderful and ornamental trinkets that somehow capture the grandeur of other worlds even in their miniature size. Also, because this cabinet was populated  during the Science Wars, its contents are all the more precious, and, in retrospect, to this day provide a sense of nostalgia to the scholars who filled it, marking the discoveries they had made, as they passed it down both as a gift and a challenge to the students they trained.

Also, in STS, however:

Before we are accused of fickle sentimentality for our academic home, our cabinet of curiosities might just as well appear as a “bar à hôtesses” to some insiders sickened by the excesses of postmodernity, or the bitter, personality-driven, concept-oriented turf wars over aurthorial copyright that have come to typify STS <FOOTNOTE: At feverpitch in the early 1990s, … collins yearly / latour callon etc.> and, to this day, distract the field from sharing any semblance of unity with regarding agreed-upon phenomenon to study as a group, all of which might spell the end of STS in years to come. Thus, calling our cabinet a bordello might be warranted in certain company.

*This post was largely inspired by Fabio’s early characterization of STS as a “cabinet of curiosities,” which has, since I first heard it, stayed with me. As he put it, STS is:

very anti-normal science. You end up with a cabinet of curiosities than a deep and precise knowledge of a specific issue.

**The picture is from: http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=7p2FFa9Eveh4JM&tbnid=oxupV4E35lZsLM:&ved=0CAQQjB0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fparismarket.blogspot.com%2F2011%2F09%2Fcabinets-of-curiosities-and-pretties.html&ei=pFuFUoT6NPHC4APa3ICABg&bvm=bv.56343320,d.dmg&psig=AFQjCNFDvgagsuepOr4mm7V0rPzbL4qZCQ&ust=1384557853106096

Research at Cornell

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Just last week, I visited Cornell University to visit Trever Pinch, a well-known STSers from the early days. Trever has been an active member of the two most important professional association in STS, the Society for the Social Studies of Science and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology.

With outstanding luck for me, turns out Trever is something of a pack-rat too, and has original conference proceedings for every single event in the history of both organizations. I’m in the process of using them to chart how different topics have been used in the history of the organizations. After my initial run, they will be donated to their respective professional organization.

While studies of 4S seem relatively rare, there was a recent (and interesting) project reviewing EASST, which is here: EASST_conf_summary. Still, a couple of older 4S programs are available on-line. In what appears to be Sal Restivo’s personal program from the first meeting at Cornell University in 1976, available here: 1976 4S at Cornell, we can see into STS’s past.

During the 1976 meeting, Bruno LaTour (sic!), for example, was still a member of the Salk Laboratories presenting on citation analysis, which would later be the groundwork for Laboratory Life (which, in the 1986 edition, as a great postscript). S. W. Woolgar was present to, at the time hailing from Brunel University, discussing sociological analyses of scientific accounts. H. M. Collins attended, speaking about replication in science, which, as many of you know, would be the work that Woolgar, along with his student Malcolm Ashmore, would later bring Collins to task on in Ashmore’s incredible (and incredibly playful) The Reflexivity Thesis (read the preface for a hilarious letter from Woolgar to the editor). R. K. Merton gave the lunch talk. Karen Knorr gave two talks and John Law gave one on Anomie(? Anybody know what happened to that paper? Maybe it’s sitting in an edited book nobody reads anymore…).

At any rate, as these are completed by my assistant, I’ll occasionally a comment or two.

What’s wrong with STS?

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Here is what’s wrong with STS. For a better STS, consider the following:

hmmm … My sense is that what’s “wrong” with STS is what’s “wrong” with a lot of organizational theory. There are no well-characterized phenomena to study (case studies are not phenomena, although they can lead to their discovery). Instead what you see is a proliferation of schematic “concepts.” In science, “progressive” cosmopolitan collectives build on phenomena and are pragmatic towards concepts and models (the one that provides a more satisfactory account of the phenomenon wins); “oppositional” enclave-based scientific movements deplore phenomena and focus on “authorial” concepts. Authorial concepts are those that are inherently associated with an author, who thus “owns it” (e.g. Latour –> actant). Because oppositional enclaves tend to be organized around “groups” and authorial charisma scientists do not compete to offer the best explanation of an explicitly recognized phenomenon (as in the Mertonian ideal type) but instead the incentive structure is biased for leaders of different subtribes to provide their own authorial concept. The reason is that without your “own” concept, you don’t have a reputation.

Thus, conceptual proliferation in oppositional enclaves is simply the outcome of a more basic underlying socio-structural logic. This contrast to the Mertonian ideal-type collective (which actually attaches names of authors to effects not concepts), which favors the proliferation of different explanations of the same (small) set of (clearly characterized) phenomena. Because authorial concepts, like all concepts, have the general structure (A as X) where X is the concept and A is some empirical setting, “progress” in oppositional collectives follows a “turf-war” model as you extend your concept to cover other realms, in particular realms that were previously covered by your rival’s own authorial concept (e.g. B as X and not Y, C as X and not Y, etc.)

This is not to say that well-characterized phenomena are absent from STS. Obviously one interesting phenomenon to emerge out of the STS enclave is what has become known as performativity (although Ezra might disagree as to whether this phenomenon is well-characterized), and not surprisingly, this is where STS has been the most influential outside of the enclaves. If you prefer the Mertonian model of science (and I’m going out on a limb here and presume that Ezra–who is a boy–prefers this model) then the good thing about phenomena (as opposed to let’s say “concepts”) is that they don’t carry authorial copyright, so that anybody can take a “shot” at (accounting for) them. Phenomena-centered science thus leads to cosmopolitan, interdisciplinary endeavors that follow more closely the “progressive” line traditionally associated with normal science. Given a phenomenon as a reference point, we can make a pretty good estimate of where we stand in relation to the immediate past.

Take for instance the phenomenon of “boom and bust” in industries (or organizational imprinting). You’d be crazy (or just uniformed) if you didn’t realize that we are in a better explanatory position in relation to these phenomena than we were let’s say a three decades ago. However, given a “concept” (let’s say “social structure”) no such “progressive estimate can be given, instead it seems as if we are stuck in second gear. Authorial concepts-centered science instead leads to either Spenglerian “coming crises” types of analyses or cynical, “nothing matters, there’s never progress, everything goes in cycles”(e.g. Abbott in Chaos of Disciplines) types of takes regarding the health of a given field.

It is obvious that STS is a “concept-based” enclave and the “system of thought” that governs most STSers is based on this make-a-”contribution”-by-offering-a-new-concept model. A typical example is Callon, who in a recent paper (2007: 140) argues that “Relying upon the anthropology of science and technology, we can define economic markets as socio-technical arrangements or agencements (STA) whose functioning is based on a set of framings concerning not only goods and agencies but also price-setting mechanisms(1).” Then if you have the patience to go to footnote one we get the definition of agencement:

An agencement is a combination of material and technical devices, texts, algorithms, rules, and human beings with their various instruments and prostheses. I discuss elsewhere the reasons why I prefer the French term agencement (which unfortunately has no equivalent in English) to assemblage or arrangement (Callon, 2007). Agencements denote socio-technical assemblages when they are considered from the point of view of their capacity to act and to give meaning to action. By defining markets as STAs we emphasize the fact that they are simultaneously malleable and capable of actions.

At this point, of course Ezra has already thrown the paper in the trash. Callon’s strategy here follows the template offered above (markets as agencement) But the main point is that throughout this paper, you will not find the usual Mertonian goodies; e.g. a characterization of a phenomenon, a specification of our ignorance regarding the mechanisms that generate it and the proposal of a new model of these mechanisms that does a better job of accounting for the phenomenon than other competitors, but simply more definitions, and stylized descriptions of sites that could be thought of as “agencements.” This is the style of thought characteristic of STS.

We can go hoarse trying to evaluate whether this is or is not a good strategy, but for now I’ll simply play the good anthropologist and say that it is “different” (I have been known to play both sides of this field) but in addition (and now putting on my more specific Mary Douglas hat) it should be noted that it is also exquisitely attuned to the social context within which it makes sense (enclaves where charismatic authority based on authorial concepts is the most natural reputational currency). Since, the main issue after reading this paper is that you come out with the impression that: agencement –> Callon so that you have to cite Callon (2007) if you want to use the concept (the same of course goes for agora, actor-network or what have you).

Please note: This is not my post; it is a recycled comment from orgtheory.net by Omar, a comment to a post that Fabio wrote about some eerily similar territorial scuffles I experienced as a guest blogger there.

Latour’s honor being protested (update)

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Latour’s honor being protested … annually?

So, I just spoke with Dr. Ann Rudinow Sætnan (Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology) who wrote that article about how Latour’s recent Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize and how Latour’s honor has been protested.

Here is the update on the Latourian protester. I asked “Has the redux fizzled out on a new-ish science wars or have there been any notable developments?”

She responded:

As for what happened to the Science  War flare-up … yes, it fizzled. I just googled the theme to check whether anything new had been published in the debate since the pieces I cited. There was one more. This one was not so much a critique of Latour as a critique of giving prizes in general as a means of gaining public recognition for (social) science. The author of this last piece claims that giving away large sums of money to already famous social scientists doesn’t do much to advance the reputation of the social sciences, as evidenced by the small number of people who have even heard of the prize. He writes that the prize is almost most famous for Jon Elster’s annual protests of it and that if Elster had not existed then someone would have had to invent him in order to publicize the prize. … and there the whole debate seems to have ended. At least until next year when Elster protests whoever wins in 2014

If you are interested in the piece (and have a reading-knowledge of Norwegian), check it out here. The title translated (thanks, Ann) is “What price the Holberg prize?”

Here is the old post:

In an interesting essay from our friends at EASST (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology), documents a possible resurgence of the ‘science wars’ of yesteryear … at sitting in the cross-hairs is good old Bruno Latour, protested recipient of this year’s (2013′s) The Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize, or as some of you might know it, just the Holberg Prize. Check out the article; its free and interesting.

Follow-up on Goldiblox

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Just saw this; more on actually doing something about gender in STEM, especially, engineering:

Fewer than 3 in 10 graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are women. And barely 1 in 10 actual engineers are women. Early in a girl’s life, the toys marketed to her are usually things that don’t encourage her to enter those fields. GoldieBlox intends to change that by teaching them while they are young that these fields can be fun — and apparently epic, by the looks of this super-genius 2-minute video. Watch and learn.

Check out the video on upworthy here. Also, a previous post about it here.

Latour’s book scoffed

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Clever public reviews of products on Amazon has become something of a pass-time for more individuals that I would have thought. For example, reviews of this banana slicer, for which there are 4,530 reviews, are quite entertaining, or for this excellent book How to avoid huge ships we find terrific (and humorous) reviews by members of the public. On How to avoid huge ships, for example, we see this review titled “Reads like a whodunnit“:

I bought How to Avoid Huge Ships as a companion to Captain Trimmer’s other excellent titles: How to Avoid a Train, and How to Avoid the Empire State Building. These books are fast paced, well written and the hard won knowledge found in them is as inspirational as it is informational. After reading them I haven’t been hit by anything bigger than a diesel bus. Thanks captain!

Or, this classic:

it didn’t work for me. i still got hit by a huge ship. i can’t recommend this book at all.

While these are entertaining … what about this one about Latour?

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One reviewer of Latour’s We have never been modern raised a point that I had not heard before that the book was “a postmodern joke”:

Anglophone readers probably don’t realise that Latour meant this book as a tongue-in-cheek exercise to capture the postmodern social theory market in his own country by using a postmodern style to show what an illusion postmodernism has always been. But, as fate would have it, when someone sneezes in Paris, an Anglophone is felled with pneumonia. It’s hard to believe that anyone with a firm grasp of the history of the last 250 years of Western culture would find this book anything more than a diversion worthy of maybe a couple of arguments in the pub. It’s telling that historians of science, who are really the people who are in a position to hold Latour accountable to anything he says here, have given the book a chilly reception. Classify this one under ‘Pseud’s Corner’.

Does anyone know if that is true, that WHNBM was just a semi-clever joke?

The EASST meeting in Torun, Poland, is now accepting session tracks

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The EASST meeting in Torun, Poland, is now accepting session tracks for those who would like to propose some productive sessions (or unproductive ones too, I suppose).

Link to the call for sessions is here, and December 16 is the deadline.

IMPORTANT DATES AND DEADLINES:
December 16: Proposal for convenors and thematic tracks deadline
January 2014:Communication to the convenors of acceptance of
tracks
January 31 2014: Call for submission of abstracts with the final track list included
March 28 2014: Deadline for abstracts submission
May 16 2014: Communication of acceptance/rejection of abstracts to authors and opening of online registrations

Surely, I will try to attend this meeting so friends in state theory and related issues of infrastructures, please do let me know if you’ll be there/submit!

About the conference

The EASST conference 2014 addresses the dynamics and interrelationships between science, technology and society. Contributors are invited to address the meeting’s theme of ‘Situating Solidarities’ though papers on any topic relevant to the wider field are also welcome.

The theme of ‚situating solidarities’ addresses asymmetries of power through a focus on material, situated sociotechnical configurations. Heterogeneous networks of actors are stabilised to different degrees through complex negotiations.  Rather than seeking universal abstractions the theme asks questions such as: What do the chains and networks of asymmetries look like? How do they travel? What do they carry? Do asymmetries translate to inequalities? What are the solidarities that shape the practices, artifacts and ‚know-hows’ in situated material contexts?

Political and ethical engagement is a central concern for a view of science as changes in collective practice, rather than as individual contemplation. How should STS observe or influence the raising and erasing of social and technical asymmetries in everyday life? What do the ‚situated solidarities’ of dealing with asymmetries and inequalities look like? Can STS contribute to the work of solidarising to connect asymmetric agents, places, moves and networks to weaken inequalities and change hegemonic relations?

A more detailed call for tracks will be available on the EASST website and circulated on Eurograd shortly.

The city of Torun is located on the banks of the River Vistula.  It has an extensive medieval town centre which is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university and the city provide a great location for the EASST 2014 conference.

Glorious Backfires in Digital Ethnography: Becoming an Urban Explorer

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Derelict places in sociology

Heather Ford's avatarEthnography Matters

Screen shot 2013-11-11 at 12.53.11 PMFor four years, Bradley Garrett (@Goblinmerchant) explored abandoned hospitals, railways, tunnels and rooftops as part of his PhD ethnography studying an elite group of urban explorers. 

Brad has in many ways had it all: a book deal from Verso just after finishing his PhD, a position at Oxford University to continue his research, and numerous requests for media appearances and license deals. But he has also just had one of the hardest years of his life, struggling with a backlash from some members of the urban explorer community as well as attempts by authorities to stop the publication of his book. Last month, Brad gave a talk to the newly-established Oxford Digital Ethnography Group (@OxDEG) about some of the perils of doing public ethnography. His story is a counterpoint to the uncritical enthusiasm usually espoused about this form of engagement. Public ethnography, we soon learn, can…

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Latour’s Gifford lectures – text now available as pdf

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Latour, pinned down.

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

Update 2019: These links seem to be dead, but the pdf of the lectures can be found here; and the videos here. The lectures are now available as a book – details here.

Bruno Latour has made the text of his Gifford lectures available as a pdf on his site –Facing Gaia: Six lectures on the political theology of nature. Thanks to Owain Jones for the link (it seems this may have been available for a while; but news to me). The lectures were all video-recorded and I linked to them a while back – the links are all at the Edinburgh site.

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Goldiblocks: Gender and engineering meet

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Anybody interested in gender, engineering, or infrastructure, especially, meta-issues, like training students in the sciences and engineering and all the related gender issues:

Check out this promotional video.

Golidblocks! This is a smart idea. There is a ton of literature about how women select out of the sciences and engineering, some of which is good work and some of which borders on the sexism it supposedly only describes; however, this angle, related to children’s toys and parenting strategies … just might be one of the smartest thing “done” in that line of thinking/concern.

If you’re teaching STS and you cover gender issues, a discussion of this might be useful.

It also reminded me, hauntingly, of this: when Barbi used to say “Math class is tough” … ugh.

Teaching STS: Controversies

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This is an extension of a previous post about teaching STS. So, teaching controversies is a mainstay of STS; if you need a good film to show, check out “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” replete with Steve Fuller weighing-in on intelligent design … and their are courtroom re-enactments and even a decent biology lesson for students that don’t have a strong background in basic genetics and/or evolution.

Of great interest for us is this: the film underscores the utility of theory in face of lame counter-factuals (which uninformed students tend to accept or privilege during discussion). Additionally, there is an incredible discussion, especially for high school or undergraduate students, about the difference between science and non-science. But, better than all of that, there is an implicit display of “truth” in three different forms — which makes for excellent discussion post-film — between “law truth,” “science truth,” and “religious truth,” which is great to show how truth is context-specific and what constitutes truth in law, science, and religion is only rarely overlapping.

Also, I have a handout already made to help students to navigate the documentary. Write me if you you’d like a copy or if you’ve used this clip for your own courses (send to: njr12 at psu.edu).

Lastly, if you’re already teaching Sismondo’s Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, the chapter on “Controversies” can be used with the film because midway through the chapter, Sismondo describes a set of 5 circumstances under which controversies can be “closed up” and those map onto the film wonderfully, making the bridge between in-class reading and an out-of-class film easy.

Foucault reduced to Leftovers

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If Foucault were more a materialist, how might he have thought about this crash-site-turned-memorial? (featured above — full background story here)

In the past, we have written about an infrastructural model of the state as composed of leftovers, specifically, when we wrote about derelict Olympic stadiums in Athens and London, residual separation of city infrastructures found in Berlin, and whether or not the durability of state projects (and the resulting leftovers they proffer) is such a good thing (as so much STS on stabilization might very well imply). What’s the infrastructure link to the state? Its simple. Foucault and especially his followers suggested that there was no such thing as the state; instead there was another thing and this other thing was called “stateness,” which is thought roughly to be captured in this form of argument: the state is not a thing; the state is, at best, at effect. Sure, sure, some governmentality scholars have discussed “institutions” and “political regimes,” but, at the highest level of abstraction, Foucault was reacting to Hobbes-like actor-models of the state and responded by rejecting those models in favor of seeing the state not as the cause but as the effect of micro-physical, bio-political techniques for self-discipline and other forms of coercion. In effect, Foucault is saying the state is the residual after effect. Put another way, the state is leftover; it is to be found amongst the leftovers. Of course, we, as material-semiotic mongrels, would see the state as a residual material after effect, but that’s another argument entirely.

Residual material after effects take all manner of forms, and today I happened upon one, which was both, in and of itself, interesting, but also a compelling case of “leaving behind” that might be relevant to developing a “leftover” perspective regarding infrastructure. This is of double interest to our infrastructure gurus because the infrastructure of the memorial is also memorializing the infrastructure that is the plane (that crashed) so they make leftovers of the leftovers.

The full story is here and here, but a quick summary is: UTA Flight 772 routinely flew from Brazzaville (now in DRC) to Paris CDG airport, when, on Tuesday, 19 September 1989, a bomb exploded aboard the plane causing it to crash in Niger about an hour after take-off. 18 years later, family and friends of the victims aboard the plane returned to the crash site and because of its outstanding remoteness, many of the pieces of the plane were still there, only slightly covered in sand. Funded by a grant from Libya, the remains were transformed into a memorial, further extending the site into the future.

Surely, there is a good deal of literature on memorialization in anthropology and geography along with the practical literature in the arts and architecture on the topic. However, our interest is more into what these “remnants” and their extension into the future means for theories of the state sensitive to infrastructure. While this case is only tertiarily related, there is something elegant about extending ruins; making them more durable through memorialization.

Image from: <http://cdn.viralnova.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/34-iQoqN4P.jpg&gt;

IS LATOUR A CLOSET LARUELLIAN?: non-modern philosophy as non-philosophy

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Is Latour in the closet?

terenceblake's avatarAGENT SWARM

Latour has famously claimed that we have never been modern, and has unsparingly criticised the postmoderns for their practice of critique, showing that he actively embraces both paradox and performative contradiction. His own name for his style of thinking is “non-modern”. Given his desire to get away from all philosophy based on the dualist principles generated by the “bifurcation of nature” and to create a new type of thinking that he calls “empirical philosophy”, one may wonder if Latour is practicing, knowingly or not, a form of “non-philosophy” in the sense that François Laruelle has given that term. His declarations that he is in no way attached to a particular theoretical vocabulary or set of references, but considers his metalanguage “disposable”, go in the same sense.

Latour’s theoretical formulations show a huge degree of liberty when it comes to locating the basic conceptual matrix of his work. Different versions of…

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Latour’s honor being protested

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(from: http://www.holbergprisen.no/en/holberg-international-memorial-prize/holberg-prize-symposium-2013.html)

In an interesting essay from our friends at EASST (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology), documents a possible resurgence of the ‘science wars’ of yesteryear … at sitting in the cross-hairs is good old Bruno Latour, protested recipient of this year’s (2013’s) The Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize, or as some of you might know it, just the Holberg Prize. Check out the article; its free and interesting.

Welcoming back Stef Fishel

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Our guest blogger emeritus Stef Fishel is joining us now as a full-time site blogger. Join us welcoming her back to the blog!

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Stefanie Fishel received her doctorate in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Victoria. Dr. Fishel approaches International Relations using techniques and inspirations from Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies, the philosophy of science, and biology. She is currently at Hobart William Smith Colleges in the Department of Political Science.

I met Stefanie at the 2012 Millennium Conference at the London School of Economics during a post-conference workshop about how actor-network theory and international relations might fit together (if at all). During her stint as a guest blogger in April, she wrote us some interesting and unusual posts about microbial roommate, homeopathy and Walt Whitman, the bodies politic, materialist directions in international relations, and technologies of sharing and caring.

Welcome back and welcome aboard!

When in doubt, de-center humans

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The challenge of de-centering humans — especially in the traditional home of human-centricity like sociology or anthropology but also in the humanities — has been gaining attention for years; however, a few ongoing developments are worth considering.

First, in human and cultural geography, our fellow bloggers at THE ANTHROPO.SCENE have recently posted (thanks, dmfant) a video “Decentering the human in human geography“, which is a lecture about ontological, epistemological, and even moral issues related to “human exceptional-ism” in our social sciences. The talk is by Kay Anderson, University of Western Sydney. At 45 or so minutes long, the talk defies simple summary; however, one might hazard this synopsis: humans have been deemed irreducible to nature, but their very ‘humanness’ is precisely predicated on their transcendence of mere beasts; the specialness of humans (and this is no news to long-time readers of ANT), thus, distracts us from material forces of significance; our presenter then historicizes, thus rendering vulnerable, human exceptionalism, treating the concept like an artifact of time rather than one of truth; hence, the lesson is that de-centering humans through historicizing the processes of centering humans, in the first place, and by appreciating humanism’s materiality and smashing the boundary between humans and nature, can we finally get a de-centered view of humans in geography. Of course, there are many more voices in this discussion that have been overlooked (by me, of course).

What makes Anderson’s talk so interesting is that by historicizing the concept of human exceptionalism we can take the concept to be an empirical matter rather than a presupposition for starting analysis (we tried to do this move with reflexivity). But this requires a careful tour of early biological sciences (e.g., Linneaus) and especially naturalists and anatomic crainiology, but in so doing, we realize that the claims toward human exceptionalism, under the bright light of empiricism, were often unstable and frequently revised in substantial ways. While I fully realize that post-humanism has been around for decades (although Haraway’s cyborg seems so odd now, so 90s), Anderson’s shift of perspective is a welcome development, and one, I contend, could be replicated in other areas. Here is the only room for criticism, though: in biological sciences (and perhaps I am raising the boundaries I would just as well smash, but …) there is not such a clear or direct link to the social sciences wrought with human exceptionalism; I agree that Anderson is uncovering the roots of this plague (i.e., human exceptionalism), but once it leaves the proper confines of biological sciences and then it taken-up as a presupposition or justification for “doing anthropology”, for example, the concept has been transported and, to some extent, changed as a condition of transport. Thus, surely, human exceptionalism has historically meant something different in anthropology as compared to sociology, each of which could be uncovered in a future analysis, or, consider, a comparison to international relations, which brings me to my second point … ir.

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Second, in international relations, a book is underway that considers ‘the human’ from a post-anthropological perspective. Some of us contributing to the book are using this opportunity to de-center humans too, only this time, it is an experiment to see how far one can de-center humans and still have viable theories for international relations, in our case, theories of the state. The opening lines of the to-be book are above in the image and give one a sense of the tone for the book.

An upcoming event is going to be held at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main “4th Global International Studies Conference 2014” (Aug 6-9), which I would love to attend, will no doubt also deal with issues related to de-centering humans. This would be a great opportunity to blend some of the thinking in geography, anthropology, and international relations precisely because the book, which is related to this conference. is considering a “post-anthropological international relations” …

The conference details are:

Our goal is to provide an interaction space in which International Relations research expertise can be shared on an international level and thus contribute to the expansion of a truly global professional network. For this purpose, IR scholars from around the world will meet in Frankfurt and present their research to a broad audience made up of scholars and experts in all fields of international studies. The overarching theme of the conference is „Justice, Peace and Stability: Risks and Opportunities for Governance and Development“. In addition to classical issues in diplomacy, security and development studies, panels and roundtables will pay special attention to novel issues in global politics, including emerging actors in international relations and new forms of south-south cooperation.

Our paper that will be part of the book, opens like this;

Acting in international relations? Political agency in post-humanist state theory

 

Jan-H. Passoth, Department of Sociology, Technische Universität Berlin

Nicholas J. Rowland, Department of Sociology, Pennsylvania State University

 

This edited volume sensitizes readers to a budding divide in International Relations (IR); a shift away from crafting overly-anthropological accounts to describe the practice of international relations (ir) and toward what our editors are calling post-anthropological scholarship.[1] The chief difference hinges on the position of the human element in IR; front and center, in the former, peripheral and de-centered, in the latter. The upshot for patient readers is insight into what the consequences of this shift will mean for IR and ir.

 

Our chapter constitutes an experiment to test the outer limits of this shift. We ask: how far can we, as scholars, decenter the human element before our models of international relations implode? To this end, we selected ‘the state’ as our test case. By only analyzing models of the state, we were finally able to dis-inhabit the state of the human element entirely, but, in the process, we were challenged to re-conceptualize many our otherwise taken-for-granted, anthropological assumptions about political agency. No doubt, some readers will be dissatisfied or un-persuaded by our experiment in post-anthropology; admittedly, we had no choice but to scour many, occasionally incompatible literatures to trace-out a fully uninhabited state in the course of our analysis. That being said, we generally believe that our analysis identifies and explores some of the outer limits of what it might mean to legitimately de-center the human element in IR. This test in post-anthropology also has an important implication for the relationship that binds IR to ir. One of the enduring quests in IR and beyond is to determine a universal, ontologically sound definition of the state once and for all. However, we now take this as a fruitless, if not reckless, endeavor. One viable alternative direction for future IR research would be to formulate and, ultimately, implement a model of the state that is more consistent with models of the state that are used in ir (i.e., out there in practice). Put another way, in IR, we need models of the state that capture the complexity of how models of the state are actually used in ir. This shift requires not a theory, but an approach to theories – a model of models – and we develop this line of inquiry forthwith.

[1] Regarding merely the label ‘post-anthropology’; we are fully aware that this term could quite easily be misinterpreted if taken too far from its orienting context in this edited volume, or if it is taken to be a literal description of our scholarship here. It is important to note that the post-anthropological turn in IR scholarship has nothing at all to do with the long tradition of Anthropology as a discipline, and, coming from the small world of Science and Technology Studies, it is significant for us to be clear that post-anthropology in IR is not a direct challenge to the anthropology of science, which our area of study has done so much to cultivate. From this point forward in the chapter, when we use the terms ‘anthropology’ and ‘post-anthropology’ it will be in the same spirit that our editors layout in their orienting introductory chapter, to wit, our title contains the term ‘post-humanist’, which we see as consistent with this distinction.

Workshop: Simondon and Digital Cultures, 21-22 November, 2013

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Workshop: Simondon and Digital Cultures, 21-22 November, 2013

Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University Lüneburg

Organizers: Yuk Hui (Leuphana Universität), Erich Hörl(Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Jeremy Gilbert(University of East London/New Formations)

Confirmed Speakers: Jean-Hugues Barthélémy (FR), Anne Sauvagnargues(FR), Ludovic Duhem(FR), Erich Hörl(DE), Yuk Hui (DE), Michael Cuntz (DE),Jeremy Gilbert (UK), Andy Goffey(UK), Luciana Parisi (UK), Christoph Brunner(CH),

This workshop is dedicated to Gilbert Simondon: our contemporary. It will explore and delineate the significance of his work for the analysis of our contemporary techno-medial condition. Therefore it focuses on the question of the digital, and aims to put forward a critical agenda for research into digital cultures, informed by  Simondon’s thought.

In Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques(1958), Simondon showed us a new approach to the understanding of ‘technical objects’, and rethought the relation between humans and machines, cultures and technologies. Today we are witnessing  the proliferation of types of object – digital objects in particular – while the very notions of object and objectivity are being transformed by digitizing processes.

This has inevitable implications for experiences and concepts of subjectivity, and Simondon’s work on individuation – in particular in L’individuation: à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (2005) – remains one of the most original and complete, yet one of the most neglected, explorations of this topic in the history of Western philosophy. This work remains particularly invaluable for its  compatibility with his work on technical systems and technological culture.

What do terms such as ‘object’ and ‘subject’ mean today? If they are undergoing a displacement in the era of digital cultures, then this issue was perhaps most obviously pre-figured by Felix Guattari’s anticipation of a ‘post-media’ age when we wrote:  “one can hope, from there that operates a revision of power of mass media which crashes the contemporary subjectivity and a new entry toward a post-media age consisting of an individual-collective re-appropriation and an interactive usage of machines of information, communication, intelligence, art and of culture”.

While the adventures of post-humanism and cyber-feminism have explored this territory for several decades already, we contend that Simondon’s work – like Guattari’s – remains a crucially under-exploited resource for understanding the ‘post-media’ age, its consequences for subjectivity, the politics of networks, the nature of digital objects, and the role of imaginations, innovation and participation in the information society  (L’invention dans les Techniques, 2005; Imagination et Invention, 2008 ) ( Communication et Information, 2010). While Simondon’s work is known indirectly by readers of Stiegler, Hansen ,and Massumi, very little has been done to develop his ideas for the analysis of contemporary digital culture and its political implications, despite its obvious relevance. We propose this workshop as a first step towards rectifying this situation.

What Does It Mean To Become An Open Access Journal?

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Per our previous discussion about open-access journals and the high pay-wall of too many otherwise good scientific communications …

Pablo K's avatarThe Disorder Of Things

Following an earlier interview with Eva Erman on editing the open access journal Ethics & Global Politics, another set of enlightening responses on academic publishing. This time with Professor Brad Weiss of the College of William & Mary and President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, which publishes Cultural Anthropology, the premier journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). It is a major journal by other metrics too (take your pick of GoogleScholar or Impact Factor). All of which is as preamble to the point: Cultural Anthropology will be a fully open access journal from 2014. Not just that. It has a web presence and offers a set of connected resources that are without compare (at least in my experience). Brad was kind enough to offer his time to answer some questions on taking a learned society journal of prestige open access.

Cultural Anthropology Cover Trimmed

1. How did the decision…

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Reports from 4S this week

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During the 4S meeting later this week, Jan and I will be blogging from the conference about the presentations we oversee.

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We will be chairing three sessions, back-to-back-to-back, on State Multiplicity in STS.

If you want to join us, please do:

I: State Multiplicity, Performativity and Materiality: Current STS Research on State and Stateness: I

Scheduled Time: Fri Oct 11 2013, 10:30 to 12:00pm, Building/Room: Town and Country / Hampton

II: State Multiplicity, Performativity and Materiality: Current STS Research on State and Stateness: II

Scheduled Time: Fri Oct 11 2013, 2:00 to 3:30pm, Building/Room: Town and Country / Hampton

III: State Multiplicity, Performativity and Materiality: Current STS Research on State and Stateness: III

Scheduled Time: Fri Oct 11 2013, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Building/Room: Town and Country / Hampton

The first session will include: *Anna West (Stanford University); *Olga Restrepo Forero (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), *Malcolm Ashmore (Loughborough University); *Kevin Donovan (University of Cape Town); *Luisa Farah Schwartzman (University of Toronto), *Jennifer Elrick (University of Toronto); and  *Govind Gopakumar (Concordia University).

The second session will include: *Huub Dijstelbloem (University of Amsterdam); *Evelyn Ruppert (Goldsmiths, University of London); *Keith Guzik (Bloomfield College); and Vincenzo Pavone (CSIC – Consejo Superior Investigaciones Cientícas), *Elvira Santiago (Consejo Superior Investigaciones Científicas)

The third and final session will include: *Nicholas J Rowland (Pennsylvania State University), *Jan-Hendrik Passoth (Technische Universität Berlin); *Manuel Tironi (Pontificia Unversidad Catolica de Chile), Rafael Crisosto (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile); *Andrzej Wojciech Nowak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan); *Steffen Dalsgaard (IT University of Copenhagen), *Christopher Gad (IT-University of Copenhagen); *Patrick Carroll (University of California, Davis)

Writing Reflexively: Lessons from ANT

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Qualitative Sociology is producing a special issue about using ANT to write-up qualitative results.

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Original from “Acting Man” at http://www.acting-man.com/?p=24647

One of the papers in now available on-line first, which is our paper about writing reflexive accounts from an actor-network approach (not actor-network theory). We had fun writing it, and, once you get toward the end, you’ll see that this paper is somewhat unorthodox …

Our title:

Beware of Allies! Notes on Analytical Hygiene in Actor-Network Account-making

Our abstract:

In science and technology studies (STS), reflexivity is not the foremost political or ethical concern that it is for some postmodernists, feminists, anthropologists, or those earnest students of Bourdieu. For us, reflexivity is a practical methodological concern. When reflexivity is raised in our scholarly communications it is, without irony, about crafting scientific communication (i.e., scholarly accounts like articles or books) reflexively. This paper therefore is an actor-network account of making reflexive actor-network accounts, specifically, in the process of writing-up qualitative research findings. It is a paper about research. It is a paper about the research process. As our empirical contribution, we report on research we previously conducted and about the subsequent steps we took toward a (publishable) way of reporting it. We are trying to honestly disclose how the process of preparing a reflexive account is more than merely a matter of cleaning upthe messiness of data, but also, and perhaps foremost, a process of finding, aligning, and occasionally distancing our accounts from our allies – in our case, actor-network theory (ANT) and reflexivity.

One paragraph with something of a hook:

As we transformed a presentation from the microcosm of professional conferences into a working manuscript for academic, peer-reviewed publishing, we encountered remarks about how reflexive we needed to be during our account-making, in particular, in our methods section. After delving into the reflexivity literature, we concluded that no “amount” of reflexivity could have made our account more reflexive because, in addition to reflexivity being part of the intransigent character of all forms of account-making, overt pleas for the epistemic virtue of adding or subtracting any form of reflexivity is an immediate dead-end for the analysts and a long-term dead-end for whatever (inter)disciplinary homes they inhabit (Ashmore 1989; Latour 1988; Lynch 2000). Our empirical analysis confirmed each of these insights.

Still, the question, “how much reflexivity was enough?” seemed all too real as we accepted critiques of our presentation(s) and received reviews of our paper. For us,
the practical problem was, how do we settle this obviously irresolvable suggestion-turned-
requirement?

Thus, the oddity that we poke-at in our paper is this: in theory, we know that nothing can be added to a paper to make it qualitatively more reflexive (no additional forms of looping-back or self-referential claims); however, that is precisely what we learn when we review our own experience: it is precisely because, in theory, nothing can make a paper more reflexive that critiques claiming that we are too reflexive or not reflexive enough are so difficult to overcome. These comments are, in theory, incomprehensible, but, in a practical sense, unavoidable if you want to present or publish your work in these academic circles where reflexivity lives…

What Would Wallace Write? (if he were an ethnographer)

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David Foster Wallace and Installing (Social) Order on ‘Being Reflexive’ … we wrote this after blogging about these issues for a while regarding excessive hygiene, actor-network attitudes and ethnography, and about style in STS.

Jan's avatarEthnography Matters

Editor’s Note: Jan-Hendrik Passoth ( @janpassoth) is a Post Doc at the Technische Universität Berlin interested in Sociological Theory and Science and Technology Studies. His fellow writer, Nicholas J. Rowland, is an associate professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University, as well as a visiting scholar at Technische Universität Berlin. Both work on the sociology of infrastructures, about which they blog at installing (social) order, exploring the sociotechnical nerves of contemporary society.

In this other piece of our “ethnography and fiction” edition, these two researchers give an interesting follow-up to the contribution by Anne Galloway by focusing on a well-known fiction writer: David Foster-Wallace. They compare his work with ethnographic field report and use that as a starting point for a discussion about the importance of reflexivity.

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Comparing David Foster Wallace and an average ethnographic field report seems unfair at first. And, it does not get better…

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Reflections on Health Infrastructure

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Screen capture from NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/health/index.html

The role of infrastructure in the current controversy about the Affordable Care Act.

As is well documented in national newspapers, America is finally trying to create a national health care insurance program. However, the bill is being hotly contested on the hill and some are even calling resistance to the program blackmail on a national level because every effort to fund the government for another year has been made contingent on defunding the national health care program that some call “Obama Care.”

The twin issues of policy battle and the introduction of national health insurance are further complicated by infrastructural concerns. They are two fold:

1. The race by tech companies and the government to use information technology infrastructure to support one of the bill’s primary objectives: offering citizens a platform for researching, selecting, and then purchasing health care insurance programs. The goal is to reduce cost and make program costs competitive, all of which will hypothetically benefit the citizen. However, support — in this case, the support of information technology infrastructure, not political support — has been slow to come into existence.

The Affordable Care Act has been contentious, confusing and abstract, but that might change on October 1 when states are required to launch websites where people can chose among different health plans.

In addition to the basic support of the program other technologies are being added to this melange of health technologies such as biometric bracelets to let your employer know how you’re doing at any given moment.

2. The prototype for the online support of the health exchange network mentioned in 1 is not friendly to non-English speakers. Apparently, the government is so worried about rolling-out the website on-time that they have not been able to offer the service in Spanish.

On Thursday, the Obama administration announced two new delays in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, saying small business and Spanish-language online enrollment services in federally run exchanges would not begin on Oct. 1 as planned, Reuters reports (Morgan, Reuters, 9/26).

This has happened even though, as is even posted on the White House website:

Today, an op-ed from President Obama is running in major Spanish-language newspapers across the country. The op-ed discusses the benefits of the Affordable Care Act for Latinos and announces the release of a new Spanish-language version of HealthCare.gov – www.CuidadoDeSalud.gov.

The op-ed is running in ImpreMedia’s print publications (including La Opinión in Los Angeles and El Diario La Prensa in New York) and online properties, all of which have a monthly reach of 9.3 million adults and monthly distribution of nearly 11 million.

Obama’s op-ed is, in contrast, available en español.

These two issues remind students of infrastructure that Law and Latour were correct all those years ago in saying that technology is “politics by other means,” although in a slightly different light. Routinely, the implementation of political aims is contingent on technological infrastructure, its development, and maintenance over time.

Sexy Infrastructure?

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For an academic blog writer, a story like this might come once in a lifetime.

Listening to the radio on the way home from a day at the University, I heard a phrase that had never occurred to me before: “sexy infrastructure.”

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Feast your eyes on this; Griefswalder Straße looks so great from the rail stop.

Jim Rose, American journalist and novelist, is responsible for “Governors Want Federal Funds For Infrastructure” which features the following comments:

Governor ED RENDELL (Democrat, Pennsylvania): We have a legitimate crisis with these bridges. They’re not sexy. People can’t see them. Almost nobody driving on I-95 saw the crack in that pier. Most of you did. And it was pretty darn frightening. And we have got to get about doing this.

Excuse me? Sexy infrastructure? Bridges, by candle light? Watch your language, Ed, there might be children around. The idea of sexy infrastructure really got me thinking…

However, there is more to this than one might, at first, imagine.

Infrastructure assets such as utilities, toll roads and airports are attractive to financial bidders like banks and pension funds because of their stable cash flow despite having lower growth rates than other private equity opportunities.

However, not everyone agrees on the general level of sexiness with regard to infrastructure. Long time proponent of seeing infrastructure as anything but attractive, anti-sexy infrastructure writer Cheri Rae from the Santa Barbara View calls infrastructure the “not-so-sexy part of government work.”

At any rate, I’ll never take questions like “how’s your plumbing?” or comments like “you have nice roads in Pennsylvania” the same way ever again …

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“Nice trains!” … “Are you flirting with my infrastructure, sir?”

Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design?

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Interesting series on fiction and science, especially social science.

laura4lano's avatarEthnography Matters

Editor’s Note: Laura Forlano (@laura4lano) is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology and she was a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012-2013. Her research is on emergent forms of organizing and urbanism enabled by mobile, wireless and ubiquitous computing technologies with an emphasis on the socio-technical practices and spaces of innovation. In her contribution, Laura describes the lessons ethnographers can learn from Science-Fiction and a sub-domain of design referred to as “speculative design”.

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In the recent science fiction film Elysium, by South-African-Canadian director Neill Blomkamp and Matt Damon, the world has descended into a dystopia in which the poor, non-white population must live in squalor on Earth working for a factory that makes robots while the wealthy have moved to a man-made country club in the sky. A recent

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good luck, sociological science!

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Rethinking sociological science at Sociological Science!

fabiorojas's avatarorgtheory.net

The new journal, Sociological Science, is now up and running. The goal:

  • Open access: Accepted works are freely available, and authors retain copyright
  • Timely: Sociological Science will make editorial decisions within 30 days; accepted works appear online immediately upon receipt of final version
  • Evaluative, not developmental: Rather than focus on identifying potential areas for improvement in a submission, editors focus on judging whether the submission as written makes a rigorous and thoughtful contribution to sociological knowledge
  • Concise: Sociological Science encourages a high ratio of novel ideas and insights to written words
  • A community: The journal’s online presence is intended as a forum for commentary and debate aimed at advancing sociological knowledge and bringing into the open conversations that usually occur behind the scenes between authors and reviewers

I congratulate them for doing this. This takes some courage to do. We need many different types of journals. And, sadly, we are lacking…

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Bogost and “Doing Things with Video Games”

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What do video games do?

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After our friend, Dmfant, posted about Ian Bogost who keynotes the 10th Anniversary Games for Change Festival.

I have recently reviewed How to do things with Videogames  (by Ian Bogost (Professor of Digital Media, Georgia Institute of Technology) Minneapolis / London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, 180 pages, ISBN 081667647X). There is a copy of the book on-line here.

Here are some excerpts if you’re curious about the topic or the book.

One the one hand, it was oddly satisfying to read research about video games that was not mired in the woefully lame “do they cause violence?” trope. In contrast, Ian Bogost in How to Do Things with VideoGames shows how videogames have transformed society, arguing that games have shaped, in meaningful ways, essential facets of social life, ranging from exercise and relaxation to politics, travel, and photography.

            On the other hand, we all had the nagging feeling, while reading this otherwise fine book, that games – not videogames, specifically, but just games, generally, of which videogames are just one branch – are nothing at all new. When we step back and consider whether or not games have changed art or relaxation – or, more realistically, how games and society are a dynamic mutually shaping state of co-constitution – the question seems … well, silly. No doubt, games shape society and society shapes games … of course.

In general, the book was a fun and quick read; much like a video game itself. For scholars, however, here is the bottom-line:

where does this book fit on the library shelf? His past and future works hold together nicely. In Bogost’s 2006 Unit Operations, he shows us that games should be analyzed using the same techniques we would use to criticize architecture, a poem, or a sunset as a means to keep “game studies” from being ghettoized in the larger academic discussion of the role of games in our information society. His 2007 book Persuasive Games offers us an example of exactly what games can do: persuade; Bogost shows that games contain all manner of persuasive rhetoric, which has long-term potential to change the shape of society. Those two titles laid a solid groundwork for How To Do Things With Videogames and make the title more understandable once put in the context of his previous work. The shift in grammar – from “doing” to “how to do” – is anything but subtle, but rather than talk about video games – critiquing or lauding – this book is about what to do with them, and where, and the answer to the “where” question is, more or less, “anywhere and everywhere.” If Bogost gets his way, terms like “gamers” will be so ubiquitous as to hardly capture anything at all meaningful, and, instead, video games will take their rightful place at the center of popular culture (so long as Bogost is there to hold them up). In Bogost’s 2012 Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing – his most intense work to date –shifts readers away from doing things with games and toward trying to understand how things, such as games, are.

 

The Language of Things by Akiko Busch

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“Using language as a more complete partner for thinking things (through)” … wow.

dmf's avatarANTHEM

“Atmosphere of Objects,” a close examination of the way objects in space inform inhabitation, influence perception and create social dynamics.
Akiko Busch writes about design, culture, and nature for a variety of publications. She is the author of Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects: Essays on Design and the Everyday, and Nine Ways to Cross a River. The Incidental Steward, her essays about citizen science and stewardship, will be published by Yale University Press in 2013

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call for papers on poltics and the later Latour

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Latour-lovers unite!

doctorzamalek's avatarObject-Oriented Philosophy

My own view is clear: if you’re not assimilating Bruno Latour into your work in some way, then you’re probably stuck in some form of pseudo-novel modernism that wants to use ostensibly dark scientific or mathematical results to club other people over the head.

That’s one version of contemporary continental philosophy. But it’s not too late to go back and take the other fork in the road.

***

Call for Papers

 Politics and the Later Latour

 

Global Discourse:

An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought

 

Volume 4: Issue 4

November 2014

 

This August sees the publication of the English translation of Bruno Latour’s ‘An Inquiry into Modes of Existence’ (AIME), marking both a landmark in the long-collaborative AIME project and a significant development in Latour’s thought. This issue of Global Discourse will examine the political significance of Latour’s later work, which has seen important…

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Thank you, guest blogger Stefanie Fishel

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A thank you, which is long overdue(!), to guest blogger Stefanie Fishel.

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Looking back, her great posts on “thinking with the body,” which played with a comment that Jan and I made at the Millennium conference about STS being a “cabinet of curiosities,” is a favorite for me, along with “The Bodies Politic,” are all good reminders of the rich interface possible between international relations and science and technology studies.

Stefanie also a fresh new article out: “Theorizing violence in the Responsibility to Protect” (Critical Studies on Security, Volume 1, Issue 2, 2013, Special Issue: Late Warfare), check it out!

A quick plug for Stefanie from when we introduced her earlier this year:

Stefanie Fishel received her doctorate in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Victoria. Dr. Fishel approaches International Relations using techniques and inspirations from Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies, the philosophy of science, and biology. She is currently at Colgate University in their Peace and Conflict Studies area.

I met Stefanie at the 2012 Millennium Conference at the London School of Economics during a post-conference workshop about how actor-network theory and international relations might fit together (if at all). Andrew Barry was the keynote speaker. In all, it was great.

In her LSE talk, “Lively Vessels and Contaminated States: Biological Metaphor and Global Politics” Stephanie described … well, I’ll let her fill you in over the next month.

Join us in welcoming Stefanie to the blog!

Resisting infrastructural development in China

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In the New York Times this morning (September 9, 2013), a terrific article (written September 8, 2013) explores a development in China’s plans for urban development and the displacement of rural inhabitant.

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“Leaving the Land” is a new series in NYT, and “Articles in this series look at how China’s government-driven effort to push the population to towns and cities is reshaping a nation that for millenniums has been defined by its rural life”, which can also be read in Chinese, fittingly).

The third piece, “Picking Death Over Eviction,” explores rural resistance to government-based programs to urbanize rural citizens, including a graphic opening passage about a young woman who refuses to have her small shop removed by a demolition crew set to level it, drenches herself in diesel fuel and lights a match. According to the journalist, “Besides the self-immolations, farmers have killed themselves by other means to protest land expropriation.”

For STS scholars, the link between infrastructural expansion/transformation and social protest, the bread-and-butter of traditional/conventional sociology, seems like an obviously good research site for mutually beneficial scholarship, potentially even for those individuals being displaced through the advanced justification of infrastructural expansion … after all, it appears that this change is not poised to slow for many years: “In China, the timeline for moving 250 million rural residents into cities by 2025 is so rapid and far-reaching that it is raising concerns that some people will be left behind” … so, it is a sad, unfortunate case, but one rich for considering “infrastructural controversies” (controversies being a mainstay in STS) and “social protest” (protest being a mainstay in sociology).

We are back.

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After a long summer hiatus wherein Jan-H and I were hard at work on a few new publications, we have returned to blogging for the (in the US, anyways) fall semester. We will share excerpts from our new work and invite a few new guest bloggers to share the stage with us as we consider the role of infrastructure in supporting (or up-ending) (social) order.

 

Infrastructure Humor from The Onion

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Maps and map-making and the like have played a powerful role in shaping states and shaping states up, in STS research and elsewhere; however, a shocking and not-at-all-new statistic indicates that map literacy may be fading.

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The Onion Reports: “Increasing Number Of Americans Unable To Point Out Map”

WASHINGTON—-An alarming new study released Tuesday by the Department of Education found that nearly 70 percent of Americans are incapable of pointing out a map when presented by researchers with a map. “Not only did a majority of people just stare blankly ahead, but nearly half pointed to nearby desk lamps in their attempts to guess correctly,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who called the findings endemic of the nation’s failing school system.

At least as concerning:

“In fact, 14 percent of all Americans claimed they had never ‘even heard of no map,’ and asked if being prompted to locate one was some kind of trick question.” According to Duncan, the Department of Education has suspended all further studies and will instead be spending the next six months just screaming into a pillow.

America’s Infrastructure Report Card

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The American Society for Civil Engineering has created a nifty interactive website about the state of infrastructure in America at http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/.

The website is appealing to look at and intuitive to use if you’re curious about, in this case, how poor American infrastructure really is in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Bottom-line: America gets a failing grade, but only-just-failing at a D+.

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For STS scholars, this might be one of those great cases in the rough that could bring the “assessment” or “accounting” literature together with infrastructure studies given that the infrastructures must be defined in order to be counted and compared, and, as such, provides a right backdrop upon with some solid STS-oriented research could start from … and STSers will no doubt love this “grading rubric” available at the sight to legitimize and justify the grading standards. Also, of particular interest to scholars like Jan-Hendrik and I (along with our friends Stefanie Fishel (guest blogger emeritus), Govind Gopakumar, Kathryn Furlong (also guest blogger emeritus), and Patrick Carroll, there is a section that breaks-up scores according to states … nice, no?

In all, this is one of the places where an STS orientation might just be of serious government interest again …

Visualization Infrastructure

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*This is, in some ways, Stefanie‘s post, because she found it. Here goes, anyways:

One of our longstanding understandings of infrastructure is that it facilitates and supports something else, but, in these discussions, we almost never discuss music (even though Jan has written extensively on the topic). When I think of music infrastructure, I typically think like a sociologist and come-up with ideas like those in this website about linking together musicians, studio owners, and show venues or infrastructure as constituting the business and legal environment music is embedded in.

However, composer, pianist and software engineer Stephen Malinowski has me thinking another way about music infrastructure, in particular, about visualization infrastructure for audio stuff. Now, music visualizers are nothing new. In fact, off-the-shelf software installed on most computers is capable of it.

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National Public Radio in the states covered this story about music visualization infrastructure featuring Malinowski. The title, “Watch A Mind-Blowing Visualization Of ‘The Rite Of Spring'” is pretty accurate in my opinion. Similar to overcoming the problem of getting pseudo-instruments into the hands of millions (a la Guitar Hero and MIT’s Media Lab),

Stephen Malinowski has created one brilliant solution to an age-old problem: how to communicate and understand what’s going on in a piece of music, particularly if you don’t know standard musical notation.

The visualization infrastructure is fairly basic at this point, and, as Malinowski admits, he is only at the beginning of his ability to render music (with his imagination being one of the only limitations). Still, his “music animation machine” is a pretty fascinating case of infrastructural development. Enjoy!

Peer Schouten, at it again!

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We introduced Peer back in March … well, his paper presented in last year’s 4S meeting at the Copenhagen Business School (and subsequent ISA meeting at London School of Economics) is now in press!

Check it out; its an alternative answer to traditional interpretations of “failed states” in conventional IR research, and, of course, the alternative to orthodox social contract theory appears to be ANT (or, at minimum, ANT can draw our attention to alternative explanations … or, better yet, help us to understand the infrastructural underpinnings that make explanations possible, like those used by our friends in social contract theory [although their friendships seem oddly contractual]).

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Cheers, Peer!

Oh, he even mentions as much in the acknowledgements:

Further thanks to the following people for comments on a previous draft of this article:the editors Graham Harman, Maximilian Mayer, the participants in the panelOn States, Stateness,and STS: government(ality) with a small “g”?, Society for Social Studies of Science & European Association for the Study of Science and Technology Annual Conference, Copenhagen, October17-20 2012, and participants in the Millennium/Theory Talks workshop at the Millennium Annual Conference, London, October 20–22 2012.