Category Archives: STS

Jan-Hendrik Passoth and I’s (Nicholas Rowland’s) comments at 4S

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Jan and I organized Sessions 201 and 222 back-to-back on the topic of states, state measurement, and state theory. These talks and our comments were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Social Studies of Science in Cleveland, OH, November 05, 2011.

Session 201: Counting and Measuring

The relationship between science, technology, and governance is a relationship that shapes and is shaped by contemporary states. While this relationship has been influential in STS research on how contemporary modes of governance influence scientific practice and technological innovations, the converse question of the influence of both on governance is relatively underrepresented.

These sessions, therefore, take-up the task and explore this relationship and its depiction in history and social and political theory. The first session (session 201) is presenting a series of five case studies on the role of conflict, measurement and performativity for the enactment of stateness, drawing from rich empirical projects. The second session (session 222) is focusing on conceptualization and theoretical approaches, dealing mostly with the mechanisms and techniques of creating, maintaining and shifting the multiple ontologies of stateness.

Anat Leibler will show us the traditional science-state relationship, but from a new angle wherein the science of population measurement is embedded in states of conflict, in this case, being Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Hector Vera also emphasizes the central role of measurement, in his case; however, it is about measurement standards adopted by Mexico and the US, in a historical comparative case study approach.

Michael Rodriguez brings together the dual-tasks of counting and countings of populations, but on the level of micro-practices in his work on the role of “partnerships” with Latino communities that are often “undercounted” by traditional census techniques.

Keith Guzik returns our attention back to Mexico where rather than counting techniques or practices, he emphases the role of techno-infrastructure in his historical account of national security programs.

Daniel Barber also provides a historical view, but one more fine grained, drilling-deeply into the 1940s US Department of the Interior where two models of future energy use were evaluated quite openly; however, as we can all see, one of these methods has obviously become taken-for-granted.

 

Session 222: Theory and Ontology

Patrick Carroll shows us, through a detailed but theoretically oriented case study, how diverse, seemingly unrelated issues of water and water infrastructure became a – read, grouped or combined – political object of state governing.

Hendrik Vollmer describes another transformation which invokes the state; this time, however, through micro-measurement for sake of global comparison and regulation.

Erich Schienke grounds his paper in the fertile fodder of Ecocities in China, which do not yet fully exist (other than in discourse), showing how aggregated environmental indicators will be used, we think/he thinks, to re-position the Chinese state as an ecological civilization in the global theater of political action.

Kelly Moore’s (not in attendance) work challenges us to say “how does the state get into our bodies?” the answer to which turns out be a neoliberal story of government intervention into bodies through what she calls the promulgation of “pleasured self-discipline.”

 

Concluding Comments (once presentations end, and before questions):

All of the papers tackle the crucial, which we will crudely frame here as the classical concern over the relation between micro processes and macro entities. For example, the micro processes seen in Michael Rodriguez’s work on the day-to-day, on-the-ground counting of the undercounted, or Patrick Carroll’s work on water infrastructure where many seemingly distinct matters relating to people, land, and water where lashed-together and inverted to become one concern over water for some manner of macro entity usually referred to as the state. The relation between micro processes and macro entities is a debate worth studying.

And these presenters do much justice to this enduring debate by taking much more nuanced interpretations into their analyses, especially of counting practices, and their theoretical approaches to understanding where the state is and is not, and its multiple purported effects.

We observe empirically, and we all have seen this here today, that there are important similarities too between what we “see” on-the-ground and the conceptual tools we have inherited from our respective disciplines in sociology, history, geography, political science, and the like. The perhaps surprising link we speak of is between (a) the historically-embedded, highly-contingent, ongoing-accomplishments that we observe in our empirical investigations and (b) the conceptual apparatus that we invoke, as scholars.

To our minds, and this is our closing remark, which is perhaps c
ontroversial: it is of the utmost importance for scholars to remember that the concepts we make and their appearance and use in our field-sites are linked together. These are not merely opportunities to verify or reject our theories. Instead, they are valuable analytical opportunities to critically and empirically engage them.

Whether or not “the state” exists is a waste of our time; rather, it is precisely these ephemeral moments when, by whom, and how the state is brought into existence or invoked as a partner that we should direct our analytical and empirical attention to …  as we consider this a fertile site for STS’s group contribution to state theory.

ANT and Ethnography

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Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz just alerted me to the fact that Qualitative Sociology is going to host a special issue on ANT and ethnography called “Reassembling Ethnography: ANT beyond the
Laboratory“!

Details:

Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2012 submitted directly to the journal.
Word Limits: 10,000 words (maximum) including bibliography
Queries: Gianpaolo Baiocchi (Gianpaolo_Baiocchi@Brown.edu), Diana Graizbord
(Diana_Graizbord@Brown.edu), and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz
(Michael_Rodriguez@Brown.edu).

Check out the full solicitation here:

CFP_ANT_Ethnography_QS.pdf

4S in Cleveland, a first couple of notes

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Since I am the only one of our little outfit to be still left in Cleveland I might just as well start off reporting from the 4S meeting with a couple of quick Sunday morning impressions.
As usual, the meeting as a whole was well attended, and the organizers did a good job of providing a well-balanced mix of themes and issues.
Before I get to the sessions organized by Nicholas and Jan, I should say that the “author meets critics” panel with Marion Fourcade and with Daniel Breslau, Mary Morgan, and Ted Porter discussing Fourcade’s book about “Economists and Societies” somewhat stood out for me. For one thing, the discussants provided excellent commentary, but more generally speaking, I just love this format. Rather than having four+ different papers cramped into 90 minutes, you actually get a couple of very smart people discussing the same piece of work. Maybe the organizers could think about making this format a still bigger part of the overall schedule.
Then, of course, the two sessions about “Seeing states and state theory in STS”, organized and hosted by Nicholas and Jan, were surely the place where things were happening with respect to the interests represented in this blog. The powers that be provided one of the finer rooms and a good crowd of people was present, despite the fact that it was Saturday afternoon. If I should pick a presentation that impressed me the most, it was the presentation by MIchael Rodriguez-Mu??iz. He is studying the work of census representatives in getting the cooperation of people whose data have to be collected. What I liked so much about this study is that it nicely illustrates the work that has to be done at the periphery to make a technology that is historically highly crucial for establishing state power work in actual practice. It turns out that sometimes, rather than the state being summoned as an authority to implement a certain obligation, the actual exercise of state power benefits from being dissimulated. Fascinating stuff right there.
Thanks to Nicholas and Jan for making it all happen! I sense an STS field in the making here and maybe a continuous series of sessions for future 4S meetings. And one more reason to look forward to next year’s 4S in Copenhagen.

Endre’s fifth post

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A Parliament can be regarded as a centre of calculation in a liberal democracy, but it’s a rather strange one at that: on most days it’s completely empty, and even when it is full of politicians, one has the feeling that the debates that take place in the richly decorated chambers are mere perfomances. At least this is what a journalist told me once, complaining that all the decisions on the Hungarian National Assembly’s agenda had already been made somewhere else — in party meetings, closed committee sessions, or one of the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of politics. He said he felt cheated whenever he had to report on a plenary sitting, and when he learned about my interest in the material practices of political representation, he immediately thought I was on a mission to find out what was going on behind the curtain, in the backstages of the Parliament.

Sometimes it was a bit like that, but now — more than three years after the beginning of my fieldwork  — I think it’s more appropriate to say that I was interested in staging processes, rather than the front-stage and the backstage(s) of democratic politics as such. Let me unpack this.

On Monday, 31 March 2008, which was incidentally the first day of my fieldwork in Budapest, the parliamentary faction of the Alliance of Free Democrats announced that it wanted the party to quit the socialist-liberal coalition, which by then had been governing the country for six years. The main reason for this was that two days earlier the socialist Prime Minister unilaterally decided to sack the liberal Minister of Health, blaming her (and her party) for a failed healthcare reform. Being the smaller partner in the coalition, the Alliance of Free Democrats was suddenly confronted with a dilemma: either they swallowed the insult, stayed in Government, and risked becoming politically irrelevant, or they joined the Opposition, and lost whatever power they still had in various ministries and other public institutions. The parliamentary faction believed the latter to be the better option, and this was supported by the party’s Executive Committee. However, the decision to quit the governing coalition could only be made by an exceptional party congress, which was quickly convened for 27 April 2008.

This was a full-blown government crisis, and I was right in the middle of it. In the end of March 2008 I travelled to Budapest to examine how political representation worked in practice by shadowing a Member of Parliament for three-four weeks. The MP who agreed to participate in this strange exercise happened to be the deputy faction leader of the Alliance of Free Democrats, whom I knew from early undergrad times — we studied sociology together at the Eötvös Loránd University. In 2002, the same year I finished my degree, he became one of the youngest MPs in the Hungarian National Assembly, and in 2006, the same year I began my PhD in Lancaster, he was re-elected. He was the only person I knew in the Parliament at the time, and so I was incredibly happy when in the end of 2007 he agreed to become part of my research. Neither of us would have thought back then that the shadowing period would be so intense.

How much biographical detail is required to make my story interesting and credible? Should I disclose the MP’s name, age, and place of birth? His marital status? His favourite hobby? His view on religion, human rights, and climate change? I don’t know. STS has not been very good at dealing with persons — after all, doing away with ‘great men’ narratives has been one of the most important aims from the outset. One of the few — and often misinterpreted — examples for how a person could be analysed as one of many entities is Bruno Latour’s work on Louis Pasteur, which is about a drama that took place on several stages. (The reference here is not necessarily The Pasteurization of France, but Chapter 4 of Pandora’s Hope) The first (part of the) drama was an ontological one: a nonentity had to be turned into a character. The second was an epistemological one: Pasteur had to  claim the authority to make claims about that character. As Latour says, the experiment was

‘a story tied to a situation in which new actants [underwent] terrible trials plotted by an ingenious stage manager; and then the stage manager, in turn, [underwent] terrible trials at the hands of his colleagues, who test[ed] what sort of ties there [were] between the first story and the second situation’ (p. 124).

While the stages Latour focuses on are laboratories and academic settings, I think the concept of staging works really well in the realm of conventional politics. (For a similar argument see Lisa Disch’s fascinating paper here.) It is possible to say that in the spring of 2008 the Alliance of Free Democrats faction — including the MP I was shadowing — conducted an experiment that took place on several stages, including TV studios, street demonstrations, the party headquarters, and the Parliament. Their task was simultaneously to make liberal voters distinguishable from socialist voters, and to make the claim that the liberal party was their true representative in the National Assembly. Although the experiment ended with a single decision — at the exceptional party congress about 80 percent of the delegates voted in favour of quitting the coalition — it could not be reduced to a single moment. None of the stages were irrelevant to the other. The reason why the Parliament could be thought of as the front-stage of democratic politics was not because the performances in the debating chamber were more important than in other places, but because between the elections in 2006 and 2010 it was the only place where the sovereign could be seen.

Imagining infrastructures the corporate IT way

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A couple of days ago a video made by RIM (the manufacturer of blackberry) cropped up on youtube. It shows RIM’s vision of the future of work and, of course, of its own role in it. The two videos which you can see here and here were supposedly leaked from within RIM. Surprisingly though, they are still on youtube for anybody to see, so RIM does probably not feel shamed by them (to say the least). Some of the blogosphere has already been reacting, calling the video, for example, “depressing as hell”.
The insight the videos provide into imaginations of future infrastructures probably informing the setting of corporate strategies in the development of communication devices is interesting – and transcends the character of this particular video as a somewhat desperate life sign of a company currently under some pressure to make a show of itself. About time for the role of fantasies in the development of infrastructure to move up a bit on our list of research topics?

Teaching STS: Geographic Diffusion of Facebook

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The diffusion of innovations is a common topic worth discussing in basic courses in sociology, usually on the topic of cultural diffusion, as well as STS courses. While it is often not a problem to spread the good word about diffusion, a contemporary example, the spread of facebook, provides some interesting fodder for in-class discussion and student exploration.

2004-12

Here is a website, inside facebook, with some interesting images that students, in my experience, will be interested in using, discussing, and perhaps hazarding a few hypotheses. The images are US-focused, which is not ideal; however, explanations for some of the geographic distribution of facebook will help students to really understand how ideas like this spread.

What’s nice about it, in my opinion, is that it provides some opportunitites to discuss the various explanations for diffusion. For example, was facebook expensive to adopt early on as compared to later on? Was facebook an obvious improvement on technologies that preceded it? How did one “adopt” facebook? Do people “use” facebook differently? Is it analytically meaningful to count every “personal facebook page” as an adoption, even if it is rarely or never used? Why did facebook spread geographically first and then how do we explain further developments in adoption patterns?

I am contemplating an in-class assignment where students break into groups, assess the images and then present their conceivably competing understandings of why facebook spread the way it did, and, importantly, not the way it didn’t…

Endre’s fourth post

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So the parliament building in Budapest is an inhabited ruin — a memorial to a political community that is sometimes defined in cultural, sometimes in legal-political, and sometimes in moral terms. Fine. But since 1989 it’s also the home of the National Assembly, which is the ‘supreme body of State power and popular representation’ in the Republic of Hungary. At least this is what Article 19 of the Constitution says. It is the supreme body of popular representation because it is the only entity in the current political regime that has the right to create and modify laws, which are considered to be expressions of the will of the people.

The creation and modification of laws, I’d like to argue, is another distinct mode of doing politics in a liberal democracy. Unlike the one concerned with drawing the boundaries of the political community, it has hardly anything to do with the past as such. Its temporality is defined more by the legislative process, which begins when an issue takes the shape of a bill, and appears as an electronic document in the Parliament’s Information System called PAIR.

A short detour: there’s a fascinating discussion in STS about issues, and the ways in which they can create their own publics. Noortje Marres has a couple articles on this (see, for example, this one), and so does Bruno Latour (a good summary of his position is available here). What I find really interesting is that the formation of issues is largely invisible from the Parliament’s perspective, just as parliaments are largely invisible from most STS scholars’ perspective. Perhaps it is time to rethink the status of hybrid forums (Michel Callon and his colleagues’ term — see Acting in an Uncertain World) as alternatives to parliaments, and focus instead on the traffic that happens between the two realms.

Back to PAIR. In one of the chapters of my dissertation I examine the Parliament and its Information System as a legislative machine, the main function of which is to turn bills into laws. (Yaron Ezrahi argues the machine is one of the two main metaphors in modern politics — the other being the theatre. See his article here, and, of course, Andrew Barry’s Political Machines) In the chapter I make the claim that the operation of this machine is regulated by two documents, the Constitution and the Standing Orders, which can be read as the Users’ Manuals to the legislature. Describing how they work — not as abstract texts, but as ordering devices — helps to understand what kind of politics is enacted by (this version of) the Parliament. So here’s a rough-and-ready reconstruction of the legislative process:

The first phase is the distribution of issues. The Constitution clearly defines who has the right to submit bills to the National Assembly, and the Standing Orders specifies the format these bills have to take. (They need to be addressed to the Speaker, they need to contain a justification, an assessment of social and economic impact, etc.) Once recognised as bills, issues are forwarded to various Standing Committees, which in turn decide whether the bills are suitable for debate. If they are, the so-called House Committee determines the National Assembly’s agenda — this is when bills are distributed not across space but across time.

The second phase is the debate of the bills. It happens in several rounds, and the Standing Committees play an important role in it, but the plenary sittings in the House of Representatives are structured in a way that most discussions occur between the Government and the Opposition. Two main characteristics of the debate are worth emphasising: 1) that it’s a public event, which means people can follow it either in person or on TV and the web, and 2) that it has a time limit. Even the longest and most tedious debates have to come to an end at some point.

The third, and final, phase is decision-making. Again, this happens in more than one round, and some bills require stronger support than others to be approved, but the making of the decision almost always takes the same form: electronic voting. When the Speaker asks the National Assembly to decide the fate of a bill, all MPs in the House of Representatives have to press one of three buttons on their desks: ‘aye’, ‘nay’, ‘abstain’. A moment later the result appears on a large electronic screen, and the Speaker moves on to the next item on the agenda. But this is not the end of the story. Once approved, the text of the proposed law has to be checked by the Legal Department, and signed by the Speaker and the President. The former testifies that the legislative process went according to the rules and procedures laid down in the Standing Orders, and the latter that the text is in harmony with the Constitution.

There’s a lot to be said about the process, and the persons and artefacts that make it possible, from shorthand writers to microphones, but let me briefly summarise what kind of politics is enacted by the legislature. It is defined as a series of public debates that take place in the Parliament. These debates are about well a defined object between the Government and the Opposition, and sooner or later lead to a clear decision. If the decision is positive, a bill becomes a law, which — as I said earlier — is considered to be the expression of the will of the people.

You think this is too thin? Too naive? Too technical? You think real politics happens elsewhere? In cafes, party meetings, and street demonstrations? I’ll address these concerns in the next post…

First book available from "The MIT Press Infrastructure Series"

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This is a great future publishing series for folks interested in infrastructure:

Check it out: Geoffrey C. Bowker and Paul N. Edwards, Associate Series Editors

In recent years, awareness of infrastructures has been building to a remarkable degree in virtually every area. The information infrastructure which subtends the revolutionary new forms of sociability, science, scholarship and business is one example. A second is the state of roads, bridges, dams, and other large, expensive, long-term investments as our national and international infrastructures fall into disrepair. A third is the energy infrastructures, both old (fossil fuels) and new (renewables), that subtend the world economy.

A few centers of important scholarship on infrastructures have emerged, such as large technical systems theory (history of technology), urban infrastructures (urban planning, geography), and information infrastructures (information studies, computer-supported cooperative work). Yet too much of this work has been siloed, focusing only a particular system or scale, and with few exceptions it has remained sequestered within some of the smaller academic fields. Finally, remarkably little work has been done on the comparative study of infrastructures: taking lessons from one field and modifying it for another.

The first book in the series is “Standards: Recipes for Reality”

Capture

Standards
Recipes for Reality
Lawrence Busch

Standards are the means by which we construct realities. There are established standards for professional accreditation, the environment, consumer products, animal welfare, the acceptable stress for highway bridges, healthcare, education–for almost everything. We are surrounded by a vast array of standards, many of which we take for granted but each of which has been and continues to be the subject of intense negotiation. In this book, Lawrence Busch investigates standards as “recipes for reality.” Standards, he argues, shape not only the physical world around us but also our social lives and even our selves.  

Busch shows how standards are intimately connected to power–that they often serve to empower some and disempower others. He outlines the history of formal standards and describes how modern science came to be associated with the moral-technical project of standardization of both people and things. He examines the use of standards to differentiate and how this affects our perceptions; he discusses the creation of a global system of audits, certifications, and accreditations; and he considers issues of trust, honesty, and risk. After exploring the troubled coexistence of standards and democracy, Busch suggests guidelines for developing fair, equitable, and effective standards. Taking a uniquely integrated and comprehensive view of the subject, Busch shows how standards for people and things are inextricably linked, how standards are always layered (even if often addressed serially), and how standards are simultaneously technical, social, moral, legal, and ontological devices.

About the Author

Lawrence Busch is University Distinguished Professor in the Center for the Study of Standards in Society in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University and Professor of Standards and Society in the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics at Lancaster University, U.K.

Endorsements

“Lawrence Busch’s book, Standards: Recipes for Reality, illustrates with vivid clarity the ubiquity and importance of these ‘things’ called standards. Rather than present a dry economic text, or a singular discipline’s focus, Busch has proposed a ‘Unified Field Theory’ for standards—a multidisciplinary view of standardization. For anyone interested in standardization from a policy, technical, or social perspective, this volume is absolutely essential.”
—Carl Cargill, Principal Scientist of Standards, Adobe Systems; author of Open Systems Standardization: A Business Approach

“With enviable style and impeccable clarity, Busch shines a bright beam into the anonymous, invisible world of standards to reveal how these commonplace instruments order the messy world we live in. This deeply thoughtful work of political sociology is a must-read for anyone concerned with the hidden dynamics of power in contemporary industrial democracies.”
—Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School; author of Designs on Nature

“This book demonstrates that Lawrence Busch is not only an outstanding expert and even connoisseur of the subtle nuances of the world of standards that are used to make and unmake the world; he is also a critical analyst of their political and moral significance. Deeply informed by debates in the social sciences, economics, and even analytical philosophy, the book combines a rigorous examination with a great sense of humor in a journey that leads the reader from Harlequin romances to the auditable firm.”
—Laurent Thévenot, Professor, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris

2012 Digital Government Society Conference

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Preparations for the 2012 Digital Government Society Conference (dg.o 2012) are underway, and we would welcome your participation in the conference. This marks the 13th annual conference, demonstrating a strong and vibrant international community of research and practice. Taking place at the University of Maryland College Park June 4-7, 2012, the conference will bring together e-Government researchers and practitioners to explore cutting edge research and best practices regarding e-Government initiatives.  Accepted papers are published in the ACM Proceedings Digital Library. 

Each year the conference combines:

  • Presentations of effective partnerships and collaborations among government professionals and agencies, university researchers, relevant businesses, and NGOs, as well as grassroots citizen groups, to advance the practice of e-Government.
  • Presentations and discussions on new research on e-Government as an interdisciplinary domain that lies at the intersections of information technology research, social and behavioral science research, and the challenges and missions of government.
  • Practice regarding e-Government projects, implementations, and initiatives that bring together the research and practitioner communities, demonstrate the effectiveness and/or challenges of e-Government, and offer best practices.  

Governments today face unprecedented opportunities and challenges. New technologies provide governments with the opportunity to redefine the relationship between government and the public that they serve, create innovative public services, provide customer-focused services, encourage transparency, promote participatory democracy, facilitate the co-design of services, form new partnerships in service delivery, streamline operations and reduce costs, and build trust in government. But harnessing and implementing technologies effectively raise a number of policy, technology, and governance challenges. This year, the conference program will focus on the ways governments and the e-Government research community can work collaboratively to leverage information and communication technologies as part of innovative and dynamic approaches to creating and implementing high quality, efficient, and effective e-Government.

Research, practice, and collaboration submissions addressing this theme could include but are not limited to: social media and public participation in digital government; effective use of social media by governments; crowd sourcing for government decision making; transformative government; open and transparent government; models of collaboration among government, industry, NGOs, and citizens; data  integration, visualizations, and analytics for government decision making; agile and flexible government; financial/economic/social policy making; government productivity and effectiveness; service quality and customer-centric e-Government; social and health infrastructure; global  government collaboration models and practices; infrastructure for data sharing among government agencies; computing infrastructure models,  cyber-security and project management; IT-enabled government management and operations, and interest in program execution; IT and tools to support government security; and methods to measure and evaluate success in e-Government.

In addition, we welcome submissions from the broader domain of e-Government research. We invite completed research papers, papers describing management and practice, policy, and case studies, student research papers, on-going research posters, and live demonstrations that demonstrate the use of technology to promote innovative e-Government services. We particularly encourage submissions on interdisciplinary and crosscutting topics. We also encourage the submission of suggestions for panels, and pre-conference tutorials and workshops.

More specific conference details are below. 


Kind regards,

John Carlo Bertot, President-Elect and Conference Chair
Hans Jochen Scholl, President

13th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2012)
Bridging Research and Practice
University of Maryland, College ParkMD
Monday– Thursday, June 4-7, 2012
Website: http://dgo2012.dgsna.org
General inquiries: dgo2012@easychair.org
Paper submissions: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dgo2012

 

 


Important Dates:

Jan 22, 2012               Papers, doctoral colloquium papers, workshop, tutorial, and panel proposals due 
March 7, 2012            Paper, doctoral colloquium, workshop, tutorial, and panel acceptance notifications
Mar 16, 2012             Poster and demo proposals due 
Mar 30, 2012            Camera-ready manuscripts due
April 6, 2012              Poster and demo acceptance notifications

May 4, 2012               Early registration closes
Jun 4-7, 2012             dg.o 2012 conference

 

 

Special Issue on "Online Collective Action and Policy Change"

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Call for Papers

Policy and Internet  
Special Issue on “Online Collective Action and Policy Change”

Guest Editors 
Andrea Calderaro (PhD, European University Institute)
Anastasia Kavada (PhD,  University of Westminster)

Policy and Internet, the first major peer-reviewed multi-disciplinary journal investigating the impact of the internet on public policy, is inviting submissions for a special issue on ‘Online Collective Action and Policy Change’, to be published in January 2013 (paper deadline: 31 March 2012). The journal is edited by the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) for the Policy Studies Organization (PSO). Please find more at:&nbsp! ;http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news/?id=595

The Internet has created a new interface between collective action and policy making: it opens new channels for social coordination and mobilisation, and it offers multiple platforms from where to influence public opinion and policy makers. The recent wave of protests that has swept authoritarian regimes like Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, but also western liberal democracies like Greece, Spain, and the UK, offers new empirical evidence of the impact that online interactions and information exchange can have on policy making.

In addition to these recent instances of contentious politics, advocacy and grassroots groups are increasingly using online technologies to empower local communities and direct change in the policies that most affect them. And issues at the heart of online governance, like Internet regulation, are motivating many collec! tive efforts directed to shaping file-sharing policies, free software, or digital communication rights.

This special issue calls for academic papers reporting novel empirical research on how online collective action drives policy change, in any of its ramifications. This includes topics such as:

– The coordination of protests and mobilisations using online technologies, and their impact on public opinion and policy making.
– The mechanisms through which online collective action grows and diffuses, and how or when they trigger a policy reaction.
– The impact of online activity on issue salience, and the responsiveness of policy makers.
– The interplay between online collective action and the offline policy cycle, or how policy makers deal with new sources of instability and disruption.

This list of topics is not exhaustive, and other questions related to online collective action and its impact on policy making will be considered. Please cont! act the editors (policyandinternet@oii.ox.ac.uk) if you have any queries about how your paper might fit in the issue.

Paper Submissions

The online submission deadline for papers is 31 March 2012. Please indicate in the cover letter that the paper is intended for the special issue ‘Online Collective Action and Policy Change’. Authors are advised to consult the journal’s Guide for Authors before submitting their paper. Please feel free to contact the guest editors Andrea Calderaro (andrea.calderaro@eui.eu) and Anastasia Kavada (a.kavada@westminster.ac.uk) for any inquires about the special issue.

_________________________________
Andrea Calderaro, PhD
Department of Social and Political Sciences – European University Institute

Visiting Researcher
Department of Media and Communication – University of Oslo
———————————————–
PERSONAL PAGE: www.eui.eu/Personal/Researchers/calderaro/

Job Posting: Digital Humanities

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The College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University invites applications and nominations for an open rank position (assistant/associate/full professor) in the field of Digital Humanities to begin fall 2012. The successful candidate will have expertise in new computational approaches that help distill meaning from texts and artifacts, and in new modes of presenting these in electronic formats. Examples include but are not limited to text-mining, geo! graphic information systems, natural language processing, visualization, or complex network analysis. He or she will be familiar with the theoretical challenges implicit in this emerging field, will have an interest in translating knowledge within and between disciplines and for a broader public, and will help to build new expertise in Digital Humanities at Northeastern. The position will complement existing University strengths in the related areas of network science and computational social science. Applications are invited from any discipline that contributes to the Digital Humanities. The appointment will be made in an appropriate department in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and a cross-departmental or cross-college appointment (such as with the College of Computer and Information Science) is also possible. Candidates must have a PhD at the beginning of the appointment and a record of scholarship and teaching commensurate with rank.

 

Northeastern University in Boston is a nationally-ranked research university with a strong urban mission, a global perspective, and an emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship. Its signature Cooperative Education Program and study-abroad opportunities such as Dialogues of Civilization provide experiential learning opportunities for its 19,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The newly founded College of Social Sciences and Humanities incorporates the departments of African-American Studies; Economics; English; History; Languages, Literatures and Cultures; Philosophy and Religion; Political Science; and Sociology and Anthropology. The College is home to the School of Crimi! nology and Criminal Justice and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. Its eight interdisciplinary programs include International Affairs; Law and Public Policy; East Asian Studies; Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and Jewish Studies.

 

Applications will only be accepted through the College of Social Sciences and Humanities website. To apply, please go tohttp://www.northeastern.edu/cssh/, and click on the Faculty Positions link. Applicants already holding tenure should upload a letter of application, CV, a statement of current and future research interests, a writing sample of no more than 50 pages, and the names of three referees. Untenured applicants should upload a letter of application, CV, a statement of current and future research interests, a writing sample of no more than fifty pages, and should have three references submitted via the Fac! ulty Positions site. Review of applications will begin October 20, 2011 and will continue until the position is filled. Questions about the position may be directed to the Chair of the Search Committee, David Lazer, or to Co-Chair, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon at dighumsearch@neu.edu.


Northeastern University is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Educational Institution and Employer, Title IX University. Northeastern University particularly welcomes applications from minorities, women, and persons with disabilities.

David Lazer (www.davidlazer.com)

Associate Professor of Political Science and Computer Science
Northeastern University &
Director, Program on Networked Governance
Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard University
The netgov blog: http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/netgov/

Endre’s third post

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What do we learn about liberal democracy if we focus on the (construction of) the Hungarian parliament building? In the previous post I argued that one the one hand we learn that it’s a political reality that first came into being neither in 600 BC, nor in 1989 AD, but sometime in the 19th century, and on the other hand we learn that at the time it was not a singular model of governance, but consisted of three distinct modes of doing politics. I also argued that what the parliament building did in the turn of the century was that it held together this political reality, which was supposed to last hundreds of years. But it only lasted a little more than a decade.

Between 1914 and 1989 the building in the centre of Budapest witnessed two world wars and three revolutions, as a result of which hardly anything that Imre Steindl once cast in stone is valid anymore. Today, the neo-Gothic palace that was once the largest parliament building in the world makes a rather grotesque sight in a country of only ten million people. Just how grotesque, I think is wonderfully captured by Hungarian writer Lajos Parti Nagy:

[…] It is as if a talented, up-and-coming pastry-chef had once dreamt of something big, awful and uncontrollable. The dream is long gone with the river, but the stone-pastry fossil is still there. It looks like its own model, made to scale of matchsticks, carved out of lard and marzipan. It looks like it is painted, stitched, batiked, patchworked, embroidered, knitted, forged of moonlight, copper, tin, iron staples, bullet shells. It is so unreal I cannot dislike it, I’m used to it, it belongs to me, along with all the coarse absurdities of my country’s history. It is the lamentably false and imposing fulfilment of a desire. An ‘in-the-meantime’ disproportionate monster, designed for a different, earlier country.
(My – not very eloquent – translation. The original version is available here)

I find Parti Nagy’s words captivating. And yet I believe it is not simply the twists and turns of the 20th century that make the parliament building an analytically interesting entity. As an inhabited ruin, it also helps to understand the workings of a distinct mode of doing politics – one that is as much concerned with the definition of a political community in the beginning of the 21st century as it was in the end of the 19th century.

In one of the chapters of my dissertation I draw on Geoffrey Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences to examine how the parliament building works as a memorial today. The premise is that, similar to the Austro-Hungarian period, the present and the future of the political community in the Third Republic is envisioned (and materialised) as the extension of the past it creates for itself. This past, however, consists of several, often conflicting, claims of continuity.

The first claim of continuity takes material form in the Holy Crown, located in the Cupola Hall of the Parliament. This fascinating object, which is often referred to as St. Stephen’s crown, is widely regarded as the symbol of a thousand-year old state, and defines the political community in very broad cultural terms: anyone who feels Hungarian is Hungarian, including those living outside the current borders of Hungary. (This is, of course, a can of worms – those interested in opening it should have a look at László Péter’s thorough article here)

The second claim of continuity is associated with the Parliamentary Collection of the Library of the National Assembly, which treats the 1848 revolution and the first democratically elected government as the absolute threshold in Hungarian history. The emphasis is on the term ‘democratically elected’, which denotes a radical shift in the logic of sovereignty. According to this logic, power stems not from God or the Holy Crown but from the people – a term that in this context refers to the collective of those who have the right to vote.

But what if voters want to use their power to exclude certain groups from the political community, either to ‘purify the nation’, or to ‘realise the dictatorship of the proletariat’? The third claim of continuity has less to do with the state and the nation than with a society, held together by a moral commitment to fight all forms of tyranny. As several statues and memorials in the square in front of the parliament building show, in the Hungarian consciousness this commitment is exemplified by the 1956 revolution, which might have been crushed by force, but from the early 1980s onwards served as one of the most important sources of inspiration for the illegal democratic opposition, and then for the new National Assembly set up in 1990.

Needless to say, I’m oversimplifying things, but my point is this: if we use the Hungarian parliament building not simply to reconstruct the political history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century, but more as a device to analyse how liberal democracy works today, then I think it makes sense to say that one mode of doing politics is (still) very much concerned with the tension between a cultural, a legal-political, and a moral definition of the political community. 

Job offers: Post Doc and Visiting Fellowships in Darmstadt

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The interdisciplinary graduate program “Topology of Technology” at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, announces 1 postdoctoral fellowship and 4 visiting fellowships. The postdoc stipend runs for two years, preferably starting Jan. 1, 2012; the guest stipends are offered for three-month periods throughout 2012.

The program is organized by teachers from the subjects of history, sociology, philosophy, literary criticism, mechanical engineering, informatics, and the planning sciences. It focuses on the relationship between technology and space-at present, in history, and in a possible future. It has four thematic foci:

  • The Persistence and Routinization of Daily Life in Technical Surroundings
  • The Formation and Limitations of Action in Spatial-Technological Settings
  • The Planning and Design of Technologies in Spatial Contexts
  • The Modeling and Simulation of Spatial Relations by Technological Means 

The program is primarily financed by the German Research Council (DFG); see www.dfg.de.

Monthly stipends range between 1,468 and 1,570 euros (parents receive additional child allowances). There are no tax reductions; however, fellows have to finance their own health insurance.

Applicants for the postdoc fellowship need to have a doctoral degree (or at least to have submitted their dissertation). Since course work and seminars are carried out in both German and English, it is expected that applicants are able to read and understand German.

The visiting fellowships are offered to graduate candidates or recent PhDs interested in intensifying their own work on the relationship between technology and space during a three-month stay in Darmstadt. Applicants are asked to indicate in what way they expect to profit from intensified contacts with our graduate program.

Fellows are expected to work together in our beautifully situated villa downtown Darmstadt and thus need to take up their residence in the city or the vicinity.

Applications are only accepted in electronic form. They should include (1) a CV,

(2) copies of academic diplomas,

(3) a short description (max. 5 pages) of the planned postdoc project and doctoral dissertation, respectively, as well as

(4) the names and addresses of two university professors who are willing to act as reference persons. Please send your application no later than

15 November, 2011

to topologie@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de. Please make sure that it includes a personally formulated explanation why you are particularly interested in the topic of the program and to which thematic focus your research will, in the first instance, contribute. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact one of the directors: Petra Gehring (gehring@phil.tu-darmstadt.de) or Mikael Hård (hard@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de).

More information about the research and teaching program of the post-graduate college / graduate school may be found under http://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/index.php?id=1921&L=2

 

What’s the next great infrastructure study?

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One of the common topics of discussion between Jan-Hendrik and I is “What’s the next great infrastructure study?”

Patrick Carroll is writing about bogs and water infrastructure again, only this time in California rather than Ireland.

Anique Hommels is writing about re-building and unbuilding cities.

David Ribes is writing about cyberinfrastructure (in a paper worth reviewing).

A long time ago, to some, Tom Hughes wrote on the electricity infrastructure in Networks of Power.

What are some of the other classic infrastructure studies, and if we review enough of them, what stones seem obviously unturned? (that might become the next great infrastructure study)

NSF meeting at 4S in a few weeks

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STS Events

Interested in funding from the National Science Foundation?

November 05 2011 | Social Studies of Science annual meeting

http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5324

Hear about important changes to the Science, Technology and Society Program solicitation coming on or about November 1, 2011, new STS-related funding opportunities at NSF, and requirements for data management plans. Saturday, November 5, 12:15-1:15, Crowne Plaza, Owens. To schedule an individual meeting or phone call, contact me at kmoore@nsf.gov .

Computers, infrastructure, and recent obituaries

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How is it that Steve Jobs can die and people mourn the man as if he were a family member, and Dennis Ritchie dies and there is hardly a blip on mainstream media?

I realize that many people spend more time with their iPhone than any family member or friend, but try living in our digital age without C programming, windows, or linux.

Thoughts?

A thought for Endre, courtesy of Tom Gieryn

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I’ve been thinking about the link between “what buildings do” and our current exploration of the “multiplicity” of things. One of the concerns Endre raised was the idea that saying that Parliments “do” anything is hard to say with a straight face in STS because there are so few Parliments that what happens in one may not be altogether instructive about the goings-on in another. I agree with this point or insight, mainly, because the space is at once two things from the perspective of the analyst. That is the focus of this blog post: the position or perspective of the analyst must come into play to fully appreciate your point.

The fodder from which I make this claim is Tom Gieryn’s work on Chicago as a “truth spot” wherein he claims that the Chicago School of sociology and urban studies drew credibility for their claims by demanding that the city was at once two cities; an ethnographic field-site untouched and unknown wherein the analysts had to take their analyses “to the streets” AND a laboratory setting controlled and thus knowable as any city wherein the analysts were required to maintain an objective distance as they solved, one by one, the problems of urban life. Check out Tom’s paper here.

Parliment, thus, is both a place of detailed ethnographic work where you take your analysis to the fine-grained detail associated with urban studies, and credibility stems from your closeness to the action (both now, but also historically, with enough original documentation).

Parliment, however, is also another place of distanced analysis — and this is a slight point of departure for your work, because you are not capable of tinkering with the inner workings of Parliment — so instead of the analyst being the one who claims the Hungarian Parliment is like any Parliment (i.e., a lab-like setting), the claims to gather are ones from the inside, from its members (the members of Parliment) about the ability to see “this” Parliment like or unlike others. This is a twist on the credibility statements or strategies Tom describes.

The ground gained, thus, is in seeing credibility of claims or their legitimacy from a different register. Now that we focus on the members of Parliment (but we could go way beyond that), then we can see this shifting register (i.e., a continuum of sorts) between (a) the credibility of claims based on the locality or uniqueness of Hungarian Parliment and associated practices, and (b) the credibility of claims based on the non-local or generic qualities of, lets say, all Parliments. The notion of “claim” is also incredibly flexible, such that you could capture “political” claims, “architectural” claims, etc. This draws, of course, liberally from anthemista’s ideas/comments from the last post. I just find that multiplicity, for it to really capture something, needs an anchor beit credibility, in this case, or the assumption that the body is really one thing seen many ways, in Mol’s case, or some other place to pindown from what angle we assume there is one in many (or a oneness to many).

Endre’s second post

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What do buildings do? The question has been addressed several times in STS (see, for instance, Thomas Gieryn’s paper here, and Michael Guggenheim’s paper here), but I don’t think it’s possible to find a general answer. So let me be more specific: what does the Hungarian parliament building do?

I spent a long time thinking about this question, both during fieldwork in Budapest and during writing-up in Berlin. One day I decided play a game and pile up as many books as I could find in the Grimm Zentrum – Humboldt University’s new open shelf library – that had an image of the Hungarian Parliament on its cover. The result was quite surprising: the books fell into two distinct categories. Either they were about the parliament building, which was constructed in the end of the 19th century, but had nothing to say about politics, or they were about the current political regime, born after the collapse of communism in 1989, but had nothing to say about architecture. There was materiality on the one hand, and democracy on the other.

The only exception I could find was a large-sized exhibition catalogue, published in 2000 by the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. The title of the catalogue was House of the Nation: Parliament Plans for Buda-Pest, 1784-1884, and according to the preface, it was supposed to be more than a supplement to architectural history – it was meant to be the documentation of the realisation of ‘a ramifying high-political programme’. To understand what this programme might have meant, I decided to follow a material semiotic strategy, articulated in John Law’s Aircraft Stories (especially in Chapter 2), and do an anti-reading of the catalogue. The aim was not to faithfully reconstruct how the imposing Parliament was built in the centre of Budapest, but to explore what made its construction possible – indeed necessary.

The answer is that there was not one but at least three reasons for its construction. The first had something to do with the political community. I don’t want to go into the details, but Hungary in the second half of the 19th century was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and so the demonstration of the country’s autonomy was of crucial importance. The story about how the Hungarian government came up with the idea of celebrating the 1000th anniversary of the conquest of the land in 1896 would have been a nice addition to Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition – the point is that the permanent home of the legislature was intended to be a memorial of the thousand-year-old nation.

The second reason is much more prosaic. After the Austro-Hungarian compromise, signed in 1867, the two houses of the Hungarian Parliament moved into two temporary locations, and for more than three decades the House of Lords held its sessions in the main hall of the National Museum, while the House of Representatives assembled in the place of a former military barracks. The latter was too small, the acoustics was bad, the insulation was even worse, and there was hardly any room for the administrative staff. If Hungary wanted a new parliament building, many MPs argued, it had to be large enough to accommodate both houses, the entire administration associated with the legislature, not to mention its library, archives, post office, and so on.

So the new parliament building, which was commissioned in 1880, had to be memorial-like, and it had to be large. But this doesn’t explain why it had to be neo-Gothic. Indirect evidence suggests the decision to choose Imre Steindl as the architect of the Hungarian Parliament was made by former Prime Minister Gyula Andrássy, who was very much impressed by Steindl’s neo-Gothic designs. Not because he was interested in revivalism as such, but because he wanted the new parliament building to resemble the Palace of Westminster as much as possible. He was absolutely fond of English political culture, and his understanding of parliamentarism was strongly influenced by his regular visits to London. He thought it was important to have an independent legislature, to have a House of Representatives that consisted entirely of  elected members, but he was against the extension of the franchise to workers and women, and was definitely against republicanism. As a liberal politician, he believed a constitutional monarchy was the best model a modern nation could hope for.

To make the long story short: the anti-reading of the House of the Nation catalogue revealed that there were at least three different reasons for the parliament building’s construction in the end of the 19th century. In my view, these reasons or justifications (see Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thevenot’s On Justification) point towards three changes in the practice of doing politics: the definition of the political community, the specification of the legislature’s continuous operation, and the birth of the professional politician. I think it’s fair to say that these three changes together constituted the high-political programme mentioned in the catalogue – a political programme that could just as well be called liberal democracy. And what the Hungarian parliament building did, at least until the First World War, was that it held together this political reality, which consisted of three distinct modes of doing politics. What these were and what they look like today is going to be discussed in subsequent posts…

Fashion and waves in STS ??? Is ANT the platform shoes of STS?

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Call me a naive STS newcomer, greenhorn, curly girlie or whatever, but as I was reading all this STS stuff I got more and more confused. And after a lively debate with a colleague from Hamburg University who told me „nobody is doing sociology of knowledge in STS anymore“ I got even more confused. What does that mean „not anymore“? The more I read the more I got the impression that STS proceeds somehow ‘evolutionary’. It seems like everybody is doing ANT (except of those who do post-ANT understood – somebody has to be against it). Other theories and concepts seem to be completely out of fashion.

Coming more from an organisation studies perspective I’m completely not used to something like that. Postmodernism, Neo-Institutionalism, Systems Theory, Structuration Theory – they are used (of course by different researchers) at the same time. What I mean is, not everybody in organisation studies does, let’s say, Neo-Institutionalism and John W. Meyer. In STS there seems to be a consensus – at least somehow – that ANT is the concept to be used.

There was this debate on „thirdwaveness“ a few months ago: http://www.installingorder.org/how-many-sts-waves-does-it-take-to-create-a-d

Well, I was wondering: Is ANT the platform shoes of STS? Will Latour be out of fashion in 2015? And what will be the dernier cri in 2015?

Plug for ANTHEM

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A fellow named “Peter” recently commented on Endre’s first post; turns out, he’s the long-time maintainer of content at ANTHEM, which is a blog originally formed to be:

… the public face of ANTHEM, the “Actor-Network Theory — Heidegger Meeting,” a gathering of human and nonhuman actors that are interested in both actor-network theory and the work of Martin Heidegger, as well as the relationship and controversies between the two. Our primary focus is the question of technology. We are interested not only in the philosophy of technology but also in the empirical issues pertaining to the social study of technology.

However, those meetings appear to be over, but the blog lives on … still nutured by Peter and readers.

Check it out — I am and now I’m getting turned-onto Princes, Wolves, and quadruple objects … oh yeah, Peter, what about quadruple “things”!?

"Hollow" infrastructure?

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I’m just starting to get turned-onto this line of research on “hollow states,” which is about the decreasing duties associated with state enterprise and how to manage the relations between states and non-state entities as they adopt a greater number of previously-state, now-outsourced duties related to governance.

This paper on infrastructure caught my attention. It is written by Georgia’s O’Toole.

Citation:

Laurence J. O’Toole, Jr.

Hollowing the Infrastructure: Revolving Loan Programs and Network Dynamics in the American States

J Public Adm Res Theory (1996) 6(2): 225–242

Abstract:

Trends toward more complex intergovernmental programs and greater use of public-private arrangements carry implications for public management, since these developments signify challenges for administrators called upon to manage within hollowed institutional settings: interorganizational networks for effectuating policy. The implications of such shifts are explored by examining one important program change of the last decade: the move away from federal grant support for municipal wastewater treatment infrastructure and toward the creation of separate state revolving-loan funds (SRFs). National regulatory standards remain, but the central place of the EPA in the infrastructure effort has shifted largely into other hands, with consequences for the implementation of policy. Altered policy instruments stimulate the formation of more complex network patterns involving new actors who offer needed technologies. These changes carry implications for program operations and results. Evidence from the operations of SRFs suggests that these developments are significant and also that public management has become, if anything, even more consequential in such networked contexts.

Intrastructure — before and under?

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Do infrastructure studies suffer from a before-and-under bias?

The term infrastucture, per my understandings of the term, but also reflected in the wiki site, takes on two basic meanings.

First, infrastructure gets one of its meanings, which also double as conceptualizations, by being what precedes whatever system it supports, hence, infrastructure comes before the system it facilitates. This might be called “infrastructure as antecedent” (or pre-structure).

Second, infrastructure, perhaps this time in a more etymological sense, is also meant to denote the undergird that holds a system in place, for example, the layers of earth, sand, and rocks which create the bed under which roadways can be built and, hence, the interlinking arteries of transit can be laid. This might be called “infrastructure as support” (like a craddle, or sub-structure).

Of course, the notion of “sub-structure” is not foreign territory for sociologists. In fact, in numerous lines of scholarship far outside of sociology, there is a belief that something “real” or “raw” maybe even primordial can be discovered in the depths or beneath. Likewise, there is precedent in nearly any historical analysis, some being executed better than others on this measure, that that which occurs before a given event in need of explanation is often seen as powerfully influencing its later form. In this sense, infrastructrure almost becomes akin to “pre-structure.”

These are sometimes used in infrastructure studies to justify their reason for being done in the first place; some version of “it came before and powerfully shaped X” or “it is beneath and powerfully supports X”. Sometimes these claims are explicit, but often they are more implicit such that were the author, one would imagine, to get a review who writes “why study this at all?” the author would be almost dumbfounded as if to say “duh.”

Now, infrastructure that comes before the system/material it supports, I suspect, operates according to different dynamics as compared to (a) infrastructure that comes after the system/material it supports (i.e., a system that is imposed on pre-existing materials such as security infrastructure developed in response to and not before serial crimes) or (b) infrastructure that support from above rather than below (i.e., a system that is not under us, but on us, although an obvious infrastructureal equivalent of this illudes me now — imagine the infrastructural equivalent of glasses on a human face, which does not support from below, and instead supports on top of or above the person).

Do infrastructure studies suffer from a before-and-under bias? This might be a nice empirical question.

Endre’s first post

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Once again, many thanks to the Installing (Social) Order team for inviting me as a guest blogger! Let me start this first post with a short introduction that hopefully helps to situate my research within science and technology studies.

Sociologists and anthropologists of science know a lot about laboratories, innovation centres, museums, design studios, hospitals, and the politics of related material practices, but curiously there’s hardly any STS work that focuses on explicitly political institutions. Perhaps the most notable exception is the thousand page long Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy catalogue, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. As many readers of this blog probably know, the catalogue was published in 2005 as a companion to a fascinating exhibition, held at the Karlsruhe-based Center for Art and Media (http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$4581#), but I stumbled upon it only a year later, in the library of Lancaster University. It was the very beginning of my PhD at the Department of Sociology (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/), and I was looking for studies on political technologies when I discovered the massive blue book on one of the shelves. My idea at the time was to compare three or four distinct political configurations or arrangements (street demonstrations, public debates, election campaigns), but flipping through the essays in the catalogue made me realise that it would be much more interesting to focus on the entity that in one way or another coordinates these arrangements: the parliament. (The term ‘arrangement’ comes from Andrew Barry’s Political Machines.)

I can’t say I immediately had a clear idea about what an STS-informed research of a parliament would look like, but I knew where it could take place. As someone who grew up in Hungary, I remembered that the parliament building in the centre of Budapest was once the largest (and arguably the most impressive) of its kind – quite bizarre for a country that is not only small, but in most political scientists’ view also counts as a ‘new democracy’. Either they are right, I thought, and then props really don’t matter in politics, or the idea that liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe fell from the sky in 1989 – like in Peter Sloterdijk’s thought experiment (http://www.g-i-o.com/pp1.htm) – needs to be rethought.

So there was a problem, there was a site, and thanks to a friend from undergraduate times, who started his second term as a Member of Parliament in 2006, soon there was access. The fourth component, funding, came from The Leverhulme Trust, which generously supported a larger research project entitled Relocating Innovation: Places and Material Practices of Future Making (http://www.sand14.com/relocatinginnovation/). I’ll write more about my MP friend and the research project that involved Lucy Suchman, Laura Watts and myself in subsequent posts. For now, let me just say that my fieldwork began in Budapest in 2008 and – somewhat surprisingly – ended in Berlin in 2011. The main idea was very simple: instead of treating the Hungarian Parliament as a local manifestation of liberal democracy as a universal concept, I wanted to understand what liberal democracy was by focusing on the Hungarian Parliament. In practice, however, the research very quickly became very complex. As a sociologist, all of a sudden I had to find ways of relating to architecture, Hungarian history, constitutional theory, political science and political philosophy, while constantly keeping an eye on STS. It was overwhelming.

Between 2008 and 2011 I spent four extended periods doing ethnographic and historical research in and around the Hungarian parliament building, and a longer period as a visiting researcher at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University (http://www.euroethno.hu-berlin.de/), trying to make sense of my empirical material. Finally, less than two weeks ago I submitted my dissertation, which is entitled Parliament Politics: A material semiotic analysis of liberal democracy. My plan in this space within the Installing (Social) Order blog is not to provide a summary of the dissertation, but to offer some sort of a problem map. First I will focus on architecture, and discuss what we can learn about liberal democracy if we concentrate on the construction of the Hungarian parliament building in the end of the 19th century. Then I will briefly recount what happened to this building (and the political reality it was supposed to hold together) in the 20th century in order to highlight some tensions related to the definition of a political community. I’ll then concentrate on the parliament’s role in the current political regime – the Republic of Hungary – and examine some of the most important aspects of the legislative process. After this, I’ll (re-)introduce my MP friend and summarise what I’ve learned from him about political representation, which sometimes takes place in the parliament building, but some other times in TV studios, party congresses, street demonstrations, and various other places. All of my stories will be full of political objects, but the picture wouldn’t be complete if I remained silent about political subjects. This part will be a little complicated, because I don’t think STS is very well equipped to deal with questions related to citizenship, but I might be wrong. In the end, I’ll say something about the implications of my research, and the Relocating Innovation project in general, which will probably coincide with a workshop I’m going to attend at MEDEA at Malmö University in the end of October (related to this event: http://medea.mah.se/2011/09/medea-talks-presents-lucy-suchman/).

I hope these posts will be useful and entertaining, and generate some interesting discussions! If you have any questions and/or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to post them as comments or send them in an email to edanyi -at- gmail.com.

Guest Blogger: Endre Danyi

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Endre Dányi is going to join the blog for the month of October. He is the student of Lucy Suchman and John Law at Lancaster University’s Department of Sociology, and he writes on what I shall dare say “the parliment multiple.” Like Anna Marie Mol’s work on the “body multiple,” Endre’s work aims to capture the ontologies of parliment, and he does this with some attention to the interface of the future and the past.

Join me in welcoming Endre Danyi to installing social order!

NOTE: A short snippet about his Ph.D. work:

What is a parliament? And how does it work? In order to answer these questions I suggest that we consider ‘the parliament’ not as a general metaphor for democratic politics, but a specific site that lies at the intersection of distinct political imaginaries. Following a material semiotic approach my research focuses on the Hungarian Parliament – a hundred-year-old socio-technical assemblage that at the time of its opening was the largest parliament in the world. Building upon recent works in science and technology studies (STS) and cultural anthropology that conceive of politics as a set of located material practices, I argue that this seemingly singular iconic site in Budapest sometimes functions as an historical monument, sometimes as a professional organisation, and sometimes as an elaborate set for politicians. Based mainly on ethnographic and archival research, I examine the ways in which versions of a national past, the workings of a political regime, and acts of decision-making get materialised in the Hungarian Parliament, and the political futures that these narratives render real(istic) while keeping others invisible.

Kathryn Furlong on infrastructure

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A new paper by Kathryn Furlong is out in Sage’s “Progress in Human Geography” titled “Small technologies, big change: Rethinking infrastructure through STS and geography“

The abstract reads:

Infrastructure tends to be conceived as stabilized and ‘black-boxed’ with little interaction from users. This fixity is in flux in ways not yet fully considered in either geography or science and technology studies (STS). Driven by environmental and economic concerns, water utilities are increasingly introducing efficiency technologies into infrastructure networks. These, I argue, serve as ‘mediating technologies’ shifting long-accepted socio-technical and environmental relationships in cities. The essay argues for a new approach to infrastructure that, by integrating insights from STS and geography, highlights its malleability and offers conceptual tools to consider how this malleability might be fostered.

While the author might be a little hard on STS, stating:

STS tends to privilege the technical and thus often exhibits less refined approaches to social, political, and economic processes, has little to say on the production of nature, and exhibits ‘a rather generic notion of space’ and place (Truffer, 2008: 978)

It is still well worth the read, especially given the necessity to consider geographic issues, which might be a way to consider the matters of scale we so recently discussed here.

States in the news

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This morning’s New York Times on-line features an article titled “New State Laws Are Limiting Access for Voters” and it presents or conceptualizes the infrastructural entitiy of “the state” in a couple of interesting ways.

On the one hand, states are presented in the journalist protrayal as active agents, in this case, passing laws.

Five states passed laws this year scaling back programs allowing voters to cast their ballots before Election Day, the Brennan Center found.

On the other hand, this hard work was the networked outcome of competing representatives with diverse interests.

Republicans, who have passed almost all of the new election laws, say they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, and question why photo identification should be routinely required at airports but not at polling sites. Democrats counter that the new laws are a solution in search of a problem, since voter fraud is rare. They worry that the laws will discourage, or even block, eligible voters — especially poor voters, young voters and African-American voters, who tend to vote for Democrats.

More in the middle, we see “the state” as both an actor, capable of passing laws, but also an effect of networked practices and representations, as evidenced by the now law-enforced presentation of government-issued identification cards at voting booths (the state being more like the effect, rather than the cause).

The biggest impact, the Brennan Center said, will be from laws requiring people to show government-issued photo identification to vote. This year, 34 states introduced legislation to require it — a flurry of activity that Jennie Bowser, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, called “pretty unusual.”

In reflecting on these issues, I am reminded of a dichotomy in the literature about states and statehood. Sometimes the state is presented as an empty signifier capable of action, as evidenced in their ability “pass laws this year.” In contrast, sometimes states are defined by their effect, as evidenced by the now law-enforced presentation of government-issued identification cards at voting booths. In our final example, we see one of two things: either an actor-network (where the state is conceptualized as an actor because it is a network) or a register-shift, meaning that the state registers as an actor during certain actions as a shortcut in presenting ideas, but also as an networked entity composed of competing actors incapable of concerted effort that might otherwise be called “state action.”

There will be an infrastructure.

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Check out this recent video from the FuturICT group in which Paul Lukowicz presents his take on the project from the perspective of a computer scientist.
A lot of the issues we have been discussing come up very explicitly in this bit. Particularly interesting, I think, is how emergent structures on the one hand and purposefully built infrastructure on the other are being renegotiated conceptually, and how both are finally associated with the use of a platform by an potentially infinite and yet unkown set of users: “there will be an infrastructure” which all kinds of people may contribute to, may use to run their own projects on, built their own apps, and so on. This particular aspect of infrastructure as platform may be worth exploring further, as it has all kinds of conceptual implications, and an interesting political undertone.

A couple of more videos are linked at the site, for example a ten-minute promo of the project.

Coordination as an enduring infrastructure problem

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Many thanks to my mentor, Alice Robbin of Indiana University’s School of Library Sciences, for turning me onto this interesting new paper by Nancy C. Roberts.

Beyond Smokestacks and Silos: Open-Source, Web-Enabled Coordination in Organizations and Networks

What accounts for coordination problems? Many mechanisms of coordination exist in both organizations and networks, yet despite their widespread use, coordination challenges persist. Some believe the challenges are growing even more serious. One answer lies in understanding that coordination is not a free good; it is expensive in terms of time, effort, and attention, or what economists call transaction and administrative costs. An alternative to improving coordination is to reduce its costs, yet there is little guidance in the literature
to help managers and researchers calculate coordination costs or make design decisions based on cost reductions. Th is article explores two cases—the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Offi ce’s Peer-to-Patent pilot program and the online relief eff ort in Haiti following the devastating earthquake there in 2010—to illustrate the advantages and constraints of using Web 2.0 technology as a mechanism of coordination and a tool for cost reduction. The lessons learned from these cases may offer practitioners and researchers a way out of our “silos” and “smokestacks.”

Now, I’m not totally convinced that the author is suggesting that infrastructure is the answer to reducing transaction costs associated with coordination efforts. However, the claim, which seems well substantiated to me, that the challenges facing those attempting to coordinate are growing “even more serious” amid ever complex webs of people, places and things seems like a valuable position to take for those of us writing on infrastructure.

The position can be used to justify infrastructure research. Why is this needed? All too often, I see papers on infrastructure that must justify their raison d’être and their justification is little better than “duh, its infrastructure”, “its the reason other stuff can work,” or “its the stuff that civilization is made of.” However, I am dissatisfied with all of these reasons, even though I share the personal sentiment, esp. “duh, its infrastructure.”

Of course, there are a variety of reasons that we might want to invetigate/examine infrastructure, especially for theoretical purposes. However, scholars tend to fail to justify their research on a more general or social level, and this position on transaction costs associated with coordination is probably a decent position to start from.

Write tilt-shift

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Seeing this intersting tilt-shift video of a city, I was reminded that scale is a salient issues regarding infrastructure as infrastructural entities often exist in at such massive scale that it is difficult to “humanize” or make it “knowable” to people.

Capture

Similarly:

Regarding numbers, sometimes numbers are so large that their meaning (or reality) is somehow compromised by their sheer size/scale and they are somehow unknowable.

Regarding art, sometimes a painting or sculpture can be so large that it fails to relate to human viewers.

All of this reminds me of the first time I read de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life” and, in particular, the section on walking in cities. The experience of walking in a city is quite different as compared to maps of the city or arial views. Unlocking the scale issue for infrastructure is quite important, especially emphasis on the massiveness, but, as this video indicates, although only through implication and extension: as scholars, we may need to find a way to write tilt-shift about infrastructure.

How brains work in imaginary worlds

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A colleague of mine, Eric Charles (psychology), recently posted some thoughts about how brains work in the world of Marvel X-men. It occurs to me that the modest role of expertise and cognitive psychology that oftentimes make it into our classes on STS might be meaningfully enhanced if we teach a lesson like this about X-men to students.

Explicitly how memory works might be a fruitful avenue, the role of memory and what it means to “know” something, and what expertise might mean if we consider the brain/body relationship, and of course, one gets to talk about Wolverine during class in the process.

"There will be an infrastructure."

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Check out this recent video from the FuturICT group in which Paul Lukowicz presents his take on the project from the perspective of a computer scientist.
A lot of the issues we have been discussing come up very explicitly in this bit. Particularly interesting, I think, is how emergent structure on the one hand and purposefully built infrastructure on the other are being renegotiated conceptually, and how both are finally raised to the offer of a platform: “there will be an infrastructure” which all kinds of people may contribute to, may use to run their own projects on, and built their own apps.

A couple of more videos are linked at the site, for example a ten-minute promo of the project.

Specifying infrastructures cont.

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I was just revisiting the earlier post about the wikipedia page about infrastructures, and the sentiments expressed in the comments about the missing social science and STS references on that page, impressive and elaborate as it is. As far as this blog is concerned, the issue of specifying a common understanding of infrastructures has so far turned out to be, I think, one of its implicit continuous commitments, and one that perhaps merits re-addressing explicitly from time to time. So, very briefly, and slowly gearing up for the 4S meeting, some thoughts on where we are at this point.
On the one hand, there are lots of ressources and discourses about infrastructures drawing in participants that from all types of sources and disciplines. On the other hand, there is STS as a field in social science with some maturity, and with various kinds of theory able to bring infrastructures under the auspices of their concepts and terminologies. From time to time, STS scholars, like other social and political scientists, feel like intervening into public discourse by offering their own types of expertise about particular cases and problems of infrastructures. So far, we have not been satisfied that the conceptual work required for an appropriate understanding of infrastructures has already been done, and that we would merely need to extend the application of otherwise well-known concepts to the exploration of infrastructures. Infrastructures can clearly become “normal” cases of networks, assemblages, socio-technical orders etc., and there is nothing wrong with analyzing them as such. It may, however, also present a danger of locking analyses of infrastructures into foregone conclusions.
Here are a couple of possible lines for discussing specifications of the concept of infrastructures after taking another look at the wiki entry:
– Infrastructures as supporting something (“a society or enterprise”, “an enconomy” etc.). Clearly, the idea of an assemblage (network etc.) supporting something other than itself is worth noticing. General references to use or purpose are, of course, common when talking about all kinds of artefacts, but to speak of such heterogeneous sets of entities in terms of a general externally given purpose must be puzzling.
– References to a general public. Political issues and the state are very salient on the wiki page despite its focus on economics and engineering, and despite the fact that the definition of infrastructure is given in a way that takes great care to exclude political questions, e.g. speaking of “facilities necessary”, or “services essential” as if these qualifications were unproblematic.
– The differentation of hard vs. soft infrastructure – can we utilize this differentation at all? It rings like hard vs soft facts/science/knowledge, though the implied reference to deconstruction (or rather, the potential ease of it) may be more material, less epistemic in this case – if the connotation is not a straightforward military one. The hard vs soft differentiation clearly expresses a concern about stability and vulnerability but is this concern somewhat specific when worrying about infrastructure (rather than about truth)?
– Topographical references abound. Is infrastructure always about some association of artefacts and territories, or perhaps, more generally, about technology and place? Like the references to politics, the references to geography are ubiquitous in the wiki entry although they are not explicitly part of the definition at the top.
Would any of these aspects warrant a respecification of infrastructures in a way that would constitute them as a generic class of research objects? Would we even want to have such a class?

Job offer: Amherst: Science and Technology Policy

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And a job offer that sounds interesting:

The Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (http://polsci.umass.edu/) seeks to fill a full-time tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor in science and technology politics to start in September 2012. The Department welcomes applications from political science, public policy, public administration, as well as from related disciplines.  Geographic, methodological and
science and technology specializations are open.

In recent years, the Department has nearly doubled in size largely through a Faculty Hiring Initiative. This search continues the department’s efforts to add to the strength of its diverse and growing faculty with scholars whose work addresses broad political
questions arising in one or more of the department’s thematic emphases on a) global forces; b) governance and institutions; and c) democracy, participation and citizenship.

The successful candidate will contribute to this trajectory, adding to our current strengths while broadening our reach into new areas. The faculty hire will teach four courses in the Department’s graduate and undergraduate programs. Successful candidates must have the Ph.D. in hand by September
2012. Salary and credit toward tenure will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

The deadline for applications is October 15, 2011, but acceptance will continue until the position is filled.  The department strongly prefers that applicants submit their cover letter, curriculum vitae, and writing samples in electronic form through the Academic Jobs Online website athttps://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/917   and arrange for electronic transmission of three letters of recommendation to the same site.
Alternatively, printed versions of the application materials can be sent to Stephen Marvell, Office Manager, Department of Political Science/UMass, 322 Thompson Tower, Amherst, MA 01003-9277. Those who apply online should not also submit paper materials.  Inquiries about the position may be directed totechnology@polsci.umass.edu.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer.  It and the Department are strongly committed to increasing the diversity of faculty, students, and curriculum, and encourage applications from women and minorities

FuturICT – an epistemic infrastructure in the making

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An interesting endeavour was recently brought to my attention that, I think, is well worth checking out: the FuturICT project. I will just give you a sample of quotes from the website and you will immediately see that this project in more than one way relates to the topic of this blog:
“FuturICT wants science to catch up with the speed at which new problems and opportunities are arising in our changing world as consequences of globalization, technological, demographic and environmental change, and make a contribution to strengthening our societies’ adaptiveness, resilience, and sustainability.  It will do so by developing new scientific approaches and combining these with the best established methods in areas like multi-scale computer modeling, social supercomputing, large-scale data mining and participatory platforms. (…) The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator is a previously unseen multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems. (…) Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies probably constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century and is equally important for the development of novel robust, trustworthy and adaptive information and communication technologies (ICT), based on socially inspired paradigms. We think that integrating ICT, Complexity Science and the Social Sciences will create a paradigm shift, facilitating a symbiotic co-evolution of ICT and society. Data from our complex globe-spanning ICT system will be leveraged to develop models of techno-socio-economic systems. In turn, insights from these models will inform the development of a new generation of socially adaptive, self-organized ICT systems. (…) The FuturICT flagship proposal intends to unify hundreds of the best scientists in Europe in a 10 year 1 billion EUR program to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to.”
Basically, as it appears to me, the FuturICT is a call to arms of sorts for social scientists of all persuasions to do something with the myriad of data our current ICT systems are producing. The aim is to build an epistemic infrastructure, or rather a range of infrastructures that would put all these data to use. One of the interesting things is that everybody can at this point is invited to join in, though the emphasis is clearly on building a large network of institutions, the current state of which you can see here. It very probably though will not hurt to leave your name, affiliation and expertise, if only to be updated as things progress. Some of the information provided at the website does sound kind of sci-fi, some of it kind of eery, but believe me, as I happen to know some of the people involved, these people are very serious – and they are very capable. So, I am very curious what this will grow into.
One thing this made we wonder about with respect to the exploration of infrastructures in general was whether we have been giving quantity enough thought. The impetus for the FuturICT initiative is the mass of data already available, and the rationale is that the very fact of having these data not only will support an epistemic infrastructure but that is also constitutes an outright demand for it. Is this not something which dintinguishes infrastrutures (e.g. infrastructures for traffic, services or electric power) from other types of networks and socio-technical assemblages: that there is some input or throughput, that it comes in high numbers, and that developer-entrepreneurs try to establish infrastructures as complements or as purpose-giving or profit-generating tools with respect to the throughput?

Innovation in book reviews

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A few months ago, Jan-Hendrik and I were discussing the utility of writing book reviews. One concern we had was that book reviews basically do nothing for one’s academic standing, but more than that, in thinking about the book reviews themselves, we were frustrated with them because unlike journal articles, they rarely reference other book reviews for the same book.

So, we wrote a book review that did, to test if there was any value to this. We enlisted a student of mine, Alexander Kinney, and we set to work writing a book review that included other reviews of the same book.

We wrote our editors:

To the editors,

Please see a book review of Latour’s “Reassembling the Social.” While my co-authors realize that the length is somewhat past the desired 1000 words, we hope that you find the document satisfactory. It employs a somewhat unorthodox approach where other book reviews are cited where appropriate so that we can essentially “review what has not yet been sufficiently reviewed by other reviewers.” Additionally, we ask for a small editing consideration for adding a small “box” around a subset of identified text (this mirrors what was done in Latour’s book). I know that this is an unorthodox review, and hope that the innovation is tolerated. Still, we are prepared to make amends if this document does not meet the standards of the journal.

best,
Nicholas J. Rowland

So, it has gone through a couple rounds of editing and is now in the proofs stage (please note that we realize that Latour’s book was written in 2005 [not 2007, as the title currently states]). Also, this new approach to book reviews also requires that one reviews a book a few years after publication rather than soon after publication. This is so that the other reviews can be written and, to some extent, responded to.

Here is the document below, feel free to comment on the approach, style, or content:

PROOFS.pdf

Teaching STS: Reinvention and Modification

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I saw this in a student presentation yesterday about the role of adaptation in the process of diffusion, where we were discussing matters of re-invention and post-hoc modification/workarounds. I was somewhat stunned and the students in the class were mezmerized:

Capture

What you see in the image above is a C5 Russian missile launcher removed from its “aircraft source” and then adapted/modified for use on the rollbar of a jeep/truck. There is also a video too, below the image available at reposter here.

Another of these “DIY” wartime inventions is a hand-held grenade launcher modified for individual use (the source being a slew of them mounted on the bed of a truck).

Capture

All of these examples, along with the videos, could be used in lessons about diffusion and re-inventions, of course. My guess, however, is to ask the students: how does this make you rethink some of the ideas scholars have about diffusion and re-invention. Certainly, the old, fun ideas from STS about “using technologies in ways not originally intended by designers” is a good one here, but beyond that one could begin to rethink the, what one might call, “quick and easy” story of diffusion that seems to dominate the basic literature. I’m speaking here about the binary “1 for adopt, 0 for non-adoption” interpretation of spread. It becomes useless to think about C5 missile launchers in this way. Bringing up the old work of Akrich (1995, solar cells) and the newer work of De Laet and Mol (2002, hand-pump) leads to a much more nuanced vision of re-invention, modification, and localizatoin, but is even that enough? The role of “necessity” seems obviously right, but analytically weak as determining “moments of necessity” from conditions of non-necessity is a deadend for research. Taking a Weberian approach and forcing a claim like because of their geopolitical circumstances and cultural approach to the world around them, common Libyans are relatively more “resourceful” than their governmental/military counterparts also seems analytically weak. Is this a classic “drifting edges of global networks come together unintentionally and unexpectedly” making this outcome, as in, Soviet degeneration leading to the global sales of ersatz military resources (that almost nobody can maintain and) which are (therefore) cheap creates the conditions underwhich the only way to get additional utility out of these machines is in remaking their uses. I’m not even sure what one would call that sort of an analysis … “luck theory”? The motivation behind any modification, reinvention or workaround appears to be some combination of the need to localize and/or extend the utility of something (or a portoin of something). Trying to determine the motivation beyond mere “necessity” or “resourcefulness” is difficult to do. In this case, survival plays an obvious motivation factor; however, extending that to a broader framework seems foolhardy too. So, “where does reinvention come from?” ought to be an enduring question for our students and ourselves in STS…

Please note: reposter.net is a resposting site, so the original material comes from somewhere else, always:

Here are the videos, in order and linked to the original posts on alive.in/libya

Teaching STS: Challenging Technological Determinism in Caliente, NV

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If you were raised on STS in America, then it is likely that you read about the death of a train town named Caliente, NV. This is:

Death by Dieselization: A Case Study in the Reaction to Technological Change
W. F. Cottrell
American Sociological Review
Vol. 16, No. 3 (Jun., 1951), pp. 358-365
(article consists of 8 pages)
Published by: American Sociological Association
This is not a bad read, and easy for instructors to challenge on the grounds of “technological determinism” on two accounts:
1. the town did not die because of the out-of-control technological advance of locomotives, and instead the government-military complex invested heavily in diesel locomotoves as part of mid-century war time efforts (potentially even linking technological advance with patriotism such that any resistance to the technology was seen as anti-American).

 

2. the town did not die because of the out-of-control technological advance of locomotives because like so many towns of this age and this sort, it had a uni-dimensional economy such that the town was susceptible to new technology that challenged the source of their economic security.
I like to emphasize on the account during steam train advances, however, as they are even more telling about this “technological determinism” that seems so easy to swallow for students. Sure, Cottrell shows how Caliente, NV, was run asunder by the advent and subsequent quickened spread of diesel trains on the American landscape.

 

However, during advances to the steam train, and I am referring to low-tensile boilers as compared to high-tensile boilers (and this is somewhat simplistic of train buffs, so please forgive me), it was towns like Caliente, NV, that gained the most! A student and I created this set of PowerPoint slides to explain this (you’ll have to download it to see the animation — the small white dots are “towns” set every 100 miles from the port town): check it out here (note, you’ll have to download it to see the cool animation).

 

As some of you know, I work in Altoona, PA, which was once a heart of the Pennsylvania Rail Road. Altoona, to some extent, suffered a similar death as Caliente, NV, to use Cottrell’s words.

Call for Papers: Performing ANT ??? Socio-Material Practices of Organizing, 17-18 February 2012, St. Gallen

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Just got that a few days ago and forgot to post it here – now as I am preparing for three weeks of “off-time” (meaning: a bit of traveling and weeks of being online only once every few days) I had to post it.

Workshop_Call_for_Papers_2011_08_25.docx

Reading that I thought: what does it mean that workshops that specifically use “ANT” in their title are mostly workshops for younger scholars? Just wonder…

Teaching STS with "A fist full of quarters"

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One way I teach students the philosophy of science is by using the documentary “The King of Kong: A fist full of quarters.”

King-of-kong-a-fistful-of-quarters-poster-1

Storyline

In the early 1980s, legendary Billy Mitchell set a Donkey Kong record that stood for almost 25 years. This documentary follows the assault on the record by Steve Wiebe, an earnest teacher from Washington who took up the game while unemployed. The top scores are monitored by a cadre of players and fans associated with Walter Day, an Iowan who runs Funspot, an annual tournament. Wiebe breaks Mitchell’s record in public at Funspot, and Mitchell promptly mails a controversial video tape of himself setting a new record. So Wiebe travels to Florida hoping Mitchell will face him for the 2007 Guinness World Records. Will the mind-game-playing Mitchell engage; who will end up holding the record? Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>

The film is full of ideas from the philosophy of science. For example, logical positivists were obsessed with (1) establishing theories only from data and (2) considering what evidence either falsifies or verifies a theory. In the film, Steve Weibe, the up and comer in the world of competitive gaming, sends a score into Walter Day, the guy that runs the world record center, but the score is ultimately rejected because while the video tape recording appeared legitimate, the machine he was playing on was questionable. This one is good for the falsificationists too: the score he had could not be verified because of questions concerning the video game machine he used; however, because there was no concrete evidence — merely a hunch — of tampering, the score could not be entirely falsified either. Consensus among a group of experts emerged upon reviewing the evidence of Steve’s claim to have the new highest score on Donkey Kong. This nicely emphasizes the role of experts and how consensus over reality is as important as “reality” itself.

Now, thinking all the way back to Shapin’s work on early laboratories and experiments, Steve is invited to attend an annual competition where he can achieve his highest score “live” so that all the other experts can witness first hand his skill at Donkey Kong. He does, and the entire community of competitive gamers more or less warms to the newcomer. This is not a bad lesson in the role of social connections and acceptance of newcomers in science. This is a place to begin discussions of Merton’s norms of science, and, in particular, disinterestedness. However, there is much more to say about functionalism. His competitor, Billy Mitchell, the previous record holder and longstanding insider, sends in, at the last possible moment, a video tape of a score that beats the score Steve just accomplished in person. Merton reminds us that what is good for science tends to advance it. In this case, what’s good for Walter Day and competitive gaming also happens to be what’s good for Billy Mitchell. Bill’s sketchy video score is accepted and immediately posted on-line for the world of competitive gamers to see. Additionally, and in violation of the norm of communism, Billy’s tape is not shared with Steve, even thought Steve’s original tape, which was rejected, was shared with Billy.

The documentary is also funny in places, and it does a nice job showing how a group of gaming experts arrive at conclusions about the nature of reality through norm following, norm violation, and, importantly, consensus. If you teach STS, check it out; I’ve even got a sheet prepared for students to follow along (write me at njr12@psu.edu if you’d like to see it). Also, if you’re just interested, then check it out too.

One closing remark: those old games like Donkey Kong required a very different skill set as compared to contemporary games like Halo or Neverwinter Nights. It is nice to remind new students that games used to be hard in a much different way.

Personal Health Records and patient- oriented infrastructures

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International workshop on Personal Health Record 

Personal Health Records and patient- oriented infrastructures 

Empowering, involving, and enrolling patients through information systems: 

Trento, Faculty of Sociology 

via Verdi, 26 

12-13 December 2011

Deadline for abstracts submission: September 30th 2011

Notification to authors: October 15th 2011

Personal Health Record (PHR) has become a popular label to refer to a wide range of patient-controlled information systems aimed at allowing laypeople to access, manage, share and supplement their medical information. Launched in the US at the beginning of the new millennium, PHRs are spreading in Europe (especially in the UK and Scandinavia), where one witnesses an increasing number of experimental systems that vary to suit the local healthcare context. Nevertheless, these technologies appear to be in their infancy, as clearly demonstrated by the low rate of PHR actually implemented in real-life settings compared with the (relatively) high numbers of trials.

Whilst there is still little evidence that PHRs may affect healthcare, they are regarded by different actors (policymakers, healthcare managers, patients’ association, doctors) as “holding out great promise” to revolutionize it by reducing medical errors, cutting costs, increasing patient awareness and control over their health, and providing physicians with information in emergency situations – to mention only some of the potential benefits. This new ‘patient role’, proactive and characterized by greater control and responsibility over one’s health, is reinforced by the very existence of an electronic tool, suggesting that these new activities require an information system somehow similar to those used by doctors. The name itself, PHR, recalls the acronyms for the standard healthcare systems – EHR (Electronic Health Record) and EPR (Electronic Patient Record) – and thus affirms that it belongs within the semantic space of professional tools.

PHR systems are becoming the point of convergence among different visions concerning the future of healthcare systems characterized by the (desired) emergence of ‘new patients’ willing to share the burden of care and to reshape their relationships with doctors and institutions. Accordingly, PHR can

be considered an interesting lens through which social informatics researchers can examine the tentative transformation of different dimensions of the healthcare sector.

We believe that the time has come to engage in debate on these technologies, which are increasingly presented by policymakers and healthcare systems managers as the “next big thing” in healthcare. It is necessary to move away from a mere technocentric perspective (like the one sometimes provided by medical informatics) in order to bring the actors, their work/daily practices, and the meanings attached to them, back into play.

The purpose of this workshop is to gather together scholars, practitioners and professionals who reflect and work on PHR from different perspectives in different countries. Whilst some interesting socially-informed studies have been already presented and published, to our knowledge no attempt has yet been made to create an opportunity for dialogue among them.

We welcome contributions about, but not limited to, the following themes:

·         the design of patient-centered IS and their integration with professional ones;

·         new forms of computer-mediated doctor-patient or patient-to-patient communication;

·         the evolution of healthcare infrastructures and organizations, and the creation of new representations of health/illness;

·         new forms of alignments and conflicts between self-care practices and institutional treatment;

·         the redefinition of responsibilities and roles within the network of patient-doctors-institution-caregivers.

·         the extent to which patients use PHRs to generate data for use in patient-doctor and patient-patient communication

·         the extent to which health professionals make use of patient-generated data from PHRs

Abstracts (max. 1500 words) should be sent to phr@unitn.it

More information is available at http://events.unitn
.it/en/phr2011 or can be obtained by contacting the organizers at phr@unitn.it

We plan to select the best abstracts and presentations and invite their development into full papers to be submitted for a special issue on the topic. Further information will be given during the workshop or before it on the website.

Organizers:

Silvia Gherardi, Faculty of Sociology silvia.gherardi@unitn.it

Enrico Maria Piras, Fondazione Bruno Kessler piras@fbk.eu

Alberto Zanutto, Faculty of Sociology alberto.zanutto@unitn.it

 

Teaching STS: Controversies

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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…

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).

Science and Technology Studies: Opening the Black Box

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via youtube.com

Somatosphere just posted a link to a set of video recordings from the STS – The Next Twenty Years conference in Harvard last April. I would have loved to go there, but unfortunately poor european scholars only have money to travel abroad when they are participating actively. But, luckily, the whole conference was on live-stream back then. I was not able to watch all of it so I am so very happy to be able to watch them now. Trevor Pinch´s “provocations” are STS at its rhetorical best – so watch, laugh and think.

Should STS articles have methods sections?

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It has come to my attention that a good number of STS case studies contain no methods section, and some no mention of method at all (typically utilizing a case study approach). So, I asked today:

Should STS adopt the traditional social scientific methods/data/analysis sections, or is the implied case study methods acceptable, or perhaps a critique of science “as usual”?

So, should, for example, SSS or STHV require a methods section?

Sergio Sismondo on black-boxing and taken-for-grantedness

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Concern over the relationship between processes of black-boxing and gradual taken-for-grantedness has been expressed a bunch of times on this blog — here, here, and here.

Gearing-up to teach STS to mainly engineering students today has me reading Sismondo’s intro text — and in Chapter 11, on the topic of “controversies”, he lays out the terms as follows:

Science and technology produce black-boxes, or fact and artifacts that are taken for granted; in particular, their histories are usually seen as irrelevant after good facts and successful artifacts are established (2010:120).

It is nice that the world of ideas in science is not auotomatically labeled “taken for granted” (when facts are momentarily settled) and the world of things in engineering is not automatically labeled “black boxed” (when artifacts are momentarily settled) so that the distinction is not reified (i.e., that facts are only taken for granted and that machines are only black boxed).

However, the two terms seem to be synonyms to Sismondo — do you agree with Sergio?

A Thought on Data and an Orbituary

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This NYT article has been on my reading list for a while (some might have noticed that I posted it accientially before two times). I wanted to share it because first (of course) as an orbituary, as a bow before one of the last centuries most inspiring teacher of programming and computing. But I also wanted to share it because it points us who are interested in the assemblage of contemporary infrastructure to a figure that STS seems to like to forget after getting rid of the myth of the genius inventor: the programmer.

For years, Mr. McCracken was the Stephen King of how-to programming books. His series on Fortran and Cobol, a computer language designed for use in business, were standards in the field. Mr. McCracken was the author or co-author of 25 books that sold more than 1.6 million copies and were translated into 15 languages.

Well, of course not the individual, creative and inventive programmer – I sure we would step into the same explanatory traps again that were connected with the inventor-myth. But programming – the core acivity of building, connecting and maintaining IT infrastructure – is a cutural practice on its own, a mixture of play, craft and learned or trained skill. And as any practice, it gaines stability and cultural significance by the network of activities and things surrounding it: trainings, courses, guidelines, how-to-books, textbooks, journals and so on. Maybe it is time that we spend some thoughts on how this particular practice was shaped – an idea that struck me after reading this: 

In the early days, computer professionals typically fell into one of two camps — scientists or craftsmen. The scientists sought breakthroughs in hardware and software research, and pursued ambitious long-range goals, like artificial intelligence. The craftsmen wanted to use computers to work more efficiently in corporations and government agencies. (…) But his books are not like the how-to computer books of more recent years written for consumers. His have been used as programming textbooks in universities around the world and as reference bibles by practicing professionals.

via nytimes.com