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Actor-Network Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions
Abstract
ANT is not a “theory”, or, if it is, then a “theory” does not necessarily offer a coherent framework, but may as well be an adaptable, open repository. A list of terms. A set of sensitivities. If ANT is a theory, then a theory helps to tell cases, draw contrasts, articulate silent layers, turn questions upside down, focus on the unexpected, add to one’s sensitivities, propose new terms, and shift stories from one context to another. In this presentation of “Actor Network Theory” the terms “actor”, “network”, “theory”, as well as the terms “order” and “coordination”, will be explored. But mind you. ANT does not define these terms, but rather plays with them. It does not seek coherence. It does not build a stronghold. Instead of crafting an overall scheme that becomes more and more solid as it gets more and more refined, ANT texts are out to move – to generate, to transform, to translate. To enrich. And to betray.
... How then to think with ANT when the "term stopped working a long time ago" (Mol, 2010, p. 254)? From Harman's (2009 extensive composition on Latour and ANT up until and including Pandora's Hope (Latour, 2000), we know that ANT is about engendering a radically symmetrical democracy of things, where things relate to one another through practices of mediation. ...
... ANT attunes to the world by being playful with concepts, especially with those concepts making up its own name: "'actor', 'network', 'theory', as well as the intimately related terms 'order' and 'coordination'" (Mol, 2010, p. 253) are defined in relation to the edects actors have in situations. More practically useful in addressing the question of ANT for the years to come, Mol (2010) describes ANT as a "list of terms. A set of sensitivities. ...
... What about the entangled situatedness of "marginalized actors" (Star, 1991) that are characterized by un-plannability and resistance in the liminal spaces of ecologies that are made not-to-matter? While ANT is often attributed qualities such as sensitivity, adaptability, and experimentality (Mol, 2010), Whittle and Spicer (2008, p. 622) convincingly show ANT's inability to attend to the meanings of non-routine political action. Within Organization Studies, calls have been made to resist ANT's allencompassing translations (Whittle & Spicer, 2008) that are non-committal to any political positioning (Alcadipani & Hassard, 2010). ...
This paper argues that Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is deeply rooted in the dynamics of the Anthropocene, and it introduces the concept of dark infrastructures as an ecologically responsible alternative to the network/Anthropocene conundrum. ANT's pragmatist network-ideology promotes a symmetrical politics by tracing the material interactions of hybrid entities in agrilogical fields. In contrast, the intensity of the human-induced ecological crisis tolerates no such symmetries or fields and necessitates the exploration of alternative kinship practices. This paper speculates on ANT and the network as extractive forces of epistemological illumination that colonize unknown ecologies as networks-to-be. It posits that the network's illumination effects violently disrupt the rhythms of social and material biodiversity. In times of ecological calamity, the concept of dark infrastructures allows for intimate, extra-networked, and dividual relations of kinship in more-than-human worlds.
... It is stability rather than change that needs explanation because ANT researchers do not see stability as the norm, rather things, objects, phenomena that emerge and become as they unfold. Because there is constant renegotiation, every time that new cases are considered they will suggest new lessons about the nature of actors (Mol, 2010). In other words, ANT is an invitation to investigate or reinvestigate almost anything. ...
... Starting with the assumption that there is constant renegotiation in the field, every time that new cases are considered they will yield new lessons about the nature of actors (Mol, 2010). In other words, ANT is an invitation to investigate or reinvestigate almost anything. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present how my positionality as a researcher aligned with the works of Latour in terms of methodological inspirations and allowed me to develop a critical vantage point and simultaneously adopt a heterogeneously rather than hierarchically informed approach to ordering the world, which I argue serves as a basis for a more inclusive study of management systems.
Design/methodology/approach
I reflect on my own positionality as a researcher and share how my interpretation of Latour's ontology through some of his ideas and concepts, particularly symmetry, power, translation and agency, allowed me to incorporate and organize heterogeneous actors depicted in different empirical materials into space-time contexts and subsequently theorize organizing and management practices as agential, multiple and becoming.
Findings
A base in Latour’s ontology has equipped me with openness towards empirical settings, which I argue retains a democratic approach to theorization, i.e. theorization, which remains mindful of inadvertent assumptions about power, hierarchy or the taken for granted. This approach has also given me a form of personal resilience as a researcher.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper lies in presenting and developing the concept of method as democratizing. I argue that Latour’s approach to the empirical allows for at least two forms of active democratizing, one relating to the researcher as self and the other in how it incorporates the empirical actors into research, making possible the inclusivity of heterogeneity in analyses of organizations and organizing.
... Therefore, I hypothesized that introducing an intervention object might activate other actors, both human and nonhuman, within this interconnected network. ANT's emphasis on sensory experiences made it particularly apt for this study (Mol 2010). ...
... ANT helped me to discern the roles various objects and individuals play in the space and how slight changes can lead to impactful outcomes, in line with Jensen's (2014) assertion about network dynamics. Moreover, ANT reminded me that new interventions don't occur in a vacuum but rather within the context of established practices and cultural norms (Mol 2010). This understanding was pivotal in proposing solutions that would effectively engage and connect human and nonhuman actors in social practices. ...
This project is dedicated to analyzing enhancing social interactions in the Ørestad Syd district. The primary focus is on social infrastructures, with a commitment from the local council to introduce places that meet social interaction needs. In my thesis, I examined Ørestad Syd from a broader perspective, but in this project, I narrowed my focus to a specific location.
... Tracing such heterogeneous and dynamic interactions between different actors of building can help unfold how actually building is being adapted. ANT is argued that it does not define terms (Mol, Annemarie, 2010). The following concepts' introduction only wants to provide the basic platform to be enacted by these concepts but not to define or make them rigid. ...
... For an entity to be an actor, it is not required to have contentful mental states, but to be able to perform actions as intended. If an actor makes no difference, it's not an actor, showing the effects is important (Mol, Annemarie, 2010). During this process, some of the actors are treated as the focal ones that initiate the actor-network formulation, some may be made to act, but none of them acts alone. ...
How a building is adapted has been studied mostly from its design stage in terms of improving its physical attributes to benefit the future. While this process is also influenced by other social aspects, such as how building users make decisions to adapt to changing situations or the actual practice after building has been constructed. During this stage, heterogeneous network of human or non-human actors will play their part, especially in public buildings where diverse adaptations are made. Different users also have different authorities or power to make changes. This research, therefore, invites the lens of actor-network theory (ANT) to view this process. Using ethnographic observation method in a public building to identify building adaptation incidents in daily, planned, and emergency scenarios. Semistructured interview is then used to follow these incidents and track related users involved. The translation process from ANT is mainly used to analyse comparatively the three scenarios. Expected contribution will be in the theoretical and methodological exploration of building adaptation area and investigation of its social
aspect.
... It therefore 1 Even in the introductory paragraph, I choose to refer to the acronym ANT instead of Actor-Network Theory. With this decision, I aim to draw attention to the word "repertoire", as it is used by Annemarie Mol (2010), instead of the word 'Theory'. In this study, my understanding and usage of ANT primarily influenced by Latour's Reassembling the Social (2005) and Mol's (2010) reflections on the term in the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. ...
... With this decision, I aim to draw attention to the word "repertoire", as it is used by Annemarie Mol (2010), instead of the word 'Theory'. In this study, my understanding and usage of ANT primarily influenced by Latour's Reassembling the Social (2005) and Mol's (2010) reflections on the term in the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. feels justified to mobilize an educational program as a case study in this article. ...
In Latour’s book Science in Action, readers are encouraged to use science-in-the-making as an entry point for understanding science instead of reinforcing the stable reality of ready made science. Building on his work, this study employs an art-science-in-the-making approach to trace how a new art-science initiative is helped into being. The ethnographic work centers on the development of an interinstitutional dual degree program between two art schools and a university in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which mundane, bureaucratic practices feed into the stabilization of the new art-science initiative. Too often, these practices remain outside scholarly discussions on art-science. This article argues that being attentive to the practices of “paper shufflers”, to borrow Latour’s terminology, aids our thinking through encounters across difference. The modus operandi of holding the new intersection together is conceptualized as a mode of syncretism of continuous repair. This modality of being together points to the tendency not to avoid disruptions or threats, but to continuously attend to them anew.
... In this sense, methodological pluralism or even eclecticism seems to find its strongest expression in actor-network theory. Despite its role as a semiotic theory and a mode of enquiry (Latour, 2013(Latour, , 2017Mol, 2010), this critical approach does not seem to take causal explanations as a primary methodological concern. But I hesitate to categorize it as antiexplanatory because even in Latour's empirical work on scientific discoveries, distributed causalities can be observed in laboratory-based heterogenous relations (see also MacKenzie's, 2021 recent work on more-than-human actor networks in transforming financial markets). ...
Human geography’s onto-epistemological expansion in recent decades has not been well matched by methodological development. Learning from the methodological pluralism in four relational approaches, this paper reflects on key issues in relational-explanatory theorizing before introducing a social science method of process tracing in relation to a comparative methodology. I argue that contrastive explanations can be developed through deploying comparable methodological practices as different ‘moments’ of a research process in appropriate evidential contexts. This research process-based comparative methodology can better trace actors and their relational networks through in situ research and generate explanatory theoretical insights into the complexity of socio-spatial life.
... ³ For a more detailed explanation see Annemarie Mol (2010) and Bruno Latour (1996). For an introduction to Actor-Network theory vocabulary, see also Akrich and Latour (1992) and Yaneva (2017: 167-70 ...
This paper is concerned with an Actor-Network Theory approach to museum space. It builds upon qualitative research at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a museum and educational building in Norwich, England. Following the people who work with the building in the process of dismantling an exhibition, I examine the negotiations that emerge when a problem occurs with the handling of a specific artwork. Drawing on the concept of spacing by Bruno Latour, this paper highlights the multiplicity and complexity inherent in museum practices. I argue that space is not contained inside the building but is done with the building, exhibition objects, handling instructions, surfaces, and people. Analyzing this process of spacing, then, the work towardsand negotiation of stability and flux, of homogeneity and heterogeneity inherent to museum spaces become visible which allows for a rich and nuanced understanding of the relationship between people and physical stuff.
... "Rede de associações" aqui compreendida pela ótica da Teoria Ator-Rede, onde associações complexas e dinâmicas são compostas por atores humanos e não humanos. Tais associações (ou "redes") são atravessadas por linguagens, discursos, práticas, formas de ordenação e pelas características de seus distintos atores(Mol, 2010). ...
The purpose of this study is to examine how psychologists working in Specialized Social Assistance Reference Centers (CREAS ) understand the term “psychosocial care”, proposed in the SUAS regulations and in the technical references of the Center for Technical References in Psychology and Public Policies (CREPOP ) as one of the tasks of work in CREAS. The specific aims of the study included investigating: (1) whether the psychologists in the study mention the term “psychosocial care” as one of their work activities, (2) whether this term is used in the everyday life of the team to which the professional in question belongs, and (3) possible similarities and differences in the way professionals involved in the research understand the term “psychosocial care” (and possibly provide this service in their daily work). As research method, a bibliographic and documentary study was carried out to broaden the general understanding of the topic and to understand how “psychosocial care” is conceived – both through these regulations and through technical reference materials for the job of psychology at CREAS. However, the main focus of the analysis was on the interviews conducted with psychologists working in this field. Semi-structured interviews were used to obtain information and the Discourse Analysis as a data analysis method. The theoretical and methodological foundations were based, in particular, on Social Constructionist perspectives. One of the findings of the research was the polysemy around the understanding of “psychosocial care", with the participating psychologists reporting both not using the term and using it occasionally in the work environment, without the team being able to reach a consensus on the meaning. The categories of responses from the people interviewed focused on two main axes: one that describes psychosocial care as different from individual clinical practice and the other that translates the term into action from an interdisciplinary perspective (with emphasis on joint work between Psychology and Social Work). The study concludes that psychologists not only reproduce practices, but also (re)create them in their daily work. It also notes that the changes in professional practice seem to be happening faster than the changes in Psychology formation, whose knowledge, references, undergraduate curricula and tools need to be adapted to the challenges that Brazilian society poses to Psychology – among others, the work at SUAS and in the area of rights violations.
... This understands agency as a construction indebted to our limited cognitive capacities: any event could be traced back through an infinite chain of causalities but a human brain cannot contain the infinitetherefore we must break this chain and insert agents. An agent must always have its agency ascribed by another agent, in accordance with and can be organized in actor-networks (Mol, 2010). Spirits, projections, or personality facets, however, require existence in order to act. ...
Preface
The Healing and Emotional Power of Music and Dance Symposium took place on May 20th and 21st 2021, hosted (online) by Instituto de Etnomusicologia (INET-MD), Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, NOVA University Lisbon. It has been organized by myself and Dr. Giorgio Scalici, with support from Portuguese funding through the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), within the scope of the project “The Healing and Emotional Power of Music and Dance” (PTDC/ART-PER/29641/2017, https://www.help-md.eu/).
The Symposium’s aim was to bring together scholars and students working on the topic of music, emotion, and health across a variety of scientific fields, including ethnomusicology, music psychology, music education, and music therapy. Following the Call for Papers (see p. 1), the submitted abstracts were selected by the Scientific Committee and then published online before the Symposium (https://www.docdroid.net/FffCFYC/help-md-book-of-abstracts-pdf).
Oral presentations took place in seven sessions with each devoted to a specific sub-theme: 1) “dance, emotion, and healing”, 2) “keynotes”, 3) “music and emotion”, 4) “music, healing, ritual, and trance”, 5) “music therapy”, 6) “miscellaneous”, and 7) “ongoing field research”. One of the Symposium sessions featured an exciting double keynote presentation, with leading scholars Dr. Benjamin Koen (ethnomusicology) and Dr. Emmanuel Bigand (cognitive psychology), who I would like to thank warmly for their precious insights into the Symposium themes. All presentations, including the keynotes, have been recorded with the agreement of the authors and have since been uploaded on the project’s website (https://www.help-md.eu/recordings-of-the-help-md-symposium/).
The Symposium closed following an open session that included discussion of the possibility of publishing the papers. Among the various formats referenced (book, abstracts, etc.), we chose to publish a collection of “Extended” (max. 2000 words) and “Short” abstracts (max 300 words). This mixed format was recently adopted by the “Proceedings of the First Symposium of the ICTM study group on Sound, Movement and the Sciences” (see: https://zenodo.org/record/5514167), a publication that served as a model for the current Proceedings.
In the following pages, the reader will find the original Call for Papers of the Symposium, the program, 16 abstracts (9 of which are “extended”, and 7 “short”), and the keynote abstracts. Instead of separating the texts according to their length, I maintained the original order of the Symposium program, preserving the thematic grouping of the papers. All the texts received were duly peer-reviewed. Finally, I would like to thank all the authors and reviewers who each gave their personal best to ensure the high quality of this publication.
Lisbon, June 2022
The Editor
... Sayes (2014) argues that ANT portrays a coherent methodology for incorporating non-humans into social scientific accounts, amid claims of it bordering on chaos even by those who are ANT supporters. For example, Mol (2010) proposes that the position merely possesses a "repertoire" and a "set of contrary methodological reflexes" without a "consistent method" (p. 261). ...
This chapter, which expands on a previous publication, presents a critique of actor-network theory as a sociomaterial concept. Furthermore, the author problematizes the relative under-application of this "sensibility" in education research, while simultaneously exploring its contribution as an analytical framework through its central concepts of "actor-network," "symmetry," "translation," and their constituents. This chapter zooms on the concepts of networks and power relations. The author questions the prevalent notion of the "network" metaphor promulgated by globalization discourses, setting it up against the network conception in actor-network theory, where the main principle is multiplicity. Actor-network theory is analyzed as a theory of the mechanics of power, concerning itself with the setting up of hegemony. This chapter is especially targeted for researchers of education reform who are as yet unfamiliar with the concepts of Actor-Network Theory and somewhat wary of the validity of sociomate-rialism in the analysis of education issues.
... Bacchi, 2009) and socio-material interventions in policy (e.g. Mol, 2010). ...
Given limited investigation into the state and status of physical education policy research internationally, we suggest there is a need for a more comprehensive empirical review of physical education policy research internationally to inform a future research agenda. The purpose of this scoping review is to map the international peer-reviewed empirical literature detailing policy research in school-based physical education between 2010 and 2020 to understand and make recommendations for extension, where appropriate, of the conceptual boundaries of how to ‘do’ policy research in this field. We followed a three-phase approach to the scoping review: (i) identifying relevant sources; (ii) charting of sources; and (iii) reporting the findings from the charting of sources. Results were interpreted through two theoretical lenses: (a) Rizvi and Lingard's (2010) framework of policy issues and questions and (b) Diem et al.’s (2014) traditional and critical approaches to educational policy research. Findings are discussed in relation to the charting categories which included: journal; year; affiliations; country of work; funding acknowledgements; research question; policy definition; policy issues; and traditional and/or critical research. We hope this research can be useful to those looking to enter the physical education policy research space, as it introduces them to the research landscape, and to those already engaged in this space looking to fill gaps in the literature.
... Nesse sentido, as famílias atendidas pelo Cren passaram a receber uma sacola com alimentos agroecológicos (uma verdura para refogar, uma para consumo cru, um tempero e uma Planta Alimentícia Não Convencional (Panc)) adquiridos das agricultoras familiares que podiam acompanhar uma cesta com alimentos não perecíveis, produtos de higiene pessoal, livros e jogos. Sem negar -e colocando constantemente em análise -que a oferta de alimentos pode assumir um caráter assistencialista, o alimento agroecológico funcionou, nesta experiência, como parte da rede na constituição dos processos e redes de cuidado (Mol, 2010). ...
RESUMO A produção de dados em uma oficina de educação permanente em saúde sobre as práticas e saberes profissionais envolvendo a alimentação de crianças e adolescentes em territórios periféricos apontou a potência do encontro para o reconhecimento do próprio saber-fazer e do trabalho/conhecimento do outro no cotidiano do cuidado. Reconheceu o alimento como mediador de redes territoriais que envolvem a cadeia curta de produção-comercialização de alimentos que valorizam o saber popular para além do nutricionista como único detentor do saber sobre alimentação. A oficina convidou ao pensamento sobre as relações da equipe e da rede territorial, que não acontecem sem disputas e nem sempre resultam em respostas rápidas e fáceis.
... Neither does it distinguish between the agencies of the human and the non-human, as it is necessary to be informed by the depth of complexity the landscape contains-in time and space. The open and non-biased conception of the Actor Network Theory (ANT), the way it is elaborated by Bruno Latour (1996), Anne Marie Mol (2010) and others, is introduced as a theoretical framework for a critical discussion of hierarchisation of the 'human' and 'non-human' 'rights' in planning. The ANT is not considered a complete or closed theory on how actors 'interact', but follows a rhizomatic logic that is "acentered, non-hierarchical, nonsignifying" (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 23)-always open for the unexpected and undefined. ...
The divide between the human ‘subject’ and the non-human ‘object’ since enlightenment is an important cause for today’s deprivation of natural landscapes, ecologies, and the escalating loss of biodiversity. Consequently, there is an increasing recognition of the nature crises and the climate change as interrelated and needed to be solved reciprocally, as parts of a complex common ecology. However, at the same time in the political planning system, there is a predominant highly instrumental and reductionist practice considering natural landscapes, not least along the shoreline, as commodities open for industrialisation, urbanisation, and privatisation. In the case from Lofoten in 2017, a master studio at Bergen School of Architecture, a different approach was experimented by the production of ‘Deleuzeguattarian’ maps of new figurations of vulnerability and imbrication of layers of social activity, geology and biology, and in particular in the article; the sea birds’ lines of flight. The article discusses the material and mental context of the studio and the possibility of using artistic means and methods in the ‘re-framing’ of (non-human) agencies—to make planning more resilient and ecological consistent.
... Aplikace ANT ve společenských vědách umožňuje vypořádat se s mnohačetnými a slo žitými sociálními interakcemi mezi nejrůznějšími činiteli, které se odehrávají jak v kogni Obr. 2. Schéma pojetí materiální kultury u ANT, síťoviny (meshwork) a asemblážního myšlení (linie a čáry představují vztahy nebo toky procesů) v sociálním prostoru (podle Ingold 2011 a Jervis 2019). tivním procesu, tak v materiálovém zapojení (Mol 2010;Law 2010). Aplikace ANT může vést k pochopení komplexnosti a dynamiky nejrůznějších organizačních systémů a jejich komparativnímu hodnocení v čase a prostoru (Knappett 2011). ...
Článek seznamuje s objektově-ontologickými teoretickými a epistemologickými přístupy, které jsou diskutované především v západoevropských (anglo-amerických) archeologických vědeckých komunitách. Tyto přístupy mají ambici, alespoň to některé z nich prohlašují, stát se novým teoretickým myšlením a radikálně změnit dosavadní pojetí archeologie, zejména studium hmotné (materiální) kultury. Článek rešeršním způsobem popisuje a hodnotí různé přístupy (teorie aktérských sítí, entanglement, symetrická archeologie, nové materialismy, asemblážní myšlení), které studují relační vztahy mezi lidmi a ne-lidmi a zabývají se „věcmi“ jako sociálními a materiálními předměty s vlastní agenturou. Tam, kde je to možné, jsou přístupy vysvětleny na konkrétních příkladech interpretací archeologických pramenů.
... tarimorman.gov.tr/api/File/GetFile/425/Sayfa/759/1107/DosyaGaleri/2021_yili_faaliyet_raporu.pdf, last accessed on April 10, 2022. 4. "Extending out" (Burawoy 1998) from the field, however, does not imply making any claims to a universal, "overarching explanatory framework" (Mol 2010) that would explain environmental struggles or human-non-human relationality in every social, cultural, historical, and geographical context. Acknowledging the situated character of knowledge (Haraway 1988), this article understands the task of bottom-up theorizing as an effort to take up particular elements of a specific case and elevate them to a level of abstraction that allows one to establish certain connections, mark certain relations, and introduce certain concepts that might help in analyzing other cases beyond the specific context. ...
... The concept of socio-materiality can be used to connect all the elements in practice that continually assemble and reassemble in emergent and indeterminant ways (Fenwick, 2015;Gherardi, 2017;Hopwood, 2016). The socio-material interactions influence and reconfigure what is emerging in reality, which then shifts understanding and makes learning possible (Hopwood, 2016;Mol, 2010;Orlikowski and Scott, 2016). Thus, we adopt a performative approach in this paper. ...
Purpose
This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of healthcare professionals’ practice, where learning is taking place when a digital artefact is implemented for identification of patients’ cognitive impairment. The use of digital artefacts is increasing in various workplaces, to include professionals in healthcare. This paper aims to explore the following research question: How is the professional learning unfolding in patient-based work when a digital artefact transforms the practice?
Design/methodology/approach
Various data collection methods are used for this study, consisting of dialogue meetings, interviews and a reference-group meeting. Thematic analysis is used to inductively bring forth the themes of the collected data.
Findings
Professionals’ knowledge and experience are of vital importance in learning and changing work practices. Together with their ability to reflect on changes, their knowledge and experience constitute the prefiguration when the introduction of a digital application brings about indeterminacy in the work practice.
Originality/value
This paper makes a contribution to practice-based research as it consolidates previous research and identifies professionals knowledge and learning in a healthcare context. This can be used to further explore and advance the field, as well as to establish the evidence-based importance of transforming practices based on implementation of digital artefacts.
... do not just interact with technologies, they exist as assemblages with them, in relation to them and are thus inseparable (Lapum et al., 2012 actors because its capacities are established, limited or otherwise mediated by its network (Latour, 2005;Law, 2009;Mol, 2010)'. We stress in this article that the materiality of artefacts plays an important role in constructing inscription or meaning to action and relationships. ...
Aim
To discuss nurses' use of networks to address nursing recruitment and retention in London, UK.
Design
Qualitative evaluation of the Capital Nurse programme reporting on 30 narrative interviews with executive, clinical and student nurses in 2019.
Results
Executive nurses within the Capital Nurse programme recognized the importance of sociomaterial contexts in the health and social care system in London and worked strategically across these contexts to achieve change. Supported through the Capital Nurse programme, executive nurses from health organizations across London initiated collaborative working to improve recruitment and retention. Primarily by designing and delivering sociomaterial products (organizational and educational) to support nurses to build a career in London. Drawing on ideas from actor network theory, in particular sociomaterial contexts, nurses' actions at all levels to develop and sustain networks to address nursing recruitment and retention across the NHS in London are described.
Conclusions
Capital Nurse supported collaborative working both within single organizations and across organizations in London. There is evidence of change in how nurses across the capital work together to improve patient care, improve recruitment and retention. Findings may resonate with nurses in other settings who seek to address the problem of recruitment and retention. They show how nurses coming together in networks to effect changes in practice can work successfully.
Impact
Nurses' use of networks led to novel models of communication and action to address the problems of recruitment and retention in London. We argue that sociomateriality should be considered outside the clinical practice setting, as part of nurses' professional development and organizational practice, that is how they plan their career, how they address recruitment and retention, how they communicate across organizations about nursing issues.
No Patient or Public Contribution
This was an evaluation of a staff development project in London, which sought to elicit nurses' experiences of participation in Capital Nurse.
Neste artigo procuramos compreender quais disposições e capacidades têm permitido a intensificação, na última década, do engajamento político de mulheres nas novas direitas. Nossa hipótese interpretativa é de que a ampliação do envolvimento de mulheres conservadoras com questões políticas se dá e é favorecida por uma complexa articulação entre políticas da identidade, economias de afeto e emoções, público-privado e tecnologias digitais de conexão. Propomos a discussão de cunho interpretativo e especulativo, inspirada por elementos empíricos produzidos em pesquisa etnográfica digital longitudinal por meio da qual temos rastreado traços digitais de mulheres conservadoras dos segmentos médios da Região Metropolitana da Grande Vitória (ES, Brasil). Adotamos uma abordagem relacional e construcionista, considerando elementos teórico-metodológicos da Teoria ator-rede, dos Estudos dos afetos e emoções, e da leitura da relação casa-rua proposta por Roberto DaMatta.
The onset of emerging infectious disease epidemics is marked by uncertainties regarding the nature of the causative pathogen, mode of transmission, and preventive measures among other factors. While scientists are developing knowledge on these subjects, people must adapt to these uncertainties. We explore risk construction in the epidemic context by conceptualizing risk as a knowledge construct and identifying the constitutive elements that influence its construction. Using qualitative interviews and comparing three locations in Ghana during the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, we argue that the construction of risk is influenced by a combination of disease, networked information, and information on enabled factors—factors triggered by the epidemic context (geographic location, government policies, absence of confirmed cases). These enabled factors, we suggest, shape the disease risk characteristics that amplify or attenuate risk perception and influence health behavior.
Building on empirical ethnographic research, this study on Belgian pigeon racing explores the multifaceted
relationship between humans, animals, and territories. Drawing on animal geography and interspecies
ethnography, we investigate how fanciers and homing pigeons collaboratively navigate shared somatic
experiences, shaping epistemological understandings of environments and territories, reorientating their
knowledge through multi-species exchange. Maps play a vital role in capturing diverse knowledge forms,
guiding navigation within temporal mappings. Fanciers’ mapping methodologies uncover the agency of
pigeons who adapt their routes to evolving topologies. Reorienting involves not just a re-sensitization of the
pigeon fancier's observations but also entails new ways of acting in the world together, alongside their pigeon
counterparts. This collaborative navigational mapping signifies the co-ordination between human and nonhuman
entities, encompassing practices such as tracking traces and enhancing racing proficiency through
pigeons' perceptual abilities. Within a shared milieu, fanciers enter a heightened state of awareness,
sensitivity, and attentiveness to other life forms, navigating beyond the bounds of the purely visible.
Approaching these questions from versatile perspectives, we seek to address intersubjective angles through
heterogeneous topographies. The aim of this article is to pay attention to the configurations, modalities, and
methodologies of pigeon racing that impact the epistemological understanding of the world: the interrelations
among the pigeon fancier, pigeon, weather, technology, and various other non-human actors challenge the
fancier’s epistemologies. Through interdisciplinary inquiry, we contribute to discussions on more-than-human
mapping to illuminate nuanced interactions between humans and animals and prompt exploration of diverse
ecological niches.
En este ensayo, ofrezco una perspectiva en torno a la renuncia del presidente guatemalteco, Otto Pérez Molina (2012-2015), a partir de las ideas sobre termodinámica social de Richard Adams.
Over the course of two years, a team of researchers collaborated with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IBB) in a joint research endeavor. The project aimed to leverage a substantial 30-gigabyte dataset containing information on more than 265 million mass transit journeys to serve public interest, with a particular emphasis on enhancing the urban experience of international students through locative media applications. This article presents a case study on communication that explores the intricate and evolving network of both human and non-human actors involved, employing Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a sociological approach designed to study relationships within heterogeneous networks. Fundamental methodological principles of ANT - agnosticism, generalized symmetry, and free association - were utilized to decipher the “moments of translation”. The article proceeds to discuss a unique set of observed effects specific to the context of a developing country's “fraying” metropolis, its distinct “buffer mechanisms”, and its patron-client network relations. It concludes by proposing the integration of the concept of affordances to enhance ANT critically and further the cause of public interest-oriented urban co-governance of Big Data.
Pursuing marital partners far from home can be a complicated endeavor, and the motives to travel for a companion can be a combination of pushes from one’s locality and pulls toward something new. In the Hebrew Bible, several narratives concern pursuing a partner far from home, but the motives of the person traveling have not seen much scholarly attention. In this contribution, the entangled motives are traced in three select narratives (Judg 14; Gen 24; Tob) that each represents a specific category of pursuing a partner. Samson pursues a known partner, Isaac and his family pursue an unknown partner, and Tobias unknowingly pursues a partner. These three narrative categories are explored utilizing the framework of actor-network theory to tease out the entangled human and non-human actants that affect the motives and the pursuit itself. This contribution reveals that motives are always entangled in more extensive networks, agency is distributed among various actants, and no pursuit of a companion in the Hebrew Bible is exactly like another.
In this thesis I critically examine the production of knowledge about air quality. I do so to explore how air quality knowledge is produced, and critically engage with how we can reconfigure our relations with the air to begin to address air inequalities. I draw upon my direct involvement in three different forms of doing air quality science. I analyse these involvements across three papers that make up the thesis along with Introduction, Literature Review, Methodology, and Conclusion chapters.
In Paper 1, using an autoethnographic analysis of PhD fieldwork, I contrast the difference between ‘ready made science’ and ‘science in the making’ through challenging my own conventional account of a school air quality monitoring project. In Paper 2, I show how a research-business project in UK schools that measured indoor air quality to assess the effectiveness of an air cleaning device became re-assembled following the emergence of COVID-19. In Paper 3, I reflect on a citizen science air quality monitoring project: drawing on interviews with citizen scientists I illuminate tensions in the dynamics of knowledge production, including air quality research design and reporting. Moreover, drawing upon science and technology studies, critical physical geography, and environmental justice literatures, I propose a new Critical Air Quality Science framework.
This thesis contributes to ‘hybrid’ ways of thinking about the air that pays attention to its materiality, but also its cultural, social, economic, and political relations: in particular for indoor air quality. Additionally, through drawing upon Actor-Network Theory and other ‘more-than-human’ approaches, I contribute to research characterising the mediating role of scientists in the production of the air. Moreover, through focusing on my own mediating role in the doing of air quality science, I contribute to emerging strands of environmental justice, namely epistemic justice.
Air quality is neither a stable material phenomenon, nor form of knowledge. This was made clear upon the arrival of COVID-19 in school classrooms when humans emerged as the primary source of poor indoor air quality (IAQ), and a host of new devices were placed into schools to monitor and clean IAQ. In this paper we examine this instability as it had consequences within a research-business project attempting to measure IAQ and assess the effectiveness of an air cleaning device in school classrooms pre- and post- the emergence of COVID-19. Using a ‘near’ Actor-Network Theory analytical framework we focus on how a network of ‘science in action’ became re-assembled to COVID-19. Drawing on IAQ data that we collected, government and industry statements and reports, and the direct involvement of the lead author using both reflexive and relational ethnographic approaches, we show how our IAQ measurements, combined with other material inscriptions, were powerful actants that changed the relationship between the air indoors and outdoors. We bring Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s concept of ‘matters of care’ into conversation with the project detailing how changing socio-material circumstances led to a more active role to reconfigure classroom IAQ, and how we might better care for IAQ in the future. We also relate our project to the wider – and ongoing – process of reassembling IAQ, asking how this might relate to questions of inequalities and responsibilities.
Most humanitarian organisations claim to be evidence-based but how often has this been tested? The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) carried out a network analysis of its documentation to examine how evidence is produced, circulated and used within the IFRC. Network graphs were produced from a sample of 404 documents, depicting the structure of citations between documents. Methodologically, an actor-network perspective was employed to follow the flow of evidence and information through documents in a bid to understand the effort applied to our commitment to be evidence-based. This analysis found the uptake of evidence by other documents to be wanting. Through conventional metrics, we also found that connected documents follow a power-law distribution at multiple scales, implying the structure is scale-free, and identified the key documents shape this hierarchical structure. Unlike conventional explanations for scale-free networks, we found Least Effort provides a better explanation to how this specific arrangement arose. The limited and fragmented use of citations suggests that the principle of Least Effort is a consequence of the organisational culture in the aid sector which fails to adequately incentivise more reflexive practices in the production and use of evidence.
Die »Person« ist kein Synonym für »Mensch«, sondern eine soziale Existenzweise für menschliche und nichtmenschliche Wesen. Während die Person der Moderne an das Private gebunden ist, wird sie mit der Digitalisierung neu situiert. Fabian Pittroff analysiert diese Entwicklung in einer Serie von Studien, die sich umfassenden Aspekten widmen: der Sozialtheorie der Person, der Geschichte des Privaten, der Krise demokratischer Institutionen, der avantgardistischen Postprivacy-Bewegung, der Digitalisierung der Freundschaft, der Produktion von Selfies und den Vorhersagungen der Datenökonomie. Dabei zeichnen sich zwei Modi der Personalisierung ab: Während die private Person auf ein Zentrum hin ausgerichtet ist, existiert die verteilte Person dezentral.
The idealistic musical work concept is the idea that pieces of music exist beyond space and time. Having emerged in Western art music, this concept has not had an easy time co-existing with musical practices around the world. To show the discrepancies and consistencies of the musical work concept vis-à-vis everyday practice, the book The Movement of a Musical Work. Ernst Krenek’s Opus 20 in the Interwar Years sets out to explore the making of one single musical work and its movement in and with people, objects, time, and space. Set amid 1920s social circles of European modern music or New Music, the book focuses entirely on the Third String Quartet, op. 20 by Austrian composer Ernst Krenek.
The remediation and redevelopment of industrially contaminated land are complex challenges for urban regions worldwide. Yet the literature on urban brownfields mostly addresses this as a technical problem through dichotomic and anthropocentric terms, contrasting the passive and negative role of the contamination as a toxic entity in the ground with the active and positive roles assigned to human actors such as planners, developers and communities. This article contests this prevalent view by tracing in detail debates concerning the remediation of three highly contaminated military‐industrial brownfield sites in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region. Drawing on notions of ontological multiplicity and enactment from science and technology studies and on qualitative analysis of a vast database of planning protocols and court hearings alongside interviews with key stakeholders, we uncover how contamination is enacted in multiple ways as mobile/immobile, unified/fragmented, remediable/irremediable. Furthermore, following one of our field's inherent controversies—whether to fully map the contamination prior to planning the sites—the article highlights the attempts to regulate this multiplicity and replace it with a single coherent contamination. By acknowledging the multiple enactments of contamination, our approach offers a more nuanced understanding that could help stakeholders rethink the remediation and redevelopment of urban brownfields beyond simplistic technical solutions or neoliberal policy imperatives.
Byer har traditionelt været nært forbundet med vand både som ressource og transportvej. En afgørende forandring i denne relation indtrådte ved skabelsen af den moderne europæiske storby i sidste del af 1800-tallet og starten af 1900-tallet, hvor en ny ordning og styring af vand som infrastruktur fandt sted. Denne artikel undersøger med udgangspunkt i Gefionspringvandet og Slusen i Københavns Sydhavn, hvordan forestillinger og praksisser knyttet til vand var med til at forme København som storby omkring år 1900 og igen efter årtusindskiftet. Hvor springvandet knyttede sig til byens underjordiske forsyningsnetværk og repræsenterede en iscenesættelse af vand som symbolsk og sensorisk oplevelse, var slusen først og fremmest et teknisk anlæg, der skulle styre havnens strømforhold. Tilsammen giver de to anlæg indblik i rækkevidden af den moderne bys vandrelationer og deres betydning for storbyens iscenesættelse og selvbillede.
Me complace presentar el libro titulado: “Investigación científica e interdisciplinariedad para la transformación de las organizaciones” que reúne una Serie de Investigaciones de la Red Académica Internacional Estudios Organizacionales en América Latina, el Caribe e Iberoamérica (REOALCEI), elaborado por investigadores talentosos, quienes se esfuerzan incansablemente por brindar un aporte a la ciencia a través de la publicación de investigaciones sobre estudios organizacionales. Estos estudios constituyen un campo de investigación que se centra en el análisis del funcionamiento de las organizaciones, abarcando una amplia variedad de temas que incluyen la estructura organizativa, la cultura organizacional, la toma de decisiones, la motivación y la satisfacción laboral, la gestión de recursos humanos, la ética empresarial, el liderazgo, la innovación y la responsabilidad social corporativa.
Curran expands our understanding of the ways gang territories are made by gang members. Instead of privileging intentional human agency, she extends her observations to the host of human and more-than-human practices that bring these spaces into being in multiple, material ways. Agency shifts from being the domain of the individual to an effect of assemblage. When we pay attention to the material practices of gang territories—to buildings, technologies, personal possessions, and bodily adornment—we find that gang spaces emerge in multiple ways, sometimes in regional form and sometimes in unconventional ways. These observations begin to broaden the understanding of who or what is responsible for these spaces.
Foregrounding the relationality of gang space, Curran directs attention away from gangs as the source or cause of these territories and their ‘contents,’ towards a focus on the ways these spaces require a network or assemblage of actors to operate and maintain their form. Using the concept of the ‘gang assemblage’ provides a way to think through the associations between space and bodies, motivating us to disrupt these connections as singularly attributable, or natural. In this way, focusing on the materiality of space strengthens a relational ethics of accountability between people and place. These observations are relevant to both critical criminologists and criminologists concerned with crime-control interventions, since they encourage a renewed look at the purpose, forms, and practicalities of gang-intervention strategies.
Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir os desafios e os potências que determinados esforços intelectuais, filiados às chamadas viradas ontológicas na Antropologia e na área de Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade, podem oferecer à reflexão contemporânea sobre o fazer etnográfico nas ciências sociais. Nosso argumento geral é que na conjuntura político-epistêmica atual, em que uma crise ecológica global acusa a indispensabilidade de abarcar outro mundos, novos debates trazem o potencial de promover formas de se tratar empiricamente essas questões que engajem outros modos de existência na prática científica das ciências sociais. Apresentamos o argumento da virada ontológica direcionado nos seguintes elementos. Em primeiro lugar, a importância dos Estudos de Ciência e Tecnologia para a proposição de novos entendimentos ontológicos e políticos, especificamente, a partir da teoria ator-rede. Em seguida, o papel dos estudos que versam sobre a relação entre ontologia e linguagem como forma de reconhecimento de outros sujeitos ontológicos, bem como, o acolhimento de epistemologias que foram marginalizadas no processo de modernização ocidental. Numa terceira parte, desdobramos o argumento da virada ontológica, dessa vez, com um olhar específico para o fazer antropológico, sobretudo nos conflitos existentes na pretensão entre a tradução entre mundos e as pontes entre ontologia e política.
Presented as a six-course meal, this article addresses the ethics of innovations, interruptions, and intrusions in physical education (PE). The central ingredient in this meal is Michel Serres’ character-concept of the parasite. We begin by interpreting debates about PE’s purposes, futures, beneficiaries, and so on, as offering researchers and practitioners food-for-thought about the status quo in PE and its transformation. We then introduce the tastes and textures of the parasite and explore these flavours further using PE research on outsourcing and the use of healthy lifestyle technologies. In the main course, we propose a situated and symbiotic parasitic ethics grounded in hesitation and discuss what this set of sensitivities offers debates in PE about outsourcing and healthy lifestyle technology-use. Recognising there will never be a PE without parasites, we advocate an attunement to what it is to parasite well in PE and to the role of the parasite in the composition of any PE collective.
Despite the centrality of research phenomena, the process of their definition is often neglected and reduced to a simple choosing of pre‐established subjects of interest. However, good research not only includes empirical work aimed at more or less ‘given as fact’ phenomena. It also involves phenomena construction: that is, the process of generating and establishing phenomena to investigate and theorize. We contend that phenomena construction is not separate from, but integral to, both the empirical and theorizing phases in research. As few phenomena are truly ‘given’ or straightforward to observe, good research calls for careful and creative construction of the phenomenon under investigation. We propose and elaborate a framework that enables researchers to generate and establish research phenomena beyond those currently available in their specific area of interest and, based on this, to produce more imaginative and impactful research.
In this article, our concern is to describe how body(ies) and self are performed in women’s birth narratives through the mediation of a number of significant elements, including technical devices. We will show how, in these narratives, (1) action is distributed among a series of actants, including professionals and technology; (2) that dichotomies appear which cannot be reduced to one of body/mind, but are more adequately described in terms of ‘body-in-labour’/’embodied self’, each of them being locally performed through the mediation of medical practices, knowledge and technologies, the definition of these elements and of their relations being specific to each obstetrical configuration; (3) that part of professionals’ activities is devoted to the detailed management of the articulation between the body-in-labour and the embodied self, and to monitoring their joint transformations.
By now, the laboratory tradition, crafting transportable knowledge that allows for comparison, has been amply studied. However, other knowledge traditions, notably that of the clinic, deserve further articulation. The authors contribute to this by unraveling some specificities of rehabilitation practice. How do laboratory and clinical traditions in rehabilitation relate to independence? The first seeks to quantify people's independence; the latter attends to qualitatively different ways of being independent. While measuring independence is a matter of aggregating scores on a priori established dimensions, clinical rehabilitation concerns coordinating different ways of being independent. While independence scales map a linear development in time, rehabilitation participants juggle with time, including uncertain futures in their present. In clinical practice, then, independence is neither a single, coherent, fact nor a clear-cut, stable goal. Instead, professionals as well as patients work by creatively doctoring with the large variety of elements that are relevant to daily life with long-term disabilities.
Focusing on the interactions between people suffering from neuromuscular diseases and their wheelchairs, the author raises the question of action: how is action made possible for people suffering from neuromuscular diseases? Starting with actor-network theory, the author shows that action not only results from distribution and delegation to heterogeneous entities but emerges from hard and lengthy work that makes the relation between them possible (or not) and transforms the entities involved. The author describes this work, called the process of adjustment, as work on the links making a person, his or her body, and his or her world. Through this work, new possibilities of action emerge for the person, but also new (dis)abilities; the person’s identity is transformed and shaped. This analysis leads to a particular conception of the person as made up through his or her relations to other entities (human and nonhuman).
This article presents the implications, objectives and initial results of a current ethnographic research project on music lovers. It looks at problems of theory and method posed by such research if it is not conceived only as the explanation of external determinisms, relating taste to the social origins of the amateur or to the aesthetic properties of the works. Our aim is, on the contrary, from long interviews and observations undertaken with music lovers, mostly in the classical field, to concentrate on gestures, objects, mediums, devices and relations engaged in a form of playing or listening, which amounts to more than the actualization of a taste `already there', for they are redefined during the action, with a result that is partly uncertain. This is why amateurs' attachments and ways of doing things can both engage and form subjectivities, rather than merely recording social labels, and have a history, irreducible to that of the taste for works.
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.
In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
What is good care? In this innovative and compelling book, Annemarie Mol argues that good care has little to do with 'patient choice' and, therefore, creating more opportunities for patient choice will not improve health care. Although it is possible to treat people who seek professional help as customers or citizens, Mol argues that this undermines ways of thinking and acting crucial to health care. Illustrating the discussion with examples from diabetes clinics and diabetes self care, the book presents the 'logic of care' in a step by step contrast with the 'logic of choice'. She concludes that good care is not a matter of making well argued individual choices but is something that grows out of collaborative and continuing attempts to attune knowledge and technologies to diseased bodies and complex lives. Mol does not criticise the practices she encountered in her field work as messy or ad hoc, but makes explicit what it is that motivates them: an intriguing combination of adaptability and perseverance. The Logic of Care: Health and the problem of patient choice is crucial reading for all those interested in the theory and practice of care, including sociologists, anthropologists and health care professionals. It will also speak to policymakers and become a valuable source of inspiration for patient activists.
Is sociology the study of social questions, or is it the study of associations? In this paper the author takes the second position and extends the study of our associations to nonhumans. To make the argument clearer, the author chooses one very humble nonhuman, a door-closer, and analyzes how this “purely” technical artifact is a highly moral, highly social actor that deserves careful consideration. Then the author proposes a vocabulary to follow human and nonhuman relations without stopping at artificial divides between what is purely technical and what is social. The author builds “its” or “his” own text in such a way that the text itself is a machine that exemplifies several of the points made by the author. In particular, the author is constructed and deconstructed several times to show how many social actors are inscribed or prescribed by machines and automatisms.
Current health care discussions often deal with issues such as self-determination, consumer orientation, civil rights and choices for patients and people with disabilities. Other experiences of illness and disability, such as pain and suffering are often avoided in these discussions because these expressions seem to confirm the public prejudice of tragic victimhood of people with disabilities. Various scholars have sought to reintroduce the enactment of the sick and disabled body into the discourses around disability. This essay is a part of that endeavour. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from a centre for physical rehabilitation, this article questions the idea that suffering turns people into passive victims of their bodies. By articulating the ways in which participants deal with suffering during the day-to-day activities of rehabilitation practice, the paper seeks to demonstrate that people do not passively sink into their suffering, but actively deal with it in the multiple settings and conditions of their embodied living. Three different ways in which rehabilitation participants deal with suffering will be unravelled. First, suffering is translated in the sense that it is transformed and transferred. Second, people actively manage their situation and balance different kinds of misery. Finally, people create a space where suffering is allowed to exist.
Introduction: The Human Genome Diversity Project 1. Technologies of populations: making differences and similarities between Turkish and Dutch males 3. Ten chimps in a laboratory: or how a human genetic marker may become a good genetic marker for typing chimps 4. Naturalisation of a reference sequence: Anderson or the Mitochondrial Eve of modern genetics 5. The traffic in males and other stories on the enactment of the sexes in studies of genetic lineage 6. Technologies of similarity and difference or how to do politics with DNA.
analysis of a conflict over how elephants are managed in Amboseli national Park, Kenya. On one side are the scientists who have studied the elephants as complex social creatures with rights inherent in such status (anthropomorphism). They see elephants as scientific gold in terms of what they can offer knowledge, and they are therefore to be separated and protected from humans. Issues of elephants' effects on woodlands are outside the main concern. On the other side are conservation ecologists who view elephants as keystone species, who provide ecological benefits when at the proper population gradient (not too many, not too few). Migration outside of parks is encouraged and the locals (Massai) are seen as allies that need to be incorporated into the management plan. Charis is making an argument that there are two world-views, and from these a whole bunch of things fall out in line: science, legal, ethical, ecological, land tenure, etc... She provides a nice table showing how these differences contrast. She also makes an argument that complexity sits between reductionism/difficulty (too complicated for a non-expert to understand) and holism/complicatedness (only a local can understand the ideosyncratic realities that define the situation).
The topic of this article is the promises of technology for disabled people. The starting point is that disabled is not something one is but something one becomes, and, further, that disability is enacted and ordered in situated and quite specific ways. The question, then, is how people become, and are made, disabled – and, in particular, what role technologies and other material arrangements play in enabling and or disabling interactions. Drawing on a study of the uses of new technologies in the lives of disabled people in Norway, and recent work in disability studies as well as social studies of science and technology, this article explores precisely what positions and capacities are enabled; how these are made possible in practice; the specific configuration of subjectivity, embodiment and disability that emerges; and the limits to this mode of ordering disability and its technologies. The argument is that in this context the mobilization of new technologies works to build an order of the normal and turn disabled people into competent normal subjects. However, this strategy based on compensation achieves its goals only at a very high price: by continuing to reproduce boundaries between abled and disabled, and normal and deviant, which constitute some people as disabled in the first place. There are thus limits to normalization. And so, notwithstanding their generative and transformative power, technologies working within an order of the normal are implicated in the (re)production of the asymmetries that they and it seek to undo.
In public debates about the desirability of force feeding in the Netherlands the inclination of people with dementia to refrain from eating and drinking tends to be either taken as their gut-way of expressing their will, or as a symptom of their disease running its natural course. An ethnographic inquiry into daily care, however, gives a quite different insight in fasting by relating it to common practices of eating and drinking in nursing homes. In a nursing home eating and drinking are important social activities that may be shaped quite differently. And while necessary for survival, food and drink also have other qualities: taste, temperature, texture, smell. Whether we want it or not, in the end we all die. But with different modes of care come different modes of dying and of living.
After describing objects as networks, we attempt to describe ‘subject-networks’. Instead of focusing on capacities inherent in a subject, we attend instead to the tactics and techniques which make possible the emergence of a subject as it enters a ‘dispositif’. Opting for an optimistic analysis of Foucault, we consider ‘dispositifs’ and their constraints to be generative: they do not simply reduce but also reveal and multiply. The generative power of ‘dispositifs’ depends upon their capacity to create and make use of new capacities in the persons who pass through them. Drawing upon a diverse body of literature and upon fieldwork among drug addicts and music amateurs, we show how this point of entry into the question of the subject immediately and irredeemably undoes traditional dichotomies of sociology. It becomes impossible to continue to set up oppositions like those of agent/structure, subject/object, active/passive, free/determined. We also have to look beyond studies of ‘action’ and describe ‘events’. Through the words and trials of the music and drug lovers, it becomes clear that the subject can emerge as she actively submits herself to a collection of constraints. These actors describe necessary yet tentative techniques of preparation to produce this ‘active passion’, this form of ‘attachment’ which we attempt to describe as that which allows the subject to emerge—never alone, never a pristine individual, but rather always entangled with and generously gifted by a collective, by objects, techniques, constraints.
The identification of the genes responsible for certain serious diseases and the development of tests for identifying carriers of those genes help to put the individuals concerned in the forefront of ethical decisions. These decisions are unavoidable, especially when available knowledge and techniques have already been broadly disseminated. This article presents the case of a limb-girdle muscular dystrophy patient in Reunion Island who refuses to comprehend the lessons of genetics and to become part of the medical and associative networks that implement and diffuse that knowledge. His refusal is interpreted as the rejection of a form of agency and subjectivity, in which the individual is considered as an autonomous subject forced to choose between a number of pre-established options and responsible for the consequences of his choices. Using definitions of humanity and morality presented by François Jullien in his commentary on Mencius, the authors propose to consider that, by refusing, the patient is opting for a different form of morality and humanity. The article also shows how the interview situation constructs a situation that reduces the patient to silence.
In spite of the recent proliferation of theoretically informed writings on all things 'cyber,'- it remains the case that much of the literature on 'electronic spaces' is characterised by a strong current of technological determinism. That is to say, it assumes and reproduces a stable and matter-of-fact distinction between the material/technical and the social such that changes in the former are supposed somehow to 'impact' on the latter. In those accounts which eschew this position, authors tend to employ an approach towards technology that might broadly be termed social constructionist. After Latour, I argue that, in that they operate according to the same 'logic', both these positions-technological determinism and social constructionism-remain within a 'modern' worldview. I propose that if we are to (and I argue that we must) tell stories of a world in which what the moderns refer to as the 'material' and the 'social' are always already bound together, always already binding together, we require other vocabularies than those which divide and 'black box' the world into easy categories, vocabularies that are able to grant all sorts of things their rightful place in the (co)construction of the world. Drawing on a variety of writers, I suggest that one element of these other vocabularies might be what I term a 'materialist semiotics'. Having elaborated certain strands of what this could mean, I offer some tentative accounts of what our 'virtual geographies' might look like from an amodern perspective.
Is postmodernism debilitating for feminists approaching science? is the actor-network approach, which rejects dualisms and universalism, politically impotent Or is such a critique epistemologically conservative? I explore these questions by drawing on empirical research examining the UK Cervical Screening Programme (CSP). Specifically, I attempt to answer the question of whether or not women should participate in the CSP and undertake a cervical smear test Because the CSP is constantly changing as participants' identities multiply in negotiation, I propose that there is no stable paint from which a single decision about lay participation can be made, however politically useful it may be to do so, I demonstrate my discomfort with talking about whether women should or should not participate. Given the dynamic nature of the Programme, a 'should' discourse is inappropriate, and can also be guilt-inducing and oppressive to women. My preference is for a discourse which emphasizes that women could participate.
If laboratories and research sites are to the twentieth century what monasteries were to the twelfth, then the sources of their power and efficacy remain a mystery. How is it that the ideas and writings that issue from these institutions are able to revolutionise, if only gradually, conditions of work in industry, the universe of consumer goods and lifestyles? How are the discoveries made in Stanford, Gif-sur-Yvette, and Cambridge diffused such that they become universally known and recognised? How are certain technical devices, shaped in research departments of French or English companies, able to conquer markets throughout the world? Anthropological studies of the laboratory have shown that nothing exceptional occurs within the walls of research centres themselves which could account for their influence. These studies have also shown that the force and generality of results obtained cannot be attributed to the existence of a specific scientific method (Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Lynch, 1985). Though scientists give certain activities a higher priority than others (see Chapter 3), the former do not possess greater rigour or a logic which enable an observer to distinguish them from the latter.
Actor-network theory has, until recently, narrated the co-evolution of science and society in terms of dramatic triumphs and betrayals. This paper attempts to incorporate 'ambivalence' into the process of enrolment and black-boxing so central to the construction and continuation of actor-networks. Though ambivalence towards one's own and others' attributed roles in the network would seem to threaten the integrity of a given network, we suggest that it might reinforce it. Drawing upon fieldwork on the UK Cervical Screening Programme (CSP), we show how General Practitioners seriously problematize their own roles and the black-boxed status of the Cervical Smear Test within the CSP network. However, we also show that it is this very problematization that serves to render the network durable and workable.
The nurses on an intensive care ward for new-borns feed babies with food and doctors with information. Showing that this is so is one of the ways in which scholars working in humanist traditions of social analysis, such as symbolic interactionism, reveal the politics of hospital relations. However, semiotics, along with similar 'non-humanist' theoretical traditions, is no less political. neither, as is sometimes suggested, does it necessarily side with the strong. Here we demonstrate that semiotics implies another style of political theory - one in which the relevant axes of different are not primarily between groups of people, but between ways of ordering the world. Thus the differences between two modes of feeding or of calculating the contents of a bottle can be understood as both 'political' and 'technical' matters.
In this paper we investigate the intricacies of an admirable water pumping device - the Zimbabwe Bush Pump `B' type - so as to find out what makes it an `appropriate technology'. This turns out to be what we call the `fluidity' of the pump (of its boundaries, or of its working order, and of its maker). We find that in travelling to intractable places, an object that isn't too rigorously bounded, that doesn't impose itself but tries to serve, that is adaptable, flexible and responsive - in short, a fluid object - may well prove to be stronger than one which is firm. By analyzing the success and failure of this device, its agency and the way in which it shapes new configurations in the Zimbabwean socio-technical landscape, we partake in the current move in science and technology studies to transform what it means to be an actor. And by mobilizing the term love for articulating our relation to the Bush Pump, we try to contribute to shaping novel ways of `doing' normativity.
Configurations 8.1 (2000) 1-29
Louis Althusser
Donna Haraway
I have been puzzling for some time about the problem of the public and the private, and the role of the personal in ethnography or history. Let's put "the personal" into quotes: I have been puzzling for some time about the problem of "the personal" in social science writing: how it works; what it does. My puzzle presents itself in my own writing. The question is whether I should rigorously try to keep the "personal" out. This would be the most common response. But supposing it were let in, then there are other questions: how should it be done? how might it be handled? and what kind of job should it be doing there anyway?
These are the issues that I investigate in this paper. But let me make a context, or offer a second introduction:
Donna Haraway and Sharon Traweek teach us that when we tell stories these are performative. This is because they also make a difference, or at any rate might make a difference, or hope to make a difference. Applied in technoscience, the argument goes further; in fact, it is quite radical. It is that there is no important difference between stories and materials. Or, to put it a little differently: stories, effective stories, perform themselves into the material world -- yes, in the form of social relations, but also in the form of machines, architectural arrangements, bodies, and all the rest. This means that one way of imagining the world is that it is a set of (pretty disorderly) stories that intersect and interfere with one another. It means also that these are, however, not simply narrations in the standard linguistic sense of the term.
I want to hold the question of the "personal" together with the performative character of storytelling and its material embodiments. This paper is composed of stories -- performative stories -- about the "personal." The reason for this is that I want to make a difference to the way in which we imagine what we currently think of as the "personal," the "analytical," and indeed the "political." I want to interfere in some of the standard stories. This is because if we do it right then it turns out that the "personal" is not really personal any longer. Instead, it is an analytical and political tool for interfering and making a difference, one among many, that might allow us to defuse some of the bombs of what Donna Haraway tellingly calls the established disorder.
Well, these are familiar tropes. They are to be found in feminist writing, in cultural studies. The novelty is the application of the personal to the material world. For I want to see what happens if we try it out in the domain of machines.
This is a story about politics and an aircraft, an aircraft as seen by a young man. The young man was called John Law. But the past is at least in part a foreign country, and since they do things differently there, I will recount it in the third person.
Science and technology studies (STS) is an important and often controversial interdisciplinary field which has proved to be provocative and influential. But has its institutionalization and influence occurred at the expense of some of its provocative power? This paper considers the fate of provocative ideas associated with STS as they become appropriated and transformed by new social institutions and audiences. It aims to sketch a preliminary framework for analysing the social dynamics of the persistence and/or attenuation of its ideas and impacts. The argument reviews the main early aspirations and targets of STS. It suggests that changing emphases in STS can be understood as responses to successive versions of the principle of symmetry. It argues that the continual renewal and recruitment of audiences for STS is central to sustaining its capacity for provocation.
This paper describes the theory of the actor-network, a body of theoretical and empirical writing which treats social relations, including power and organization, as network effects. The theory is distinctive because it insists that networks are materially heterogeneous and argues that society and organization would not exist if they were simply social. Agents, texts, devices, architectures are all generated in, form part of, and are essential to, the networks of the social. And in the first instance, all should be analyzed in the same terms. Accordingly, in this view, the task of sociology is to characterize the ways in which materials join together to generate themselves and reproduce institutional and organizational patterns in the networks of the social.
This paper is about ‘material politics’. It argues that this may be understood as a material ordering of the world in a way that contrasts this with other and equally possible alternative modes of ordering. It also suggests that while material politics may well involve words, it is not discursive in kind. This argument is made for the mundane and material practice of boiling pigswill that the 2001 UK foot and mouth outbreak showed to have a layered importance. Boiling pigswill was a political technique in at least three different ways. First it made difference, dividing the rich from the poor by separating disease free countries from those in which foot and mouth is endemic. Second, it joined times and places by linking past agricultural practices with those of the contemporary world, and linking Britain with the world. And third, it also showed a way of limiting food scarcity on a world wide scale because it allowed food to be recycled, albeit on a small scale, in a region of plenty. ‘Politics’ is often linked to debate, discussion, or explicit contestation. Alternatively, it is sometimes seen as being embedded in and carried by artefacts. For the case of boiling pigswill neither approach is satisfactory. The first privileges the life of the mind while in the second politics is linked too strongly to a single order. The version of politics presented here foregrounds both materiality and difference. And it involves articulation: the question is not whether something is political all by itself but whether it can be called political as part of the process of analysing it.
This article contributes to recent discussions about the politics of nature by exploring how Alzheimer’s disease is being shaped as a ‘matter of concern’. Drawing on work on differences in medicine from science and technology studies, and from the geographies of naturecultures, it explores the ‘mattering’ of this disease in a number of locations including: an international Alzheimer’s patients’ movement; a medical textbook; laboratory science; daily care practice; an advertisement for anti-dementia medication; general practice; parliamentary politics; and a conference on dementia. It explores how these locations interfere and co-exist with one another and argues against the ‘science centrism’ of science and technology studies which contributes to the dominance of science and medicine by granting these analytical privilege. The same problem is posed in the recent STS turn from science to politics – the danger is that politics is similarly privileged.
Estudio que describe por un lado la etnografía de la arterioesclorosis, a través de observaciones cotidianas y entrevistas tanto con las personas que acuden con este padecimiento al hospital de la Universidad de Dutch como con los médicos de dicha institución; y por otro, elabora un análisis de la representación social de la enfermedad desde la antropología médica y la filosofía.
This paper explores the spatial characteristics of science and technology. Originally seen as universal, and therefore outside space and place, studies in science, technology, and society (STS) located it first in specific locations -- laboratories -- and then in narrow networks linking laboratories. This double location implied that science is caught up in and enacts two topological forms -- region and network -- since objects in networks hold their shape by freezing relations rather than fixing Euclidean coordinates. More recent STS work suggests that science and technology also exist in and help to enact additional spatial forms. Thus some technoscience objects are fluid, holding their form by shifting their relations. And yet others achieve constancy by enacting simultaneous absence and presence, a topological possibility which we call here fire . The paper concludes by arguing that the 'global' includes and is enacted in all four of these topological systems.
We all know that we have and are our bodies. But might it be possible to leave this common place? In the present article we try to do this by attending to the way we do our bodies. The site where we look for such action is that of handling the hypoglycaemias that sometimes happen to people with diabetes. In this site it appears that the body, active in measuring, feeling and countering hypoglycaemias is not a bounded whole: its boundaries leak. Bits and pieces of the outside get incorporated within the active body; while the centre of some bodily activities is beyond the skin. The body thus enacted is not self-evidently coherent either. There are tensions between the body’s organs; between the control under which we put our bodies and the erratic character of their behaviour; and between the various needs and desires single bodies somehow try to combine. Thus to say that a body is a whole, or so we conclude, skips over a lot of work. One does not hang together as a matter of course: keeping oneself together is something the embodied person needs to do. The person who fails to do so dies.
This chapter analyses the question of agency considering the animal agency of Cumbrian sheep in the uprising of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK in 2001. The article explores the conditions required for an actor to be able to act as such. In that direction it shifts the usual meaning of the concept of actor separating it from the anthropocentric model and making it distant from the ideas of “intentionality” and “dominance” to emphasise how actors not only act, but they are habilitated and produced as such as a result of complex relations with other actors. That is, to become actors they have to be enacted. To do so, the article analyses some of the multiple forms in which Cumbrian sheep were enacted in the context of the uprising of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001. Finally the article considers what types of agency perform the Cumbrian sheep in each of them.
This chapter describes the development of actor-network theory and feminist material semiotics by exploring case studies within STS (science and technology studies). It notes that STS (and so material semiotics) develops its theoretical approaches through empirical case studies, and notes that unless this is understood it is difficult to understand the significance of 'actor network theory' or any other STS theory or approach.
This paper stages an encounter between one strand of the controversy around genetically modified food crops and some conceptual resources from the field of science and technology studies, with the aim of illuminating the relationship between science and politics. Contrary to some suggestions, it is argued that the spatial, temporal and material imagination encapsulated in the figure of Progress remains central to their contemporary articulation. Best described as an ‘anti-political’ strategy, Progress does not leave room for anything else but one story of the world. Through following the attempts of both scientists in the field and protestors on the streets to make public some of the trajectories which this story leaves out, what emerges is the possibility of an alternative to Progress that is not based simply on its rejection. Instead, such efforts offer resources for inventing another way of collectively going forward which chime with some more theoretical attempts to elaborate how things might be productively ‘slowed down’. An example of how government was forced to construct a way of dealing with things that is more adequate and appropriate to life in a full world is compared with Bruno Latour’s model of due process for nonhumans, before some conclusions are drawn about whether we should be depressed or hopeful about our ability to move on in the lights of such attempts.
Obra teórica de una sociología de las asociaciones, el autor se cuestiona sobre lo que supone la palabra social que ha sido interpretada con diferentes presupuestos y se ha hecho del mismo vocablo un nombre impreciso e inadecuado, además se ha materializado el término como quien nombra algo concreto, de manera que lo social se convierte en un proceso de ensamblado y un tipo particular de material. Propone retomar el concepto original para hacer las debidas conexiones y descubrir el contenido estricto de las cuestiones que están conectadas bajo la sociedad.
Blood pressure is one of the key measurements taken in standard clinical examinations. Its importance has long been associated with the instrumental precision offered by the sphygmomanometer, which is supposed to have replaced other, more imprecise methods of blood pressure measurement, such as feeling the pulse with the finger. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a neurosurgical clinic, this paper explores the co-existence of the sphygmomanometer and the finger methods in practice. I argue that in neurosurgery these methods are both independent from and interdependent with each other: independent in the way they achieve different assessments of the patient’s blood pressure at the same time; and interdependent in the way the surgeon’s and anaesthetist’s measurements are dynamically linked with each other. The paper suggests that this particular form of coordination through heterogeneity might be described, borrowing from Michel Serres’ work, as mutual parasitism, and that this metaphor might be useful in rethinking the role of science - research, or ‘evidence’ - in medical practice.
The medical textbooks in our university library present 'principles' as the basis which underlies medical 'practice'. In this article it is argued that this helps different medical logics to co-exist. The example analyzed is that of anemia in the Netherlands. Currently this is defined pathophysiologically, statistically and clinically. These three definitions are intertwined with different strategies for the creation of normal hemoglobin levels and the detection of patients with anemia. The discrepancies between them, however, do not lead to the controversies that might be expected by those who believe in consistency. Instead, the rhetoric of principles-and-practice helps to bring about peaceful co-existence.