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On the Subject of the Object: Narrative, Technology, and Interpellation
Abstract
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.
... According to John Law, such distinctions between facts and opinions are problematic, because they differentiate 'the knower' (the subject) from 'the known' (the object). In his examination of the relationship between the personal, the analytical and the political in storytelling (Law 2000, 2), Law draws on Donna Haraway (1991) and Sharon Traweek (1988) to argue instead that 'there is no important difference between stories and materials', and thus dissolves the ontological distinction between the object, event or situation being narrated and the narrator. The 'distinction between truth and person' is performed and not a priori (Law 2000, 11). ...
... According to this perspective, there is no single independent reality to be known, and there is no 'unmarked subject'; only subjects marked by situation, location and embodiment. Rather, multiple realities are enacted through material-discursive practices, which include different modes of ordering subjects and objects (Law 2000;Mol 2002). Thus, interacting and interfering with, but also talking about, an object, event or situation are forms of practice that enact realities. ...
... Thus, interacting and interfering with, but also talking about, an object, event or situation are forms of practice that enact realities. Law (2000) maintains that different realities come into being, or 'get done', through the reciprocal process of objectivation and subjectivation. Objects, as well as human beings and their practices, are agentic, which means that they interfere with the world and make differences; they 'do realities' (Law 2009, 2). ...
For public health interventions to be effective, they need to be supported or at least accepted by those affected, and social policy should therefore be understood as political and strategic. This raises questions about the relationship between the analytical, the political and the personal in policy processes. This article offers an in-depth analysis of such issues, as they were enacted during interviews with Swedish alcohol policy stakeholders. It focuses on the assumptions and a priori ‘truths’ articulated in interviews about Responsible Beverage Services (RBS) at Swedish football stadiums or ‘Football Without Bingeing’. We argue that the participants combined different narrative forms, such as seemingly objective chronological accounts and personal ethical judgments, in talking about the policy initiative. Through such narrative intersections, three key ‘truths’ were produced that reinforced the link between alcohol and violence, necessitated blanket population-level measures to reduce alcohol use and made gendered behavior an irrelevant policy target.
... Problem representations of this kind are therefore political and strategic, produced to suit the solutions that are at hand . To scrutinize how service users are made up by staff we will turn to Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and more precisely John Law's discussion on how interpellative logics enact objects, subjects and different realities (Law, 2000). We use data from an exploratory research project on the discourse and practice of relapse prevention in Sweden. ...
... According to Law, such performances of interpellation distribute subject-positions and object-positions, and are "modes of ordering" reality, that is, "arrangements that recursively perform themselves through different materials-speech, subjectivities, organizations, technical artefacts; and that therefore, since they perform themselves alongside one another, also interact with one another" (Law, 2000, p. 23). For Law (2000), interpellation is thus not a singular process but rather multiple, where different interpellations may clash with each other, potentially leading to "conflicting subject-positions" (p. 24). ...
... According to this, multifaceted interpellations are not reducible to different perspectives on the same phenomenon, but rather indicative of different realities (Law & Urry, 2004, p. 397). In this study, we merge the discussion of performance through interpellation (Law, 2000) with the discussion of how objects can be multiple (Law & Singleton, 2005;Mol & Law, 1994). We use the concept "interpellative logic" (Law, 2000, p. 23) to scrutinize how service providers through interpellation enact service users in different ways; as objects that metaphorically build on regions, networks, fluids, and fire (Law & Mol, 2001;Law & Singleton, 2005;Mol, 1999). ...
This study analyzes how staff in Swedish alcohol and other drug (AoD) treatment interpellate service users as people who can benefit from relapse prevention. Relapse prevention is a widely used intervention. Research is scarce, however, on how relapse prevention is practiced locally and how treatment staff perceive the relationship between AoD use as a problem and relapse prevention as a solution. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory and critical studies of AoD issues within this tradition, we elucidate how staff through specific interpellative logics enact service users, their individual characteristics, and living conditions. The data derive from interviews with 18 professionals working with assessment, counseling, case-management, therapy, and healthcare at AoD treatment agencies in the Stockholm region. The results show that the participants drew on four interpellative logics, and thereby enacted service users as four different object types. Region and network logics pinpointed that individuals have stable observable characteristics that determine their problems and eligibility for treatment (e.g., living conditions, diagnoses). Fluid and fire logics emphasized that their characteristics also vary depending on context and can be present and absent at the same time (e.g., harms, agency). This flexible interpellation of service users echoes the tendency among treatment staff to embrace sometimes irreconcilable understandings of AoD problems and to enact multiple realities of addiction. This suits a professional field where many factors are thought to cause and help resolve problems, but where the treatment supply is often limited to specific interventions. We conclude that it is easier to create a reasonable match between the service delivered and the potential service user if the characteristics of the latter are considered diverse and flickering. This exemplifies Carol Bacchi’s tenet that problem representations are adjusted to fit the solution at hand.
... Analysing the court dramaturgically, and through the lens of embodied, emotional, and affective skills of lawyers, interpreters, journalists, and herself as researcher, uncovered stories enriched with autoethnographic "epiphanies" (Bochner & Ellis, 1992). Clashing multiple selves (Law, 2000) emerged and situated the researcher and participants amid the (non-)human relations and affective capacities, which enabled neutrality to converge and diverge. ...
... Nevertheless, excavating relational subjectivities (Law, 2000) further in that project could have uncovered how the participants were situated in both "neutrality" and research assemblages and how this could be exploited politically and positively. Participants could have identified which "selves" (and their relation to specific spaces, materials, and discourses) were continuously subordinated, then generated visions and experimentation. ...
... Finally, in AI, narrative communities develop an infinite "interpretive repertoire" that guides and transforms what they observe, talk about, and act on, and their subjectivity, which is fluid but relatively stable (Cooperrider et al., 1995, p. 165). Words are, however, only the tip of the iceberg (Law, 2000). Materialist approaches to subjectivity have emerged in actor-networks (Law, 2000) and assemblages (Dittmer, 2014). ...
Courtrooms globally are being reshaped by i) (legal) special measures and ii) increasing voluntary sector involvement. We examine multisectoral efforts to change conditions under which vulnerable people give evidence in Scotland. Vulnerable complainers (in Scotland)/ complainants and witnesses are now often shielded by screens and accompanied by volunteer witness supporters when testifying. These developments have important (geo)political implications. However, little scholarship examines the spatiality, materiality and discursivity of the special measures themselves and/or the relationships between special measures, courts and the voluntary sector. Addressing this gap, we fuse assemblage methodologies and appreciative inquiry: providing a novel methodological hybrid to underpin forthcoming research examining what constitutes these measures and their relationships with the court voluntary sector. Our ‘playful experimentation’ increases the political momentum of assemblages and adds spatial, material and discursive perspectives to narrative‐focused appreciative inquiry, to facilitate best evidence and organisational development. Our methodological hybrid increases interdisciplinary possibilities: for embodied legal geography, seeing law as enacted through the spatial, material and discursive body of a volunteer; and for criminal justice voluntary sector studies, creating a more materially and spatially‐aware public criminology. This is relevant across interest groups including those: supporting (vulnerable) populations involved in criminal justice; evaluating court reforms; and doing research involving the representational, emotional and affective body.
... In a similar manner, Rennstam (2012), proposing the concept of object-control, advocated a view of EPs as active creators in the initiation and realization of a knowing process through which knowledge of what to do and how to do it is elicited. By provoking knowledge puzzles, objects of investigation serve as elicitors of knowledge and question-generators; in this way, they serve to invite interested actors acting via the mechanism of interpellation so as to direct the process of collaborative innovation (Law, 2000). ...
... Drawing on the existing literature discussed above, scholars have pointed out the power that EPs have to produce emotional attachment to fuel the practices of collaboration and strategizing work (Knorr-Cetina, 1997;Nicolini et al., 2012;Rheinberger, 1997;Werle & Seidl, 2015), as well as to initiate a knowing process where knowledge of what to do and how to do it is elicited to direct the process of innovation (Law, 2000;Rennstam, 2012). However, our insight into how EPs affect KS, KA, and knowledge integration so as to coordinate the fragmented and heterogeneous knowledge mobilized during an innovation is still very limited. ...
The paper aims to explore how epistemic objects—defined as objects of investigation that are simultaneously underdefined, unfolding objects in collaboration—orchestrate knowledge for coordinating the knowledge fragmentation and heterogeneity in digital innovation networks. By using a mixed‐methods research approach, the paper begins with a qualitative case study to explain the relationships and follows up with quantitative surveys to test the hypotheses. As a result, this study finds that by acting as a trust trigger and a knowledge elicitor, epistemic objects facilitate the sharing, acquisition, and integration of knowledge, thereby coordinating the knowledge fragmentation and heterogeneity among collaborative digital ventures in their innovation networks. Hence, the study makes three contributions: (a) a focus on both affective and cognitive trust triggered by epistemic objects provides a novel source of motivation for collaborative knowledge and innovation activities, (b) the recognition of epistemic objects as a knowledge elicitor provides a new insight into identification and coordination of knowledge heterogeneity within innovation networks, and (c) it highlights the independent role of epistemic objects that presents an alternative to human control with instrumental artifacts on collaborative knowledge and innovation work.
... ontology) as performative (Hacking, 2004). 30 Those working with realist assumptions tend to locate the product of knowledge outside of the settings where it was conceived (Law, 2000). They argue that through the use of scientific methods, phenomena can be explained and studied as they are/out there (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). ...
... Nonetheless, the social scientist is often cast into a role of either the expert, extremely well informed of problems and their solutions, or of the critic, evaluating the practices and people in a field (Callon, Methodology 1984;Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 60;Latour, 2000). However, as Law (2000, p. 5) argued, it is better to accept that the social scientist -like any other observer -has "a kind of fractured vision" so that knowledge fundamentally depends on our own construction as a knowing subject (Law, 2000). In other words, drawing on the ideas of situated knowledge and the optics metaphor coined by Donna Haraway (1988), researchers cannot claim the position of the disembodied observer, since "any reflective -or even pragmatic -optics that claims to stand back and see it all from a distance is a form of mythology" (Law, 2000, p. 4). ...
In ‘The politics and performances of European blood procurement’, Nathan Wittock argues that policymakers and sociologists working on and studying blood too often approach blood donation as a ‘gift’ from donors to recipients. This predominant focus on the gift relationship tends to stress the altruist motivations of blood donors, ignoring the high level of complexity on the institutional and the ontological level. In his attempt to re-emphasize the historical, institutional and societal context, Nathan points to the need to reorient this tradition of sociology of blood donation to a sociology of blood procurement. Following an ontological approach, he looks into alternative ways to capture what blood is through specific historic and contemporary networks, and in specific actions. The aim is to open up the debate and think about other-than-gift conceptualizations of blood: e.g. blood as a risk object, an object of citizenship (struggles), an economic object, an object of technocratic policymaking and a medical-therapeutic object. Asking what blood is and highlighting that it can be multiple things, the thesis probes to think about what version is stressed, why, by whom, according to what rules and procedures and using what assumptions. This ontological approach allows to acknowledge the entanglement of blood’s different enactments, and gives way to a more nuanced understanding of the politics and performances of European blood procurement.
English and Dutch summaries are included in the dissertation.
... Contrary to the view that entities have essential attributes and ontological integrity that precede their relations, it stands out that all entities emerge from these relations. As stated by Law (2004), 'realities … are produced, and have a life, in relations' (59). This relational ontology leads new materialist scholars to assert that matter is to be studied not in terms of what it is (i.e. ...
... Simply put, stories 'breathe'; they perform vital functions. Frank also quoted Law (2000) to expose his materialist approach to narrative: ...
Having recently emerged as an intellectual project, new materialism (NM) is extending to different fields, including sport, exercise and health studies. However, it is still unclear why and how NM is new, which can jeopardise its potential impact in academia and society. The aim of this paper is to discuss the newness of NM and to explore how it plays out in relation to different issues, such as knowledge translation and partisan positions. At the same time, NM is used as a way of understanding my own positionality as a newcomer who is becoming an academic within a field having manifold intellectual debates while being shaped by a neoliberal rationality. Reasons as to why NM has to be more concerned about accessibility are provided, and a case for a receptive yet suspicious attitude towards the label ‘new’ is made. Several key points that might help newcomers start thinking with the ‘new’ are also highlighted. Next, an example of NM in action is presented. This section illuminates what NM brings to my research practice and, more specifically, how I re-created a concept that worked and is still working for me in my research on exercise and disability. The article closes by offering strategies to resist the neoliberal academic assemblage and inviting sport and exercise researchers to partake in collective environments that support the developing of new ways of thinking and becoming.
... Through narrative, we tell both what we believe to be true and what we know to be false. Through narratives, we construct our understanding of ourselves and even create the physical world (Law, 2000). Narratives have shown themselves to be powerful social forces that formulate identities and constrain as well as guide actions. ...
... Cultural and familial stories affect how we make sense of the world and our role within it; they provide a moral framework that evaluates action. However, we think of our stories as our own, and rarely understand how inexorably bound they are to the social and political (Law, 2000). The stories we tell position ourselves relative to our social environment. ...
While stories have circulated for millennia, narrative as a way of understanding and engaging with conflict is relatively new. Only since the 1990s, has the field seen a vast proliferation of narrative as applied to conflict resolution. (Cobb, 2013; Lara, 2007; Nelson, 2001) These scholars and others recognize that communities function so long as they have a “capacity for resolving conflicts, for explicating differences, and renegotiating communal meanings.” (Bruner, 1990; 47) Narrative approaches provide a means of locating individual and communal meaning and renegotiating understandings of identity which allow for conflict transformation. Narrative analysis also helps explain how marginalized people remain marginalized. Narrative intervention helps people renegotiate their social positions and reclaim lost agency from these marginalized positions. Narrative evaluation can be used to measure discursive shifts over time. This article provides a theoretical overview of narrative approaches to conflict answering: (a) What is narrative and what is its potential as a tool for understanding and responding to conflict? (b) How might we conduct a narrative analysis of a conflict? (c) From this analysis, how might we then construct narrative interventions and program evaluations?
... Rennstam (2012) proposing the concept of objectcontrol, advocated a view of epistemic objects as active creators in the initiation and realization of a knowing process through which knowledge of what to do and how to do it is elicited. By provoking knowledge puzzles, objects of investigation serve as elicitors of knowledge and invite interested actors acting via the mechanism of interpellation so as to direct the innovation process (Law 2000). ...
... Building on the existing literature discussed above, though scholars have stressed the power that epistemic objects have to produce emotional attachment to fuel the innovation process (Rheinherger 1997;Knorr Cetina 1997;Nicolini et al. 2012), as well as to initiate a knowing process where knowledge of what to do and how to do it is elicited to direct the innovation process (Rennstam 2012;Law 2000), our insight into how epistemic objects affect KM so as to coordinate the heterogeneous and disconnected knowledge mobilized during an innovation is still very limited. There is thus a need for further understanding of the relationship between epistemic objects and knowledge acquisition, knowledge integration and knowledge sharing in IT innovation alliances to answer our research question. ...
As organizations are increasingly relying on inter-firm collaborative networks such as strategic alliances to pursue information technology (IT) innovation, a significant challenge is to coordinate the knowledge heterogeneity and discontinuity. Facing this problem, scholars suggest that epistemic objects- defined as objects of investigation that are under-defined, unfolding objects in collaboration- could provide a solution, but we have only limited insights into the relationship between epistemic objects and KM in IT innovation alliances. By using a mixed-methods research approach, we found that epistemic objects facilitate interfirm acquisition, integration and sharing of knowledge. We make three contributions: 1) our focus on both affective and cognitive trust triggered by epistemic objects, provides a novel source of motivation for collaborative KM activities. 2) Our recognition of epistemic objects as knowledge elicitors provides a new insight into identification and coordination of knowledge heterogeneity within innovation networks; 3) we stress the independent role of epistemic objects that present an alternative to human control with instrumental artifacts on collaborative KM.
... Finally, whilst we can say that segmentation "makes a difference" (Law, 2000) through the politics of profiling (Elmer, 2004;Rogers, 2009;Skeggs & Yuill, 2016), for now we cannot comment on the power of such segmentation nor gauge if those positioned within them are aware of their profiling and labelling and what it might mean to them. As Kennedy (2014) argues in her discussion of the everyday experiences of datafication, scholarship about data-in-society must address people's thoughts and feelings about data-producing processes. ...
... Stories serve a sense-making function in all cultures, they inform how we see each other and influence what we believe and choose to act on (Law, 2000;Polletta et al., 2011). Intractable conflict is increasingly defined by radical disagreement that involves competing truth claims and opposing views of history and politics (Ramsbotham, 2010). ...
In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), scholars and practitioners often cite the lack of shared narrative as a primary challenge to long-term peace. A study of the multi-ethnic, collaborative story-telling work of the Post Conflict Research Centre (PCRC), a Bosnian peacebuilding organization, however, tells a different story. Instead of aiming to forge a singular narrative, PCRC weaves together multiple stories that express complex positions while driving narrative frames that show peace is possible. In a context where actors might not be ready for a joint narrative, the organization demonstrates how plural stories can co-exist, and be strategically mobilized and disseminated through diverse formats to actively engage others in peace-building processes. Identifying key narrative principles, tactics and frames employed by PCRC, this article proposes more attention is paid to how narrative can be strategically harnessed to de-stabilize the stories that drive entrenched division and to foster and cultivate a culture of peace.
... As our research shows, this process of appropriation is in a way even stimulated by the presence of wearable/digital technologies, in that their practical use interpellates (Law, 2000) workers, while offering occasions to shift from the designers' script (Suchman et al., 1999). This consideration allows us to further reflect on how technology continues to often be framed and implemented in organizations as a "remedy", a solution, assuming that it will be "naturally" absorbed by its users and the broader organizational context, without enacting any side effects. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this contribution is twofold: at the empirical level, it is shown how in the relationship that subjects are encouraged to construct with their bodies major implications for workers' well-being can be found; at a theoretical level, attention is drawn to the importance of framing the different practices workers may display towards digital wellness programmes not just in terms of acceptance or resistance, but also in terms of appropriation.
Design/methodology/approach
Empirically, this study concentrates on the pilot study conducted by a large manufacturing firm that decided to implement a digitally assisted corporate wellness programme. The experimentation involves a sample of the company's workers. The 24 participants were interviewed at the beginning, during the programme and at its end, for a total of 69 interviews. Interviews were transcribed and analysed through a template analysis.
Findings
This research emphasizes how workers' well-being manifests in the relationship subjects are fostered to construct with their body and, in parallel, how workers may play an active and unpredictable role in corporate wellness programmes.
Originality/value
Differently from the current literature that frames workers' reactions towards digital corporate well-being initiatives in mainly polarized ways, this contribution leads to a less dichotomic and more nuanced interpretation of the “impacts” wellness programmes may have, showing how workers may display practices not just of acceptance or resistance, but also of appropriation.
... Foi precisamente no contexto em que a ciência passou a ser o lugar por excelência de entendimento do mundo -em que os cientistas das áreas exatas e da natureza desvelavam a constituição ontológica do mundo e os cientistas sociais examinavam o suporte epistemológico que permitiria às ciências naturais se desenvolverem como tal -que o laboratório se consolidou como um local de transformação ontológica (Jensen, 2010;Woolgar, 1997;Law, 1994Law, , 2000. É nesse local que certas entidades sofrem uma mutação em sua natureza, mas é também no laboratório que a maneira em que essas entidades são descritas e analisadas se transforma. ...
Em 2014 a Organização das Nações Unidas para Alimentação e Agricultura (FAO) noticiou com grande destaque a saída do Brasil do Mapa da Fome. Esse feito foi celebrado no país como resultado de um conjunto de iniciativas e programas sociais implementados desde 2003 sob égide do Programa Fome Zero. Mais de quinze anos após sua criação, o programa ainda é tema de discussão, apesar de ter sido diluído em diversas políticas de segurança alimentar, e até mesmo políticas de distribuição e geração de renda, recentemente encerradas. A saída do Brasil do Mapa da Fome é aqui entendida como um "evento paradigmático" a partir do qual busquei desvelar as práticas de produção da fome como principal objeto de atenção e gestão na trajetória das políticas sociais no âmbito do Programa Fome Zero. Ao recuperar os discursos mobilizados na construção do "Paradigma de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional" para a produção da fome enquanto um problema social e sociológico, busco questionar as maneiras em que a fome é enquadrada na construção prática de uma política pública que precisa definir, medir e avaliar. Também é central o questionamento dos usos e efeitos dos discursos e saberes que produziram determinado enquadramento deste fenômeno. Por entender que é analiticamente produtivo não definir a fome a priori, esta tese lança luz aos processos tecnopolíticos de sua transformação na categoria de "Insegurança Alimentar". Através de uma etnografia da prática de "dar forma à fome", que tem como lócus principal a produção de um Arquivo Fome Zero, busco explorar os diferentes dispositivos políticos que conformaram categorias centrais na instituição de uma nova forma de governamentalidade no país. Noções como as de direitos, assistência e necessidade são trazidas à baila buscando tensionar a relação entre um "governo da fome" e um "governo pela fome" e a "cidadanização" de certos sujeitos. É através da atenção a esses movimentos de mutação e estabilização que consigo evidenciar a maneira em que a fome se tornou conhecida, definida e se consolidou como um problema de ordem pública, do Estado, criando sujeitos e populações. Mostro também como ela foi sendo informada por dispositivos, aparatos e disputas epistemológicas, ao mesmo tempo em que era alijada das experiências concretas de uma população. Levando a sério a premissa metodológica de olhar para os processos de (con)formação da fome através da etnografia das principais políticas voltadas para seu combate, pude enxergar como se deu a transformação da fome em uma metáfora e os efeitos dessa estabilização.
Abstract: In 2014, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported with great prominence the removal of Brazil from the Hunger Map. This achievement was celebrated in the country as the result of a set of social initiatives and programs implemented since 2003 under the aegis of the Zero Hunger Program. More than fifteen years after its creation, the program is still subject of discussion, despite having been diluted in several food security policies, and also distribution and income generation policies - those which were recently terminated. Understanding Brazil's removal from the Hunger Map as a "paradigmatic event", I sought in this dissertation to unveil the practices of hunger production as the main object of attention and government in the trajectory of Zero Hunger social policies. By recovering the discourses mobilized in the construction of the "Paradigm of Food and Nutritional Security" in direct relation to the production of hunger as a social and sociological problem, I seek to question the ways in which hunger is framed in the practical construction of a public policy that needs to define, measure, and assess in order to exist. It is also central the questioning of the uses and effects of discourses and knowledge that produced a certain framework for this phenomenon. Precisely by understanding the productivity of the non-definition of hunger, this research sheds light on the technopolitical processes of its transformation into the category of "Food Insecurity". Through an ethnography of the practices of "framing hunger", which has as its main locus the production of the "Zero Hunger Archive", I seek to explore the different political mechanisms that conformed central categories in the institution of a new form of governmentality in the country. Notions such as rights, assistance, and needs are brought to the forefront in an attempt to tension the relationship between a "government of hunger" and a "government through hunger" and the " citizenization" of certain subjects. It is through the attention to such movements of transformation and stabilization that I am able to show the ways in which hunger has become known, defined and consolidated as a problem of the State. Creating, thus, subjects and populations and being enacted by mechanisms, apparatuses, and epistemological disputes, while it has been removed from the concrete experiences of a population. By seriously considering the methodological premise of looking at the processes of (con)formation of hunger through the ethnography of the Zero Hunger policies, I was able to show how hunger was transformed into a metaphor and the effects of this stabilization.
... This is the model built on the observation that there is a world outside of the narrative itself but the moment we try to describe it we are again telling stories (Foucault, 1972). The shock value of the second option has been much exploited in such areas as sociologicallyinspired accounts of science and technology, where scientists are analyzed as (mere) story-tellers (Traweek, 1992;Law, 2000). ...
Forums provide venues where different actors from the public administration sector, the interest group sector, or the research sector jointly discuss an issue of common interest. This article analyses which types of benefits are related to actors’ investing working time to forums. Actors’ dedication and work are basic predicates for forums to be able to produce outputs. The analysis of members of eight forums dealing with habitat and natural hazard governance in Switzerland suggests that actors participating in forums attribute more importance to exchange benefits, corresponding to opportunities of interaction with other actors – than to policy benefits – corresponding to opportunities for actors to influence policy or practice. However, more working time is invested by actors that lend importance to individual benefits – as opposed to collective benefits. These findings are important for understanding why actors provide work for forums in collaborative and polycentric governance systems.
... The result is that diverse interests and ideas, instead of being exalted by post-its and whiteboards (apparently designed for this purpose), appear unified and standardized, while other issues get lost in the process of translation through keywords on the post-its. The material characteristics of post-its (e.g., they are made to stick on the wall) discipline employees to stay permanently activated: a post-it may fall, thus "interpellating" (Law 2000) the participants to the session in order to be reattached to the whiteboard. Again, in a hidden manner, post-its and whiteboards manage workers to constantly stay committed to their daily work. ...
This contribution stems from the thematic track "Digital technologies and power relations in work and organizations. Theoretical and empirical perspectives", held during the VIII STS Italia conference. Referring to the contributions and the discussions we had during the track sessions, we present two main themes that emerged as crucial issues: 1) the hidden dynamics of digitalized interactions in workplaces and organizations; 2) the role of algorithms and digital platforms in organizational and work practices. Not with the aim of summarizing the variety and richness of the discussions we had, with this text we want to raise the curiosity and the attention of the readers toward some of the conversations emerging from the encounters between "the digital" and "the organizational".
... We follow this analytical path and target what objects or entities 'become' through practice, which makes redundant any separation of the entity 'itself' and its discursive representations (e.g. Dennis, 2017;Law, 2000). The article scrutinises the multiplicity in practice of an understudied intervention, RP, and challenges the assumptions about recovery and agency that it rests on. ...
This article explores how professionals within Swedish addiction treatment (n = 18) describe and make sense of relapse prevention (RP). RP is known as a self-control programme for maintaining behavioural change, helping people deal with high-risk situations. However, since self-control techniques have been incorporated widely in the addiction treatment field, the specificities of RP have become vague. To grasp what RP ‘is’, we draw on John Law’s and Annemarie Mol’s thoughts on how logics enact objects and realities. We thus follow critical scholarship in Science and Technology Studies and view treatment as a local knowledge-making practice that may depart from how it was originally designed. A key question is how RP is potentially transformed and made-to-matter when moved from the controlled settings of theorising and experimental studies to practice. The professionals used a logic of fixity to make RP stable, structured and evidence-based, easily distinguishable from other interventions. They also used a logic of fluidity to explain how and why they tinkered with it and adapted it to the preferences of both staff and attendees. The two logics enacted two different realities of addiction treatment: one in which RP is standardised, temporally demarcated and can solve most addiction problems, and another where interventions must be individualised, continuous and adapted to local settings and needs. It did not appear contradictory to ‘make up’ RP as both fixed and fluid; the two realities exist side by side, but with different material effects.
... It is not something one can have, but a relational outcome. It is enacted in relations among various heterogeneous actors -thus a reality effect of such enactments (Michael, 2016;Latour, 2014;Law, 2000). Limited, no or strong agency arises from the different ways in which actors relate to different sets of other actors in particular situations (Menzel, 2018;Ren, 2011). ...
... Ethnography is uniquely adequate to investigate situated and emergent constituents of cycling practices, and to identify and understand their fragile and contingent character. In this, we build on an ethnographic and STS tradition of studying practices and technologies on the ground (Latour, 2005), as the ways policies are materialised and practiced -the ways stories 'perform themselves onto the material world' (Law, 2000: 2) -can only be studied by inquiring into local specificities. While current regimes of innovation often include user-perspectives in the crafting of needs (Jensen, 2012) they often do so in superficial manners (Lassen et al., 2015) not accounting for their often contingent changes in direction (Akrich et al., 2002), and usually oversee the tinkering (Mol et al., 2010) and adjustments of technologies once they become practiced. ...
In the last 15 years, STS has established a research programme focused on the sociotechnical reconfiguration of later life, particularly as new political programmes aim to deploy ‘active ageing’ in contemporary societies. In Denmark, the bicycle is a key technology in this aim, because of how it articulates sustainable living, health and social participation. Thus, two new ‘inclusive cycling’ initiatives for older people have been developed. Drawing on ethnographic data, we explore the ways the bikes differ, and how they explicitly mobilise active ageing as a form of ‘good old age’ in different ways. We argue that whereas ‘Cycling without Age’ rickshaws attempt to assemble social participation for older people, ‘Duo-Bikes’ aim to enable capacities through physical activity in later life. We further explore what happens when these two schemes meet, and suggest how searching for a compromise will be necessary to enhance opportunities to cycle in later life.
... It is not something one can have, but a relational outcome. It is enacted in relations among various heterogeneous actorsthus a reality effect of such enactments (Latour, 2014;Law, 2000;Michael, 2016). Limited, no or strong agency arises from the different ways in which actors relate to different sets of other actors in particular situations (Menzel, 2018;Ren, 2011). ...
Indigenous peoples such as the Batwa in Uganda are predominantly seen as marginalised groups, leaving little room for foregrounding their power, influence and involvement in tourism and development. Inspired by Foucauldian discourse theory and Actor-Network Theory [ANT], we use the concept of relational agency to analyse how the Batwa contribute to conservation and tourism development, and deepen our understanding of agency in the context of the Batwa at the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (Uganda). Based on this conceptualisation we analysed the dominant (academic and non-academic) discourses on the Batwa in the light of in-depth ethnographic research to seek for alternative Batwa realities. Whereas scientific, NGO and governmental literature predominantly reduced the Batwa to marginalised, poor and oppressed victims of development, our ethnographic research observed the Batwa as a vibrant community that deploys expertise on forest ecology, tourism entrepreneurship, organisational capacity and political activism. With such insights we discuss the consequences of agency reduction and the ways to take the Batwa’s situational agency into account. Highlighting the multiple realities of Batwa-ness provide a starting point of relating with the Batwa in ways that acknowledge them as agential, rather than only marginalised.
... In this way, we identified empirical entry points. -We then wanted to learn how the platform enrolls novel users, so we performed a sequence analysis (Behrend, Ludwig-Mayrhofer, and Sondermann 2016; Wenninger 2015) on two major "points of first contact" discourses (website; app store) to identify the platform's subject interpellations (Law 2000) and self-characterizations. -Having done so, we conducted an autoethnography (Hine 2015, 81-85), that is, conducted participant observation while using the app and interacting with the infrastructure and other users. -We included a security and privacy analysis of the app that was performed by project partners (Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, Darmstadt). ...
Research on privacy practices in digital environments has oftentimes discovered a paradoxical relationship between users’ discursive appraisal of privacy and their actual practices: the “privacy paradox.” The emergence of this paradox prompts us to conduct ethnography of a health and fitness platform in order to flesh out the structural mechanisms generating this paradox. We provide an ethnographic analysis of surveillance capitalism in action that relates front-end practices empirically to the data economy’s back-end operations to show how this material-semiotic setup elicits users’ desire to become self-determined subjects in a way that makes them amenable as objects of behavioral engineering. We combine different ethnographic methods and materials (situational mapping: network overview; discourse analysis: interpellations; autoethnography: practices; technical app analysis: data flow; business model canvas: revenue information) to specify how different types of values are produced and translated on the investigated platform. The latter offers users the values of self-mastery and social visibility. However, the data generated in this process serve to translate these values into the value of economic amenability and thereupon ultimately into economic profit. What gets lost in translation, though, is the front-end promise of self-mastery. It is these structural mechanisms that generate the privacy paradox in the first place.
... HIV and AIDS are the subjects to whom it is addressed. I instead am interpellated (Law 2000) as the supposed author of the text. Although as a person living with HIV, I do locate 'it' within me as well, here it is positioned fiercely in opposition to 'me'. ...
... Finally, whilst we can say that segmentation "makes a difference" (Law, 2000) through the politics of profiling (Elmer, 2004;Rogers, 2009;Skeggs & Yuill, 2016), for now we cannot comment on the power of such segmentation nor gauge if those positioned within them are aware of their profiling and labelling and what it might mean to them. As Kennedy (2014) argues in her discussion of the everyday experiences of datafication, scholarship about data-in-society must address people's thoughts and feelings about data-producing processes. ...
This article critically examines how segmentation is used to identify, understand and engage arts audiences. Policy reports and academic publications are reviewed to establish the priorities of arts policymakers and practitioners for understanding arts audiences and their continued focus on audience data and segmentation. This article then makes two contributions. Firstly, critical perspectives on the use of data for audience profiling are applied to arts audience segmentation. Secondly, research using biographical methods is introduced as a new approach for critically evaluating arts audience segmentation. This research, employing biographical methods, shows the exploration and negotiation of audience identity positions. This article takes these insights to critically examine the implications of how profiles and segments are used to define and understand audiences for the arts. The conclusion addresses the implications of segmentation in terms of the design and communication of cultural experiences, the complexities of aligning audiences’ identities with segments, and the seemingly inevitability of exclusion. This article will be of relevance in the scholarly study of arts audiences and for arts and cultural organisations and policymakers in reflecting on the implications of quantitative and qualitative approaches in designing and undertaking audience research.
... Some theorists claim that texts are among the major products, if not the major product, of scientific work (see Callon et al., 1986;Law, 2000;Law, 2009;Smith, 2001). Texts are pivotal in disseminating research results to other people and institutions; and, thereby, paramount to the process of gaining credibility. ...
This article addresses how a researcher-initiated autobiography’s work as an actant may offer illuminating insights into how we as humans and nonhumans are associated in networks. The aim is to discuss how the effects of these associations produce knowledge about the social. With inspiration from actor-network theory and by using an example of a researcher-initiated autobiography from the study ‘The Daughters and Sons of Rainbow Families’, the discussion firstly concentrates on how associations between the autobiography and the researcher may produce emotional effects. Secondly, the discussion focuses on how a researcher-initiated autobiography works as an actant ‘in itself’. This indicates the necessity to trace associations between the written events (actants) in the text, and discuss their effects. As an example, the article addresses how associations between written events concerning family members, produce knowledge about the relations between the members.
... 18 ''Interpellation'' is a notion originally offered by Althusser (1973). Recently it has been taken up by Law (2000Law ( , 2002. In his discussion on the role of the personal in social science he argues that in order to avoid a mind/body spilt the personal or emotions should be described in material form. ...
This paper seeks a vocabulary to study designers at work. The paper draws on STS studies of scientists and laboratories. A number of studies are explored in order to identify different points of attention in studies of science and in studies of design. It is argued that the notions in actor network theory of “following traces”, “heterogeneous engineering” and “programs and anti-programs” will be useful for the study of designers, but their potential has not been fully explored. Thorough investigation of texts of design work as well as an empirical case from a rubber valve plant in Denmark leads us to the notions of “mind”. Designing is argued to be successful when it takes place as mindful interrelating between numbers of entities of different kinds. The subjectivity and “biographical trajectory” of the designer are argued to be of particular interest in order to understand design work. The notion of mind is defined as being heedful to a number of entities. These points stand in opposition to the ideal type in science of constructing objectified inscriptions. Opposing those focuses leads to a discussion of the distribution of “regimes” in constructive everyday practice. Inspired by Latour (1998) the authors argue for a messy middle ground between a regime of science with the purpose of information transfer and a regime of design that produces a master narrative of the designer. Being mindful of identities, materials, machines, plans, customers and ideas is held to be the way designers stabilize networks and become successful.
... Entendemos que o ato de narrar faz parte da dança-pesquisa psicossocial e requer uma modalidade de escrita estética que, como nos ensina Law (2000), colabora para redistribuir e performar prazer, beleza, horrorou seja, faz presente explicitamente a dimensão da aesthesis nas narrativas mínimas que emergem como produção de testemunho, no contemporâneo. ...
This paper discusses the process of Móvel creation (2011), a dance-research in social psychology that articulates Actor-Network Theory (ART) and the production of physical evidence. In Móvel, we deal with artistic experiments in order to understand the ontological coexistence of technological devices and body, especially the latter. We study bodies in connection with multiple devices whose anthologies are not stable, being entirely dependent to relationships. From a body in movement, employed as psychosocial research method, we have testimony of production which is beyond survival through pairing elements and paired opposites that lead the body to resistance limits, the limits of the human borders.
The book charts the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact that it has had on the lives of young people and their communities, education systems, the teaching profession, and the responses by governments, NGOs, and donor organisations in Pakistan. Drawing on theories of postcolonialism, feminism, and neoliberal globalisation, the authors explore the development of Pakistan as a postcolonial nation-state, and examine the legacies of colonialism in education systems and policies, teacher education and development. The Pakistani authors bring extensive knowledge and experience to this case study of the ‘broken promise’ of education for sustainable development. This mix of theoretical insight and practical experience promises to produce significant policy and development impact in post-COVID-19 Pakistan, South Asia more broadly, and in other postcolonial development contexts around the world as it develops a critique of the UN SDGs as a global and more local framework for development.
The increasing complexity of networked systems casts doubt on the self-determination in the digital sphere. Externally predetermined algorithms and practices of third-party data processing raise questions as to the protection of and the danger to autonomy and the freedom of expression. At the same time, the legal, political, ethical, social, and economic responsibility for the consequences of digital transformation processes for societies, collectives, and individuals remains undetermined. Precisely in this field, the present interdisciplinary volume would like to stimulate a discussion on responsibilities and impact assessments; in which regard, it researches problems in digital cultures, tackles possible solutions, and discusses conflicts of economic, political, and social systems. With contributions by Anna K. Bernzen, Barbara Büttner & Carsten Ochs, Stephan Dreyer, Hans-Christian Gräfe & Andrea Hamm, Hermann Jakobi & Elizaveta Saponchik, Thomas Krämer-Badoni & Jens Crueger, Wulf Loh, Tim Raupach & Phillip Siedenburg, Caroline Richter & Christian Lenk, Alexander Schiff, Julia Schröder, Lea Watzinger and Florian Wittner
This paper unpacks what happened when members of the local community were invited to design and test a valuation tool – specifically a discrete choice experiment – to find a valuation for New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula. We argue that the assumptions that lie within a discrete choice experiment are revealed when we look closely at how community participants react to the discrete choice experiment survey they have helped design. These assumptions, usually unnoticed, include the necessity of making trade-offs; what actions are possible; the ‘reality’ of one’s preference structures; the need for abstraction; and the importance of big picture patterns. We also argue that how these assumptions are negotiated in practice depends on complex power relationships between researchers, participants, and the technology itself. While we might seek to ‘empower’ the community with knowledge of economic processes and valuation practices, this might not be the empowerment they seek. Participants find ways to be active negotiators in the face of valuation technologies.
The recent surfacing of actor-network theory (ANT) in tourism studies correlates to a rising interest in understanding tourism as emergent through relational practices connecting cultures, natures and technologies in multifarious ways. Despite the widespread application of ANT across the social sciences no book has dealt with the practical and theoretical implications of using ANT in tourism research. This is the first book to critically engage with the use of ANT in tourism studies. By doing so it challenges approaches that have dominated the literature for the last 20 years and casts new light on issues of materiality, ordering and networks in tourism. The book describes the approach, its possibilities and limitations as an ontology and research methodology and advances its use and research in the field of tourism. The first three chapters of the book introduce ANT and its key conceptual premises, the book itself and the relations between ANT and tourism studies. Using illustrative cases and examples, the subsequent chapters deal with specific subject areas like materiality, risk, mobilities and ordering and show how ANT contributes to tourism studies. This part presents examples and cases which illustrate the use of the approach in a critical way. Inherently the study of tourism is a multidisciplinary field of research and that is reflected in the diverse academic backgrounds of the contributing authors to provide a broad post-disciplinary context of ANT in tourism studies. This unique book focusing on emerging approaches in tourism research will be of value to students, researchers and academics in Tourism as well as the wider Social Sciences.
This article introduces narrative analysis as a way of engaging with storied data. Some key assumptions are first unpacked, highlighting the philosophical underpinnings of narrative research. The approach to narrative described in this article derives from narrative constructionism. This assumes that stories do more than simply reflect or recount experience: they act in people’s lives in ways that matter deeply. The paper then distinguishes between two broad standpoints for approaching analysis, those of ‘story analyst’ and ‘storyteller’, before going on to describe how to conduct a particular form of constructionist narrative analysis –dialogical narrative analysis. The paper goes on by introducing an emerging trend of thought that attempts to reach beyond the shortcomings of narrative constructionism. That is new materialism. Shifting the analytical focus from stories and narratives to assemblages, new materialism is interested in how narrative and materiality affect each other within networks of human and non-human actors. After discussing what this might mean for researchers, pluralism is presented as an opportunity to combine different analytical worlds in a single study. Finally, an uncommon articulation of pluralism termed diffractive reading is highlighted and exemplified though a study combining narrative dialogism and new materialism. The paper closes with thoughts on the future of narrative in companionship with alternative approaches.
As I/we described in Chapter 2 there are many problems with the modern university. For example the proliferation of standardizations, an overbearing and extensive audit and accountability culture, and top down command and controlled decision-making. These conditions sit beside the requirement that academics be creative, innovative and free thinking. Frustrating and stressful contradictions are present at every turn. I/we have been a member of various committees and participation on these has been distressing and troubling and has generated significant negative and detrimental emotional effects. Difficult and taxing critical incidents frequently occur. The temptation in such circumstances and environments is to leave committee work and to carve out a safer space and retreat to this safe place and protect oneself. In this paper I/we argue, drawing on Nancy Fraser (1997), that while strategic retreat is a choice that is justifiable and understandable that this is not always possible, desirable or what people are able or want to do. There are occasions when people either have no choice but to stay and try to persist in problematic situations in the neoliberal university. In this paper we focus on a composite partially fictionalized triggering incident that I/we worked through where I/we felt that I/we had to engage. I/we outline the critical collective/auto/ethnographic and arts based techniques that assisted I/we to persist in this tense place. I/we also briefly consider why I/we think this approach was helpful.
This article proposes a new framework for policy success that potentially facilitates planning, tracking, evaluating and communicating the trajectory of successes in a policy initiative. In this reframing of success, rather than being singular, successes are multiple and relational. Playing out in a shifting story-scape that progresses throughout the life of a policy, this approach addresses many of the challenges for public administrators trying to establish policy success in a demanding and complex policy environment. Re-purposing data from research on a trans-national border policy development over 2009 to 2012, this article applies the new framework to illustrate the power of the new approach. Using concepts of relationality, multiplicity, translation and stabilization, it builds on and acknowledges the value of Marsh and McConnell’s framework for policy success. This dynamic narrative approach blends the narrative contributions of Hannah Arendt and Bruno Latour with Marsh and McConnell’s three dimensions of success. In so doing, it reveals the effects of shifting narratives across the three dimensions, and demonstrates how it addresses problems with Marsh and McConnell’s framework. Its ability to be forward-looking, and therefore valuable for planning, differentiates the approach from criticisms of the retroactive, and therefore limited use, of other policy narrative approaches.
Biological sex has long been considered a stable, universal factor, the biological counterpart of gender. While this distinction is easily taken for granted, I learned otherwise when I entered the laboratories of the Human Genome Diversity Project. By way of introduction, let me first say something general about this project. During my study of the Human Genome Diversity Project (Diversity Project), I was struck by its mutual absence and presence (M'charek 2000). The Diversity Project was initiated in 1991 by population geneticists who aimed to map human genetic variation on a global level. Their aim was an internationally coordinated scientific endeavor to sample and map genetic variation between populations all over the world, and to reconstruct the migration history of humans. The Project soon became controversial because of an emphasis placed on “isolated populations” and “indigenous people.” It was associated with bad science and scientific racism. In debates about the Diversity Project, it seemed to me that the Project contributed to organized criticism not only of this particular initiative, but also of other practices such as the patenting of genes derived from the cell material of indigenous people (see Lock 2001; Haraway 1997; Hayden 1998). Thus not only was the aim of the Project a globalized approach to genetic diversity; its effect was also a globally organized criticism.
Scientific and scholarly research is heterogeneous in that divergent viewpoints, and different interests must be brought together to achieve coherent accounts of research. The tensions caused by this multiplicity of interests and singularity of output frame most collaborative research practice. The goal of present study is to identify areas of tension in such collaborative and heterogeneous efforts. To this end, the present study investigates the co‐construction of archeological narrative at one of the largest multinational archeological campaigns in the world, the Çatalhöyük project in Turkey. This study conceptualizes archeological narratives as epistemic assemblages. Following Actor Network theorists, the archeological process is conceptualized as a series of translation processes (of heterogeneous engineering) that inscribe the found material remains of archeological investigation into a narrative. This complex process takes place within a heterogeneous sociotechnical network. This study decomposes this heterogeneous network to identify the areas of tension and struggle. Two sources of such tensions are identified as fragmentation and fault lines. Overcoming fragmentation and fault lines is key for the success of heterogeneous scientific work and maintaining productive scientific collaboration. The findings of this study have applications beyond archeology and can inform the design of cyberinfrastructure for heterogeneous collaborations.
The paper seeks to makes a contribution to a recent debate in the Journal about what a political economy of youth might look like. The paper will take up aspects of Sukarieh and Tannock’s [2016. ‘On the political economy of youth: a comment.’ Journal of Youth Studies 19 (9): 1281–1289] response to the initial contributions by Côté [2014. ‘Towards a New Political Economy of Youth.’ Journal of Youth Studies 17 (4): 527–543, 2016. ‘A New Political Economy of Youth Reprised: Rejoinder to France and Threadgold.’ Journal of Youth Studies.] And France and Threadgold [2015. ‘Youth and Political Economy: Towards a Bourdieusian Approach.’ Journal of Youth Studies], and will take the form of three ‘notes’: Capitalism: From the first industrial revolution to the third industrial revolution; Youth as an artefact of governmentalised expertise; The agency/structure problem in youth studies: Foucault’s dispositif and post-human exceptionalism.
These notes will suggest that twenty-first century capitalism is globalising, is largely neo-Liberal, and is being reconfigured in profound ways by the Anthropocene, bio-genetics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT). A political economy of twenty-first century capitalism, let alone a political economy of young people, must be able to account for a capitalism that in many ways looks like the capitalism of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, but which is at the same time profoundly different as it enters what has often been described as the Third Industrial Revolution. It is these profound emergences that pose the greatest challenges for engaging with a political economy of youth.
This chapter explores the different ‘risk economies’ materializing in/through women’s birth narratives. Enactments of risk are shown to be entangled with socioeconomic positions. While risk politics operated via the normative construction of labor/birth as biomedically risky and necessitating biomedical interventions, surveillance and expertise in privileged birth assemblages, a different economy of risk emerged in the birth narratives of low-income women. These women were subject to biomedical invisibilization and ‘risks to self’ in the form of loss of dignity and care in under-resourced public health settings. The chapter also argues that risk in relation to birth is not only about biomedical risk but that women’s birth stories enact multiple forms of risk. For example, the fleshy corporeality of birth itself was associated with risks of loss of privacy, dignity and control. This chapter thus explores the multiple kinds of ‘risky bodies’ enacted in women’s birth narratives.
This chapter focuses on birth violations in the form of hidden, normalized and invisible forms of violence during labor/birth. It explores the violations produced and enacted in birth narratives and the ways in which ‘gentle’ relations of domination targeted, constrained and generated laboring/birthing bodies as passive, diminished or constricted. The chapter traces the multiple modalities of ‘embodied oppression’ that materialized in women’s birth stories and argues that heterogeneous forms of power (i.e. biomedical, racialized patriarchy, class inequality) intra-act to enact and normalize bodily violations during birth. 'Embodied oppression' was found to be enacted via multiple modes of violation, including: interpersonal and technological constraints on embodied agency, violations of dignity and privacy through exposures of self/body, shaming, structural disrespect and the denial of embodied personhood.
This chapter introduces the ‘ontological politics’ of birth, arguing that various framings of birthing bodies (i.e. biomedical, biological, racialized, political) are not just perspectives or representations of birth but are sociomaterial enactments that come to matter. These frames contribute to the materializations of worlds, bodies and realities. The chapter explores ontological framings of the body that births in biomedicine, psychology and global birth politics and activisms, arguing that dualist and racialized assumptions about birthing bodies continue to dominate understandings of birth. Working in and across North-South divides, the chapter explores the framings of birthing bodies in relation to a range of activisms and social movements around birth. The chapter ends by exploring the small body of studies that have begun to explore birthing bodies according to alternative conceptualizations of power and non-dualist approaches to fleshy embodiment.
This chapter explores the ways in which birth stories leak, counter, exceed and ‘speak back’ against normative relations of power. Adopting a creative analytic approach fusing dialogical modes of narrative analysis with poetic representational devices, the chapter shows how birth stories cannot be neatly fixed into categories or reduced to singular interpretations. Birth stories are multivocal and contain jostling voices, threads and storylines. This chapter focuses on the ways in which women’s stories resisted and subverted normative modes of framing birth (and birthing bodies), showing how comic-subversive stories and fleshy, excessive tellings enacted birthing bodies as pleasure-laden, sensuous, active, resistant and exuberant. Testimonial tellings emerged in the stories of low-income women as an alternative mode of narrative resistance. In these tellings, women took up reflexive and subversive positions, speaking against acts of wrongdoing or violation. The chapter ultimately argues that attention to ‘ways of telling’ is critical if we want to hear subversive story-lines and resistant voices.
Bodies that Birth puts birthing bodies at the centre of questions about contemporary birth politics, power, and agency. Arguing that the fleshy and embodied aspects of birth have been largely silenced in social science scholarship, Rachelle Chadwick uses an array of birth stories, from diverse race-class demographics, to explore the narrative entanglements between flesh, power, and sociomateriality in relation to birth.
Adopting a unique theoretical framework incorporating new materialism, feminist theory, and a Foucauldian ‘analytics of power’, the book aims to trace and trouble taken-for-granted assumptions about birthing bodies. Through a diffractive and dialogical approach, the analysis highlights the interplay between corporeality, power, and ideologies in the making of birth narratives across a range of intersectional differences. The book shows that there is no singular birthing body apart from sociomaterial relations of power. Instead, birthing bodies are uncertain zones or unpredictable assortments of physiology, flesh, sociomateriality, discourse, and affective flows. At the same time, birthing bodies are located within intra-acting fields of power relations, including biomedicine, racialized patriarchy, socioeconomics, and geopolitics.
Bodies that Birth brings the voices of women from different sociomaterial positions into conversation. Ultimately, the book explores how attending to birthing bodies can vitalize global birth politics by listening to what matters to women in relation to birth. This is fascinating reading for researchers, academics, and students from across the social sciences.
This article takes as its point of departure an action research project conducted in an upper secondary school in Sweden. The project had a practitioner research approach and was carried out with students in one class. In this article, I elaborate on the tensions that appeared during the project concerning collaboration and action. This is done by revisiting the project with a theoretical approach of sociomaterialism. Revisiting entails critically and creatively exploring how to comprehend collaboration and action differently. It raises question about who or what are involved in the collaborations and what are to be considered ‘good’ actions. Within the elaboration, collaboration and action become intertwined phenomena that are always working together. Furthermore, it proposes how the notion of intervention embraces the distributed and collective disposition of both collaboration and action. By addressing the notions of collaboration and action with a sociomaterial approach changing a teaching practice becomes a relational experiment without preset goals. The potential for change becomes within speculative interventions that affords various encounters and relations.
Dieser Beitrag setzt sich mit der Bedeutung von Anerkennung im Rahmen von Transitional Justice auseinander. Die Bedeutung dieses Begriffes erschließt sich beispielsweise im Kontext von Wahrheitskommissionen. Diese zielen einerseits darauf ab, die von den Opfern erlittenen Gewalterfahrungen öffentlich anzuerkennen und damit zur Überwindung von Traumata beizutragen. Andererseits erheben sie den Anspruch, durch die Anerkennung der „Wahrheit“ über ein vergangenes Unrecht den Übergang zu einer neuen, demokratischen und rechtsstaatlich verfassten Gesellschaft zu befördern. Auch in der Auseinandersetzung mit Reparationsprogrammen und Gerichtsverfahren taucht der Begriff der Anerkennung immer wieder auf. Im vorliegenden Kapitel wird ausgehend von der philosophischen Diskussion des Anerkennungsbegriffs nachgefragt, ob Anerkennung im Rahmen der Transitional Justice überhaupt möglich ist und inwiefern Anerkennung auch als Form der Herrschaftsausübung verstanden werden kann.
Hailed as the most important cultural event since the opening of the Sydney Opera House, the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Tasmania seemingly made very substantial changes to visitor experiences of an art gallery, catalysed a significant cultural florescence in Hobart and achieved tourism-led urban and regional regeneration on a par with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Drawing on a large survey of visitors this article illuminates the origins, social aims and impacts of successful attempts to push art museums beyond what Hanquinet and Savage call ‘educative leisure’. It contributes to our knowledge of the processes by which traditional forms of ‘highbrow’ cultural experience associated with the dominance of the classical and historical canon are being eclipsed by newer, performative, emotional and sensual forms of cultural taste.
Much research tends to treat alcohol and other drug ‘recovery’ as a process of positive identity change and development. In this article, we depart from this dominant approach by examining how the social and material practices of alcohol and other drug treatment are themselves active in the constitution of ‘recovery identity’. Using Judith Butler’s theorisation of interpellation, we examine the accounts of treatment experiences and practices provided in interviews with people who inject drugs. In contrast to the existing literature, we argue that the ‘recovering addict’ is a socially produced category rather than a coherent psychological identity. We consider the production of this category in relation to three dynamics identified in the data: (1) the tendency to materialise treatment subjects as both disordered and as ‘in control’ of these disorders; (2) the production of treatment subjects as enmeshed in suspect social relationships and therefore requiring surveillance as well as social support; and (3) treatment’s particular enactment of social context such that it erases stigmatisation and marginalisation and paradoxically performs subjects as entirely individually responsible for relinquishing drug use. These dynamics produce capacities and attributes often ascribed to identity but which are better understood as articulations of epistemological disorder in the state of knowledge about addiction, and its expression in treatment. By way of conclusion, we question the utility of ‘recovery identity’, conventionally defined, in providing a rationale for treatment.
Archiving digital objects consists of maintenance and conservation: the job of arresting a cultural object in time, maintaining it as closely as possible in the state in which it was created. Hardware and software provide the context in which digital objects are created, and other hardware and software provide the context in which they must be maintained, but practitioners of digital preservation are only now beginning to move seriously into the area of deciding how to perform digital objects for users. In this paper I discuss a personal effort at stopping time for hardware and what it has taught me about approaching construction of preservable platforms that can replicate the context of creation for digital objects. I will also discuss what we lose when we decide to discard environment in favor of some generalized idea of content.
Economics is a discipline remarkably distant from its publics. This is particularly striking when compared to science, which has been strenuously brought into public view for decades. The academic work done around science engagement provides a starting point for our questions here. Who is the imagined public for economics? How are they to know about economics? What is the economics that is made when it is made public? By looking at museums, books, newspapers, movies and documentaries, and through an in-depth look at blogs, we describe a public that is presumed ignorant but interested, a knowledge that is communicated from the top down, and an economics that is technical, secretive and macro-focused.
Tourists engage with narrative as they experience location, construct place, and act or perform within produced space. Northern and southern polar and subpolar regions offer multiple opportunities for narrative engagement. When conceptualizing tourists’ narrative engagement with location, place, and space in the sub-Antarctic and in Antarctica, it is interesting to consider tensions, consistencies and inconsistencies, and coherence and incoherence produced when activities and processes occurring on this part of the earth’s surface are grouped and analyzed either vertically or horizontally. Many engagements with the area are organized vertically, along two axes. One vertical axis is through Southern Australia, New Zealand, and various islands to the Ross Sea. Another vertical axis runs from the tip of South America, through various islands, to the Antarctic Peninsula. Alternatively, the sub-Antarctic may be conceived of horizontally as a distinct circumpolar domain lying between specified latitudes. Both of these analytic approaches, vertical and horizontal, involve the sub-Antarctic being described in ways which are themselves narratives of appropriation in that the descriptions are framed as persuasive communications intended to privilege one approach over the other.
Academic study of sub-Antarctic tourism traditionally has embraced a horizontal approach, while the industry is organized vertically. This chapter examines the implications of this divergence for tourists’ personal production of narrative, the provision of public and normative narratives, and the development of a compelling sub-Antarctic tourism research agenda.
Gothic cathedrals like Chartres were built in a discontinuous process by groups of masons using their own local knowledge, measures, and techniques. They had neither plans nor knowledge of structural mechanics. The success of the masons in building such large complex innovative structures lies in the use of templates, string, constructive geometry, and social organization to assemble a coherent whole from the messy heterogeneous practices of diverse groups of workers. Chartres resulted from the ad hoc accumulation of the work of many men.
In this paper, we analyze the TSR 2 British military aircraft project, beginnning with its conceptualization in the late 1950s and ending in 1965 with its cancellation. Using the notion of network we detail the fundamentally interconnected character of the social and the technical. We trace how the TSR 2 was conceived, designed, and developed, then consider difficulties encountered and the process that led to its cancellation. Our aim is to recommend and illustrate a method of social analysis that takes the technical aspects of the engineer's work to be profoundly social. By carefully following technologists, we see the kinds of social worlds, institutions, and roles contained in the machines they create. We also see the diverse objects mobilized to fit these conceptions. The technical thus is social.
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 hospital Z, a Dutch university hospital, a new protocol for the diagnosis of vascular patients has been introduced. It requires vascular surgeons to rely sometimes on a non-invasive diagnostic technique, called duplex, in place of a previously used invasive one, called angiography. This article is a multivocal account of the protocol's introduction. It focuses on the intricate ways in which two aspects of diagnosis, the detection of disease and the design of treatment, relate.
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.
This paper is concerned with the relationship between material culture and spatiality. Through the example of the ceramics collection in the City Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, England, an analysis is made of the topological character of space that is folded around certain objects on display. Ozzy the Owl, a 17th Century slipware owl jug, who was discovered on BBC TV's Antiques Roadshow in 1990 and subsequently bought by the museum, is seen as an agent that is constituted by the folding together of preface and afterword in the museum display, unsettling its (Euclidean) geometry, (Kantian) aesthetic and discourse of improvement (Organised around Wedgwood). Ozzy brings complexity and connection; his contingent location within the museum's heterogeneous material netwek reveals the functional blankness of objects and the effects that this can have in performing new topological arrangements in a space, revealing the friability and partial connectedness of its narrativity.
This is a paper about the topological presuppositions that frame the performance of social similarity and difference. It argues that 'the social' does not exist as a single spatial type, but rather performs itself in a recursive and topologically heterogeneous manner. Using material drawn from a study of the way in which tropical doctors handle anaemia, it explores three different social topologies. First, there are 'regions' in which objects are clustered together, and boundaries are drawn round each cluster. Second, there are 'networks' in which distance is a function of relations between elements, and difference a matter of relational variety. These two forms of spatiality are often mobilized in social theory. However, we argue that there are other kinds of social space, and here consider the possible character of a third, that of 'fluid spatiality'. In this, places are neither delineated by boundaries, nor linked through stable relations: instead, entities may be similar and dissimilar at different locations within fuid space. In addition, they may transform themselves without creating difference.