Search engines are important contemporary sources of information and contribute to shaping our beliefs about the world. Each time they are consulted, various algorithms filter and order content to show us relevant results for the inputted search query. Because these search engines are frequently and widely consulted, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the distinctively epistemic role that these algorithms play in the background of our online experiences. To aid in such understanding, this paper argues that search (...) engine algorithms are providers of “bent testimony”—that, within certain contexts of interactions, users act as if these algorithms provide us with testimony—and acquire or alter beliefs on that basis. Specifically, we treat search engine algorithms as if they were asserting as true the content ordered at the top of a search results page—which has interesting parallels with how we might treat an ordinary testifier. As such, existing discussions in the philosophy of testimony can help us better understand and, in turn, improve our interactions with search engines. By explicating the mechanisms by which we come to accept this “bent testimony,” our paper discusses methods to help us control our epistemic reliance on search engine algorithms and clarifies the normative expectations one ought to place on the search engines that deploy these algorithms. (shrink)

The always vexed relationships between philosophy, theory, methodology, empirical work and their representations and legitimations have been thrown into chaos with the belated acknowledgement of the Anthropocene. Unsurprisingly, traditional Western thought may have been complicit, given its underlying anthropocentric assumptions and humanist commitments in education philosophy, theory and practice. The postcritical knowledge ecology developed here is applied to both a modest and responsible form of methodological inquiry in an ethnographic study of nature experience. Our contextualised experiment adds to the nascent (...) literature of an environmentally oriented education now demanded in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This article examines the absence of biological relatedness in couples where the use of a third-party gamete donor casts doubt on the notion of conventional kinship. The authors observe that individuals who have used technology to create a family remediate relatedness through a dehistoricized idea of kinship in which the traditional concept is replaced with the concept of chance. The article also examines how inherited value is replaced by strategies that redefine the ways in which donor gamete parents can pass (...) their values on to their children. This examination is accomplished by looking at how couples who used donated gametes articulate the ways in which familial relatedness is left open to chance. (shrink)

The hierarchical human-centric paradigm has been criticized by various movements of posthuman philosophy because this paradigm forgets and dismisses nonhuman beings and entities: animals, n...

In this article, we argue that the interest being taken by governments in establishing innovative learning environments in schools relies on a conception of space as a largely neutral arena. In consequence, relations of space and power inherent in the infrastructural shift to ILEs tend to drop from view. Adopting an assemblage approach to investigating learning environments, and exploring ILEs as they are playing out in Australian schools, we strive to surface what drops from view. Taking ILEs to be sociomaterial (...) assemblages, we work with empirical material and trace how they assemble and reassemble. The account is less concerned with what works in ILEs; rather, its focus is on their ‘workings’ as assemblages of relations and most particularly, affective relations. Thus, we explore two affective encounters involving school leaders, teachers and students showing the ways in which they position and are positioned within ILEs. The argument is made that the assemblage approach which is non-deterministic and relational affords new ways of understanding what ILEs are and how they work and who they work for. And, that attending to affective practice brings into view the micropolitics through which infrastructural shifts and infrastructural policy-making are made. (shrink)

Set within the socio-political context of standards-based education reform, this article explores the constitutive role of teaching standards in the production of the practice and identity of the ‘accomplished’ teacher. It contrasts two idioms for thinking about and studying these standards, the representational and the performative. Utilising the material-semiotic approach of actor-network theory, it addresses the issue of how the representational idiom of teaching standards has become so authoritative that it readily eclipses other ways to think and ‘do’ them. In (...) tracing the development of a specific set of teaching standards as part of a national research project, the argument is made that standards should be understood as performative knowledge and identity practices. And, accounting them should also be performative. Accordingly, attention is given to key locales in which this development is taking place. Teaching standards emerge as ontologically variable and it is struggles around this variability that can create conditions for a renewed practice and politics of education reform. (shrink)

This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse problems by different means in multiple locations. So, educating children is not continuous with governing colonies (...) even though both are necessary to nineteenth-century states. For this reason, states use logistical means of coordination to link sites, and they make the power of the state seem unitary even though the exercise of state power is not. (shrink)

Script analysis is often used in research that focuses on gender and technology design. It is applied as a method to describe problematic inscriptions of gender in technology and as a tool for advancing more acceptable inscriptions of gender in technology. These analyses are based on the assumption that we can design technologies that do justice to gender. One critique on script analysis is that it does not engage with the emergent effects of design. The authors explore this critique with (...) the help of two vignettes taken from their design research. In this article they ask: How to design for gender if gender and design are emergent? The authors present two design strategies, degendering design and undesigning design and propose a new approach to doing justice to gender in design. This perspective foregrounds ethics in the design process, in particular the accountability of technology designers. (shrink)

There are many in the social sciences and social philosophy who would aspire to overcome the ‘nature/culture binary’, including some who, with at least an implicit nod toward a putatively ‘anti-essentialist’ process ontology, have set out with an orientation toward a paradigm of ‘biosocial becoming’ (Ingold and Palsson, 2013). Such contemporary work, however, in areas such as social and cultural anthropology and sciences studies has often failed to clarify, let alone justify, the warrants of their most basic assumptions and assertions. (...) In what follows, adumbrations will be offered for a comprehensive metaphysics of ‘biosocial becoming’ that can stand accountable both to empirical/descriptive and to normative claims. (shrink)

Starting from the concept of Digital Earth, the article questions the effects that Google’s geo-spatial applications have produced on our daily relationship with information, and the way we experience the spaces around us. Its aim is twofold: on the one hand, I intend to examine the implications that bring Google’s digital maps closer to the invention of the print or telescope; on the other hand, I intend to explain, through a medio-anthropological investigation, how the map, as a medium of perception, (...) falls not only de facto, but also de jure, into the field of aesthetics. (shrink)

Context holds a significant place mediating the conceptual and the empirical in ethnography. This modality of knowledge has also become a significant part of science and technology studies since the rise of laboratory studies. However, conventional modes of contextualization that locate the object of study within a whole—such as within a society or culture—have become a target of suspicion and criticism since the 1980s. This led to the radical alteration of the contextualizing strategies of actor–network theory and multisited ethnography. Anthropologist (...) Marilyn Strathern is also responding to this crisis by renovating the practice of ethnography in a way significantly different from both strategies. Since contextualization occupies a significant place in the formation of ethnography as a representation of a larger “out there” reality, her alternative contextualization requires a new characterization of ethnography other than representation. This article tries to expound the complicated, and often perplexing, ethnography of Strathern by making an analogy with objects familiar to most science, technology, and society scholars, namely, machines. By doing so, this article argues that Strathern is opening up a new way of dealing with context that is radically different both from ANT and from multisited ethnography. (shrink)

This article identifies limitations in traditional approaches to engineering ethics pedagogy, reflected in an overreliance on disaster case studies. Researchers in the field have pointed out that these approaches tend to occlude ethically significant aspects of day-to-day engineering practice and thus reductively individualize and decontextualize ethical decision-making. Some have proposed, as a remedy for these defects, the use of research and theory from Science and Technology Studies to enrich our understanding of the ways in which technology and engineering practice are (...) intricated in social and institutional contexts. While endorsing this approach, this article also argues that STS scholarship may not sufficiently address the kinds of questions about normativity and agency that are essential to engineering ethics. It proposes making use of the growing body of research in a field called “postphenomenology,” an approach that combines STS research with the traditional phenomenological concern with the standpoint of lived-experience. Postphenomenology offers a method of inquiry that combines STS’s investigation into social and institutional dimensions of technology with phenomenological reflection on our lived experience of embodied engagement with technical objects and sociotechnical systems, particularly the ways in which these involvements affect our moral perception and agency. The aim in using this approach in engineering ethics is thus to illuminate moral dimensions of everyday professional life of which practitioners may not typically be aware. The article concludes with some concrete curricular interventions for engineering ethics classrooms. (shrink)

Automated technologies populating today’s online world rely on social expectations about how “smart” they appear to be. Algorithmic processing, as well as bias and missteps in the course of their development, all come to shape a cultural realm that in turn determines what they come to be about. It is our contention that a robust analytical frame could be derived from culturally driven Science and Technology Studies while focusing on Callon’s concept of translation. Excitement and apprehensions must find a specific (...) language to move past a state of latency. Translations are thus contextual and highly performative, transforming justifications into legitimate claims, translators into discursive entrepreneurs, and power relations into new forms of governance and governmentality. In this piece, we discuss three cases in which artificial intelligence was deciphered to the public: the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, held as a prime example of how stakeholders manage to establish the terms of the debate on ethical artificial intelligence while avoiding substantive commitment; Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 congressional hearing, where he construed machine learning as the solution to the many problems the platform might encounter; and the normative renegotiations surrounding the gradual introduction of “killer robots” in military engagements. Of interest are not only the rational arguments put forward, but also the rhetorical maneuvers deployed. Through the examination of the ramifications of these translations, we intend to show how they are constructed in face of and in relation to forms of criticisms, thus revealing the highly cybernetic deployment of artificial intelligence technologies. (shrink)

Culture has traditionally been considered as a set of knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, norms, and morals, acquired by a human being as a member of a group. Some anthropologists interpret this as a set of abstract representations, such as information or knowledge, while others interpret it as behavioral control mechanisms. These views assume that the contents of a particular culture must be processed by the minds of individuals, either in a direct way or by resorting to learned mental structures in (...) processes of symbolic socialization. Some critics suggest a problem with these perspectives since they do not provide a convincing explanation of the enculturation process beyond metaphorical images of transfer or internalization of symbolic cultural contents through linguistic transmission. The new embodied theories of cognition, especially enactivism, could give new ideas about what enculturation processes are like, through the concept of participatory sense-making in material culture environments. In this essay, we discuss how an enactive vision of culture could be, and what advantages it would have, as well as the challenges and weaknesses in explaining the culture and its learning processes. (shrink)

Scholars believe that cosmopolitans—individuals who are open to foreign cultures—contribute to the adoption of Euro-American conceptions of food in the Global South. However, there remains a dearth in our understanding of the links between globalization, cosmopolitanism, and the reproduction of food and food cultures more broadly. In this paper, I draw from the sociology of translation to examine the mechanisms by which cosmopolitans reproduce food across space and time, a conceptual approach I refer to as ‘cosmopolitan translations of food.’ This (...) approach focuses on how human and non-human actants mediate and translate the discursive and material elements of food as they travel from one geographic context to another. The broader history, socio-culture, and political economy where cosmopolitan actants are situated further influence these translations, resulting in diverse expressions of food globalization. I illustrate the merits of this approach by examining the emergence of alternative food in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. Based on qualitative research, I find that alternative food in Manila has striking similarities to and notable differences from its counterparts in the United States. I purport that these similarities and differences can be attributed to Filipino cosmopolitans’ unconscious and intentional translations of what they understand as alternative food. Mediating these layers of translations are Filipino cosmopolitans’ mobilities and access to new media, as well as the colonial histories and postcolonial encounters that define their consumption tastes. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page W1-W3.

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points (...) that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms. (shrink)

In this paper I make the argument that being phenomenologically faithful to human experience means broadening the scope of the phenomenological method to not only include subjective experiences. Instead of reducing the psychological study of phenomena to the subject who ‘has’ an experience and who makes sense of this experience according to his or her own goal-directed plans, I will introduce the idea of starting our research from an understanding of an experience that is more original than the subject who (...) ‘has’ it, since it both happens to this subject and transforms this subject in the process of happening to it. This understanding of experience, which is based in part on insights from the later Heidegger and the work of Jean-Luc Marion, takes the phenomenological reduction beyond what this or that experience meant to a particular subject and looks instead at how this particular subject came into being as part of an experiential event that allowed it to become the subject that it is. I will call this new phenomenology a ‘phenomenology of the event’ and will seek to develop the implications of situating the study of psychological phenomena within such a paradigm. (shrink)

While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources, content, and consequences of collective memory, the study of future projections has been much more fragmentary. In part, this has to do with the challenge of measurement; how do you measure something that has not happened yet? In this article, I argue that future projections can be studied via their externalizations in attitudes, narratives, performance, and material forms. They are particularly evident in what I call “sites of hyperprojectivity,” that (...) is, sites of heightened, future-oriented public debate about possible futures. As a pilot project, I examine contending narratives about possible futures in the online documents of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and the accompanying “People’s Summit,” held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. I propose a framework for studying how public interventions into debates about “sustainable futures” and the “green economy” differ on various dimensions of projectivity, including their temporal reach, attention to contingency and causality, and network mapping of future actors. I present a preliminary analysis at the level of narrative and grammar, by analyzing the use of predictive, imperative, and subjunctive verb forms in both programmatic and oppositional texts. I close with a discussion of how different genres of future projection might be put to analytical use in studying processes of interest to social scientists, such as coalition formation, institution building, political mobilization, and policy change. (shrink)

This article delves into the work of a researcher group based around the Center for Theoretical Archaeology in Belgrade and the path they have taken to establish a foundation for further archaeological development within Serbia. This process illuminates the conceptual tools Fleck originally formulated - thought collectives, thought style, proto-ideas – which have played a significant role in the deconstruction of the concept of scientific fact and in the historicization / socialization of the theory of knowledge. For the Serbian archaeological (...) community, one of the most fiendish aspects has been the ever present correlation between the field and the construction of a national identity - an especially painful theme for the postwar Balkans whose borders are still imprecisely defined. Hence, this work pays special attention to long held beliefs of ethnicity, ethnogenesis and continuity, emanating from outdated racial anthropology, but unfortunately still held as fact in Serbian archaeology. (shrink)

This article approaches the paradigm shift of datafication from the perspective of civil society. Looking at how individuals and groups engage with datafication, it complements the notion of “data politics” by exploring what we call the “contentious politics of data”. By contentious politics of data we indicate the bottom-up, transformative initiatives interfering with and/or hijacking dominant processes of datafication, contesting existing power relations or re-appropriating data practices and infrastructure for purposes distinct from the intended. Said contentious politics of data is (...) articulated in an array of practices of data activism taking a critical stance towards datafication. In data activism, data as mediators take a central role, both as part of an action repertoire or as objects of struggle in their own right. Leveraging social movement studies and science and technology studies, this theoretical essay argues that data activism can be mapped along two analytical dimensions: “data as stakes” vs. “data as repertoires”, and “individual practice vs. collective action”. Mapping action repertoires and tactics along these axes allows us to chart the potential emergence of a political data subject at the intersection of these two dimensions. This furthers our understanding of people’s engagement with data in relation to other forms of activism and existing work in social movement studies. It also helps us interpreting potential trajectories of contemporary social movements, as they increasingly interface with data, devices and platforms. (shrink)

This article tracks a shared methodological tension within the work of a few classic phenomenologists, based on an epistemological juxtaposition at the heart of their enquiry. This epistemological tension emerges as secular and non-secular concepts are worked with concurrently. A modified form of this tension is present in the materialist phenomenology of religion that David Chidester presents, which links his phenomenology to the earlier classical forms. However, although a methodological tension is maintained in his work, the epistemological juxtaposition that initiated (...) the tension is collapsed along humanist boundaries, with important consequences for the study of religion. (shrink)

This article explores the idea of agential multiplicity in medical treatment of childlessness. The analysis illustrates the kinds of agencies that emerge in the use of assisted reproductive technologies. The article begins with a discussion on feelings as participants in IVF treatment and as elements of women’s embodied experience. This is followed by an analysis of three consecutive steps of IVF: ovulation induction, assisted fertilization in the laboratory and embryo transfer. The article aims to show that feminist theory and praxis (...) benefits from empirical analyses of lived bodily experiences as they take form in relation to non-human agencies. Also, it provides a view into how biological processes and material elements can be taken into account in anti-essentializing ways in feminist research. (shrink)

Focusing on the virtue-ethics tradition, this article analyzes the practice of networking within the business context. First, it distinguishes three types of networking: utilitarian, emotional, and virtuous. Virtuous networking does not exclude utilitarian and emotional networking, but these latter forms should be practiced with reciprocity. It is argued that virtuous networking requires (1) acting with good faith, sharing honest goals, and participating in licit activities; (2) sharing information, knowledge, and resources with reciprocity and even with gratuity; (3) serving with justice (...) in asymmetrical power relationships; and (4) exercising a positive ethical influence within the network. Specific forms of unethical behavior in the practice of networking include (1) bad faith or abuse of trust, (2) opportunism, (3) abuse and misuse of power, (4) network cronyism, (5) networking as disguised bribery, and (6) cooperating in the wrongdoing of other actors of the network. The article concludes with some remarks about the role of ethics in social networks. (shrink)

Members of the lay public are turning increasingly to the internet to answer health-related questions. Some authors suggest that the widespread availability of online health information has dislodged medical knowledge from its traditional institutional base and enabled a growing role for alternative or previously unrecognized health perspectives and ‘lay health expertise’. Others have argued, however, that the organization of information retrieved from influential search engines, particularly Google, has merely intensified mainstream perspectives because of the growing consolidation of the internet with (...) traditional, commercial media sources. In this paper we describe an analysis of ‘first page’ results retrieved through Google searches about several common health concerns, each of which has been the subject of controversy as a result of uncertain aetiology, diagnoses, outcomes and/or contested approaches to treatment. Our findings suggest that the online search tactics used by most lay health information seekers produce sources of information that, for the most part, reflect mainstream biomedical discourses, often linked to commercial interests, rather than a plurality of voices that offer a variety of perspectives and resources. We discuss the implications for health-interested internet searchers who fail to look beyond the ‘first page’. (shrink)

Scientific knowledge is the outcome of a collective, for example, of experts, methods, equipment, and experimental sites. The configuration of the collective shapes the scientific findings, allowing some interactions to become visible and meaningful at the expense of others. PROTEE is a methodology that aims to increase the reflexivity of research and innovation projects by helping to sensitize practitioners to the demarcations their projects enact and to think through how these may affect the relevance of the outcomes. We used PROTEE (...) to structure a series of dialogues with a research project that wanted its findings to make a contribution to the heated debate on transgenic trees. Through this process, the project did indeed become more articulated while we ourselves became engaged with the project in a very particular way, by becoming loyal to it. The dialogues also made the risks that engagement with public debate entails for scientists very apparent. Like us, the scientific project chose its loyalties, but what PROTEE did was to help make these explicit. (shrink)

What difference does the philosophical revolution of Deleuze and Guattari make to our understanding the early Christianity? In honour of the fortieth anniversary of publication of A Thousand Plateaus, this article argues that the discipline of Christian origins is currently premised on a historically condemned mode of subjectivity, that of subject/object metaphysics. The philosophical processes found in A Thousand Plateaus are particularly apposite to the current dilemma of Christian origins: as a rhizome-book consisting of plateaus, machines, singularities and non-representational concepts, (...) this book models new modes of thinking that can help the discipline rejuvenate itself and accomplish new tasks which are presently beyond its reach – for Deleuzian philosophy privileges the virtual over the actual, becoming over being, machinic transformations over static structures, and semiotics over linguistics. (shrink)

This article presents diagrams developed from the insights of three middle school children with limited mobility about their experiences navigating social and spatial relations in their home, school and neighbourhoods. The paper explores the concept of assemblage as well as operationalising the Deleuzian idea of the diagram. The diagrams we produce are developed in connection with dominant idealisations of neighbourhood and home range that function in North America to choreograph children's progression from infancy through adolescence. We undertake this diagramming in (...) order to immediately and affectively illustrate the limits and possibilities of the challenges these young people face. (shrink)

There is a long history in science and technology studies of tracking problematic objects, such as controversies, matters of concern, and issues, using various digital tools. But what happens when public problems do not play out in these familiar ways? In this paper, we will think through the methodological implications of studying “problems” in relation to recent events surrounding the sharing of patient data in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. When a data sharing agreement called care.data was (...) announced in 2013, nearly 1.5 million citizens chose to opt out. Yet, in subsequent years, there has been little evidence of a robust public mobilising around data sharing. We will attempt to track this elusive ‘non problem’ using some digital tools developed in STS for the purpose of mapping issues and problem definitions within science. Although we find these digital tools are unable to capture the “problem,” the process of searching helps us map the terrain of the case and forces us to consider wider definitions. (shrink)

This paper argues that ignorance, rather than being a result or representation of false beliefs or misinformation, is a compensatory epistemic adaptation of complex rhetoric systems. A rhetoric system is here defined as a set of interconnected rhetorical elements that cohere into a self-organized system that is thoroughly “about” its contexts—meaning that its own boundaries and relations are both constrained and enabled by the contexts in which it exists. Ignorance, as described here, is epistemic management that preserves the boundaries and (...) relations of a rhetoric system, and is a way of dealing with information that runs counter to one’s beliefs. Ignorance is also productive, in that it produces new knowledge that works to make rhetoric systems more resistant to potential destabilization. To elaborate these points, the paper examines discourse about the phenomenon of global climate change, which illustrates how individuals productively counter information as a way of preserving beliefs. As the paper argues, ignorance is neither a cognitive nor epistemological failure, but rather is a result of the dynamic and continuous process of enforcing epistemic and rhetorical boundaries. (shrink)

Although there is a significant amount of research on organizational citizenship behavior and its importance to individual and organizational outcomes, relatively little research has explored the process by which such behavior emerges and is established within an organization. Against this backdrop, we combine the perspectives offered by contextualist inquiry and actor–network theory to propose an integrative framework for investigating how organizational citizenship behavior develops in a large, heterogeneous organization. In order to illustrate the framework, we present a detailed case study (...) of recycling at a large university. Like many other organizations, the university does not have a formal organizational structure to address sustainability concerns and the initiatives are therefore mainly voluntary and emerging in nature, and outcomes are, as a consequence, highly uncertain, and fragile. We argue that contextualist inquiry in combination with actor–network theory provides new and important insights into the emergence and establishment of organizational citizenship behaviors, and that outcomes are contingent upon interactions between the context, process, and content of the behaviors in question and the related networks of human and non-human actors. (shrink)

This article takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method in the study of science, technology, and society and beyond and outlines a distinctive approach to address the problem of digital bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy in online settings, and this risks undermining the substantive focus of controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue (...) mapping. The article begins by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the development of controversy analysis as a digital method, namely, demarcationist, discursive, and empiricist. Each has been adopted in STS, but only the last one offers a digital “move beyond impartiality.” I demonstrate this approach by analyzing issues of Internet governance with the aid of the social media platform Twitter. (shrink)

Next SectionIn a series of previous articles, we have considered how we might reconceptualise central themes in medicine and medical education through ‘thinking with Homer’. This has involved using textual approaches, scenes and characters from the Iliad and Odyssey for rethinking what is a ‘communication skill’, and what do we mean by ‘empathy’ in medical practice; in what sense is medical practice formulaic, like a Homeric ‘song’; and what is lyrical about medical practice. Our approach is not to historicise medicine (...) and medical education, but to use thinking with Homer as a medium and metaphor for questioning the habitual and the taken-for-granted in contemporary practice. In this article, we tackle the complex theme of ‘translation’. We use the lens of translation studies to examine the process of turning the patient's story into medical language. We address the questions: what makes a ‘good’ translation? What are the consequences of mistranslation and poor translation? And, while things are inevitably lost in translation, does this matter? (shrink)

Over the last 25 years, major research in media and cultural studies has investigated the play of affect in our cultures. ‘Affect’, as a term derived from its neurophysiological and psychological origins, defines the particular movement of feeling from sensation to its attribution as an identifiable emotion. This article explores the way that ‘affect’ to emotion is being curated online by users particularly of social media as they learn to structure how they are perceived in online culture by others. It (...) also investigates how the specific correlating of affect to emotion is one of the essential algorithmically generated activities of social media and online corporations. To discern this flow of affect and emotion, the article works to identify how this online cultural pandemic has intersected with the COVID-19 pandemic and produced a new level and intensity of affect and emotion curation as greater parts of our connected cultures are being managed and moderated by ourselves as well as governments, corporations and institutions. The neologism ‘covidiquette’ is used to describe this new form of online curation of cultures, and a further pandemic expansion of this movement of affect into attribution – transnationally, governmentally and commercially. Key pathways for investigating this correlation – and curation – of affect are analysed in this paper during 2020 and 2021 and the ever-presence of COVID-19 and its unique capacity to produce a proliferation of sharing, connection and – critically – surveillance. (shrink)

This essay interrogates recent materialist monisms, be they based on contingency, eliminativism, or objective phenomenology, on account of their metaphilosophical ramifications. It is argued that certain dualities must be retained, at least nominally, in order to have any explanatory purchase and escape velocity from philosophical circularity. Dyads such as “spirit” and “matter,” “manifest” and “scientific,” “living” and “dead,” or even “illusion” and “reality” are given an immanentist reading that treats them as equal parts of the Real. Following this revisionary metaphysics (...) that reviews the meaning of such terms as optical realities, the matter–spirit couple is specifically used to explain why reality cannot appear as just one thing, even if only in virtue of the illusion of at least two things. The consequences for philosophical monisms of all types, and for anthropocentric thought in general, are then examined in the light of the ethical effects of recent attempts to explain every thing through one medium alone. (shrink)

An ethnographic or ethnomethodological turn in the history of the human sciences has been a Holy Grail at least since Cooter and Pumphrey called for it in 1994, but it has been little realized in practice. This article sketches out some ways to explore the reception, use and/or co-production of scientific knowledge using material generated by mediators such as mass-market paperbacks, radio, TV and especially newspapers. It then presents some preliminary findings, tracing the prevalence and, to a lesser extent, use (...) of selected social-science concepts in the USA and the UK from the 1930s to the 1970s. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to identify the reasons why the dialogue between sociocultural anthropology and animal rights theories and movements continues to be difficult and scarce. At first sight this weakness of communication is surprising, if one looks at the amount of anthropological studies on human/animal relationships, in most cases pointing to how animals are considered in many cultures as non-human subjects or persons. For understanding the roots of this state of affairs, I compare the ways anthropologists and animal (...) rights theorists and activists have engaged with the issue of the differences and commonalities between human beings and nonhuman animals. For this aim, I contrast the search, among philosophers and activists, for a universal rational ethical foundation of animal rights, to which natural sciences’ findings can give support, with sociocultural anthropologists’ focus on the embeddedness of human/animal relationships in symbolic systems and in political relationships. In spite of the paradigmatic shifts intervened in a century and half of sociocultural anthropology, I show, through a critical review of the recent works of Ingold, Descola, Viveiros de Castro and Kohn, that even today this difference in approach is far to be overcome. (shrink)

This article introduces an important concept: Transparency by way of Humanistic Intelligence as a human right, and in particular, Big/little Data and Sur/sous Veillance, where “Little Data” is to sousveillance as “Big Data” is to surveillance. Veillance is a core concept not just in human–human interaction but also in terms of Human–Computer Interaction. In this sense, veillance is the core of Human-in-the-loop Intelligence, leading us to the concept of “Sousveillant Systems” which are forms of Human–Computer Interaction in which internal computational (...) states are made visible to end users, allowing users to “jump” into the computational feedback loop whenever or wherever they want. An important special case of Sousveillant Systems is that of scientific exploration: not only is data considered, but also due consideration must be given to how data is captured, understood, explored, and discovered, and in particular, to the use of scientific instruments to collect data and to make important new discoveries, and learn about the world. Science is a domain where bottom-up transparency is of the utmost importance, and scientists have the right and responsibility to be able to understand the instruments that they use to make their discoveries. Such instruments must be sousveillant systems! (shrink)

Since the foundation of the Santa Fe Institute, the new science of complex adaptive systems has seen extraordinary development, breaking with previous, more epistemological, trends in complexity theory. This article makes a critique of CAS as a model of the current global complexity. Its basic model, the cellular automaton, which focuses on the interactive dynamics among components, ignores the nature of any complex system as constructed by the observer/actor and is unable to explain the sociohistorical construction of the agents/subjects and (...) the social structure in which they are located, thus being unable to accurately represent the overall social complexity. (shrink)

All stakeholders agree publicly that innovation and governance of emerging technologies should be done responsibly. However, the international debate on who should do what to contribute to this lofty goal is nowhere near a solution. The starting point of this paper is the issue of how and for which reason to engage stakeholders in addition to governments in the international governance of nanotechnology. This article examines the mainly North-American communitarian criticism of political liberalism and the related concept of subsidiarity in (...) order to shed new light on this discussion. The central research question is: Can a communitarian-subsidiarity perspective on the roles of governments, companies and civil society actors that hold a stake in emerging technologies clarify the grounds on which each actor should be expected to contribute to responsible research and innovation at the international level? After selecting some relevant aspects of a communitarian-subsidiarity model for a dialogue society, an analytical framework is proposed. This framework is then applied to the recent international dialogue on responsible governance of nanotechnology. The outcomes of the analysis are compared to the OECD planning guide on public engagement and outreach in nanotechnology, and indicators for monitoring progress in responsible global innovation are suggested. The main contribution of the selected communitarian-subsidiarity perspective is that it offers philosophical grounds for a return of citizens to the driving seat in cooperative international responsible innovation. (shrink)

In contrast to rigid conceptions of nonhuman animals, several philosophers have put forth ideas that suggest a more flexible and extended vision of other animals. In articulating the condition of humans in the world, philosophers have referenced ideas that necessarily bring other beings in common with humanity. Significantly, conceptions of movement and biological transformation have played a central role in these ruminations, thereby suggesting the importance of geographical variables in human/nonhuman relations. By drawing out the connections between these perspectives, this (...) paper outlines an ethics of extension. (shrink)

Since the middle of the last century, normative language has been much studied. In particular, the normative function performed by certain sentences and by certain speech acts has been investigated in depth. Still, the normative function performed by certain physical artifacts designed and built to regulate human behaviors has not yet been thoroughly investigated. We propose to call this specific type of artifacts with normative intent ‘deontic artifacts’. This article aims to investigate this normative phenomenon that is so widespread in (...) our daily reality, but so often forgotten by scholars of norms and normativity. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to examine the different ways that smallholders are brought into Fairtrade certification schemes in the Tanzanian tea industry. We examine the different ownership relations of processing factories and the perceived benefits of these different arrangements. We use descriptive qualitative analysis based on qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted between 2008 and 2010 to identify the significance between factory ownership organization and Fairtrade certification. We find that there is a movement toward innovation in the organizational (...) strategies, which includes new ownership arrangements of processing factories and outgrower contracts that have been associated with certified Fairtrade production. We also suggest that organizational innovation is significant for obtaining scheme success yet perceived benefits of and increased information about Fairtrade production is independent from ownership shares in processing. (shrink)

Sociologists often imagine society as spaces, yet how social spaces are related remains ambiguous in most theories. In developing his field theory, Bourdieu used extensively the concept of homology to describe the structural similarities across fields, but he had not taken seriously the spaces between fields or how fields are related to each other. Adopting the Simmelian approach of formal sociology, this article outlines six basic social forms by which social spaces are related. It argues that relations between social spaces (...) can be understood along two dimensions: heterogeneity and social distance. In terms of heterogeneity, social spaces can be kindred, symbiotic or oppositional. In terms of social distance, they can be linked, nested or overlapping. These social forms of interspatial relations are constituted by the boundary work of a variety of actors, including guardians, brokers and space travellers. The article provides a general vocabulary for thinking about how social spaces are related and how they interact across boundaries. (shrink)