Sociomaterial theories, including actor–network theory (ANT), materialist feminism and posthumanism, are sometimes argued to not be addressing or unable to address sufficiently the political and are therefore dismissed as irrelevant to educational research. Through an extended discussion of writers across the social sciences, this article seeks to counter such a view. Drawing specifically on the work of Latour on the nature of critique and on examples of political analysis from writers such as Barad, Bennett, Braidotti, Marres and Whatmore, we suggest (...) that sociomaterialist approaches to the more-than-human open up extended understandings and productive alternative practices of politics. While recognising that this is a work in progress and not without difficulties and challenges, we argue that there is much to be gained for educational researchers from engaging with such approaches. (shrink)

Science and expertise have been antithetical forms of knowledge in both the ancient and the modern world, but they appear identical in today’s postmodern world, especially in Science & Technology Studies literature. The ancient Athenians associated science with the contemplative life afforded to those who lived from inherited wealth. Expertise was for those lacking property, and hence citizenship. Such people were regularly forced to justify their usefulness to Athenian society. Some foreign merchants, collectively demonised in Plato’s Dialogues as ‘sophists’, appeared (...) so insulting to citizen Socrates, because they dared to alienate aspects of this leisured existence and repackage them as techniques that might be purchased on demand from an expert – that is, a sophist. In effect, the sophists cleverly tried to universalise their own alien status, taking full advantage of the strong analogy that Athenians saw between the governance of the self and the polis. Unfortunately, Plato, the original spin doctor, immortalised Socrates’ laboured and hyperbolic rearguard response to these sly and partially successful attempts at dislodging hereditary privilege. (shrink)

We live in an age defined in large part by various facets of neoliberalism. In particular, the market world has impinged on virtually every aspect of food and agriculture. Moreover, most nation-states and many international governance bodies incorporate aspects of neoliberal perspectives. Multi-stakeholder initiatives, with their own standards, certifications, and accreditations are evidence of both the continuing hegemony of neoliberalism as well as various responses to it. Importantly, to date even attempts to limit neoliberal hegemony through MSIs have been largely (...) within the parameters established by those same neoliberal agendas. However, neoliberalism is itself in crisis as a result of climate change, the continuing financial crisis, and rising food prices. The founding myths of neoliberalism are still widely held, having the effect of closing off alternative paths to the future. Yet, this need not be the case. Alternatives to the current MSIs that promote justice, democracy, and equality can still be constructed. (shrink)

This article focuses on the power of technological mediation from the point of view of autonomist Marxism. The first part of the article discusses the theories developed on technological mediation in postphenomenology and critical theory of technology with regard to their respective power perspectives and ways of coping with relations of power embedded in technical artifacts and systems. Rather than focusing on the clashes between the hermeneutic postphenomenological approach and the dialectics of critical theory, it is argued that in both (...) the category of resistance amidst power-relations is at least similar in one regard: resistance to the power of technology is conceptualized as a reactive force. The second part of the article reads technological mediation through the lens of the antagonistic power-perspective on class struggle developed in autonomist Marxism. The outline of a provisional autonomist philosophy of technology is developed using Foucauldian dispositifs of biopower in contrast to the hermeneutic and dialectical approach. It is thus argued that resistance should here be understood in terms of practice that subverts the technically mediated circuit of production itself. (shrink)

This article addresses the tension between conceptualizations of the objective body, which are central to biomedicine, and conceptualizations of the expressive body. Within a metaphysics which can be an adequate grounding for the practice of alternative medicine, I argue, the natural body must be fully conceptualized as both object and as expressive. I draw on phenomenology and on actor-network theory to outline a new model of `biosocial nature' which is inherently figurative and which is constructed by a network of human (...) and non-human actors. I then look at two remedies within the homeopathic materia medica, arguing that their capacity to treat ill health by acting as nodes with a network of `imagined connections' is more explicable within a biosocial than within a modernist metaphysics. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper argues that science and technology studies need to adopt a much wider view of what counts as a laboratory. The factory, it is suggested, is as much a site of invention and intervention as the laboratory. As a site for the government of economic life, the factory is a laboratorypar excellence. One particular factory is studied — the Decatur, Illinois, plant of Caterpillar Inc. — as it is rethought and remade in accordance with ideals of cellular manufacturing, (...) Just-In-Time systems, customer-driven manufacturing, and competitor benchmarking. But it is not just the changes at the factory itself that are studied. The paper analyzes the linkages and relays between the redesign of a particular manufacturing plant and the plethora of calls for a revitalization of North American manufacturing industry and a new form of economic citizenship. The paper examines the remaking of a factory as anassemblage, a historically specific and temporarily stabilized complex of relations among ways of problematizing the factory in a multiplicity of locales. There are four steps to the changes analyzed here: a problematizing of the factory at the level of North American manufacturing as a whole in the 1980s; a problematizing of the notion of competitiveness at Caterpillar Inc, through the calculative practices of competitor benchmarking and related expertises; a diagraming of the ideal factory in systems terms; and the embedding of notions of the product, of competitiveness, and of a new economic citizenship in the “Assembly Highway” at the Decatur plant. Rethinking the factory took place within this assemblage of relations, rether than at any one site. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe paper is divided into the two parts. In the first, I examine the relations among molecular biology, gene technology, and medicine as some aspect of the consequences of these relations with respect to the human genome project of the consequences of these relations with respect to the human genome project. I argue that the prevailing momentum of early molecular biology resided in argue that the prevailing momentum of relay molecular biology resided in crating the technical means for an (...) extracellular representation of intracellular configurations. Assuch, its medical impact was rather limited. With the advent of recombinant DNA technology is based on the prospects of an intracellular representation of extracellular projects—the “rewriting” of life. Its medical impact is potentially unlimited. In the second part, I question the very opposition between nature and culture that implicitly underlies the notion of medicine as a “cultural system.” I argue that both on a macroscopic level and on a microscopic level, the “natural” and the “social” are no longer to be seen as ontologically different.In its uncanny oscillation between retrospection and foresight, between description and proclamation, and between assertion and hesitation, this essay translates an uneasiness that I have not been able to overcome while writing it. The essay conveys the tangled views of a hybrid author who himself cannot but oscillate between the perspectives of an actor in the field of molecular biology, a participant in the field of science studies, and a citizen. (shrink)

During the last 3 years the interface between geography and nursing has provided fertile ground for research. Not only has a conceptual emphasis on space and place provided nurse researchers with a robust and subtly different way to deconstruct and articulate nursing environments, but also their studies have provided a much needed focus on certain areas of health‐care, and in particular clinical practice, not currently prioritized by health geographers. We argue that, as something that is forcing fundamental re‐considerations of the (...) nature of both nursing and geography, cyberspace is a particularly important phenomenon that lies comparatively under‐researched at this interface. To encourage some interest in researching nursing and cyberspace through a geographical lens, and at least to showcase a range of potentially useful and transportable concepts, we provide an overview of some of the key debates pertaining to cyberspace developed by human geographers, and make some initial and tentative connections to nursing. (shrink)

This study investigates the institutional work that underlies the diffusion of responsible investment (RI) and enhances its adaptation to local settings. Building on institutional theory and actor–network theory, we advance the concept of contextualization work to describe the institutional work that sustains RI glocalization. Empirical data from two case studies highlight how entrepreneurial actors imported the notion of RI from the US to France and Québec. Our findings uncover three types of contextualization work—filtering, repurposing, and coupling—that sustain RI glocalization, and (...) show how actors employed them in both settings to overcome the lack of technical, cultural, or political fit between the imported practice and their local context. Our results explain how divergent glocalized versions of RI are developed and adapted through contextualization work. Last, we discuss how our repertoire of contextualization work can account for local forms of a global concept and the uneven pattern of its diffusion. (shrink)

While Jacques Derrida’s influence on posthumanist theory is well established in the literature, given Martin Heidegger’s influence on Derrida, it is surprising to find that Heidegger’s relationship to posthumanist theory has been largely ignored. This article starts to fill this lacuna by showing that Heidegger’s writings not only influences but also has much to teach posthumanism, especially regarding the relationship between humanism and posthumanism. By first engaging with Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics and related critique of anthropocentrism, I show that, while (...) rejecting Heidegger’s conclusions for being too humanist, posthumanism shares, and indeed is largely unreflectively defined by, Heidegger’s critique of the binary logic underpinning anthropocentric humanism. With this, posthumanism aims to go beyond Heidegger by overcoming all forms of humanist understanding, an attempt that brings us back to the relationship between humanism and posthumanism and Heidegger’s notion of trace. With this, I not only show that Heidegger influences posthumanism through his destruction of metaphysics, critique of anthropocentrism and notion of trace, but also point towards an understanding of posthumanism that distinguishes it from humanism and transhumanism. (shrink)

In this chapter I propose to understand the current paradigm shift in biology as the origination of a biology of subjects. A description of living beings as experiencing selves has the potential to transform the current mechanistic approach of biology into an embodied-hermeneutic one, culminating in a poetics of nature. We are at the right moment for that: The findings of complex systems research, autopoiesis theory, and evolutionary developmental biology are converging into a picture where the living can not longer (...) be described in terms of causal mechanisms (as is, e. g., the Watson-Crick “central dogma”). Instead, organisms bring forth themselves physically and thereby generate a hermeneutic standpoint, interpreting external and internal stimuli interfering with their auto-creation according to embodied values. This can be observed empirically during embryonic develoment, where genetic instructions do not act as orders, but rather as perturbations being interpreted by an auto-maintaining developmental centre. The notion of organic subjectivity opens the living realm to a hermeneutic perspective. Since any encounter has a meaning and is interpreted accordingly, it creates a perspective of innerness or self. This self experiences all external and internal stimuli as values. The innerness is coextensive with the material dimensions of biochemical processes as their other, or symbolic, side. By this process the subjective perspective of organisms is open to other’s experience. Meaning and value become visible, as they are generated in material, embodied form. Instead of being separate from nature as pure “mind” or “language”, man shares with any other being the same “conditio vitae” of experienced meaning and expressive feeling. (shrink)

Libre Culture is the essential expression of the free culture/copyleft movement. This anthology, brought together here for the first time, represents the early groundwork of Libre Society thought. Referring to the development of creativity and ideas, capital works to hoard and privatize the knowledge and meaning of what is created. Expression becomes monopolized, secured within an artificial market-scarcity enclave and finally presented as a novelty on the culture industry in order to benefit cloistered profit motives. In the way that physical (...) resources such as forests or public services are free, Libre Culture argues for the freeing up of human ideas and expression from copyright bulwarks in all forms. (shrink)

After a brief biography of Jaap van Brakel we set out his appropriation and use of the distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of the world. In a certain sense van Brakel gives priority to the manifest image as the ultimate source of meaning in chemical discourses. He does not take sides in the debate about nominal and real essences, twin earths and so, but presents a compromise. As an active practitioner of the chemical arts he emphasises (...) the indispensability of models as a main tool for chemical thinking. We then turn to van Brakel’s interest in forging an intercultural point of view in which philosophy of chemistry plays an important part. (shrink)

Since archaeology is fundamentally the study of the human past, which is what the word “archaeology” connotes according to its Greek etymology, it is part of the humanities. However, archaeologists work in teams with scientists and employ quantitative techniques and comparative methods of the social sciences; archaeologists are thus an academic hybrid and are pleased to live in the interstices of many disciplines. In this article we review the history of archaeology in the humanities and explore some new directions in (...) archaeological research. We discuss the enduring questions of origins of the antiquity of humanity, religion and art, the first agricultural villages, and the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. We also consider new agendas in archaeology: historical archaeology, landscapes in the past and present, material studies of the present, and how archaeologists are engaged in modern politics. (shrink)

In recent years several approaches—philosophical, sociological, psychological—have been developed to come to grips with our profoundly technologically mediated world. However, notwithstanding the vast merit of each, they illuminate only certain aspects of technological mediation. This paper is a preliminary attempt at a philosophical reflection on technological mediation as such—deploying the concepts of ‘transparency’ and ‘opacity’ as heuristic instruments. Hence, we locate a ‘theory of transparency’ within several theoretical frameworks—respectively classic phenomenology, media theory, Actor Network Theory, postphenomenology, several ethnographical, psychological, and (...) sociological perspectives, and finally, the Critical Theory of Technology. Subsequently, we render a general, systematic overview of these theories, thereby conjecturing what a broad analysis of technological mediation in and of itself might look like—finding, at last, an essential contradiction between transparency of ‘use’ and transparency of social origins and effects. (shrink)

What new forms of ethical engagement are emerging in naturecultural worlds? In this paper I explore the example of the practical ethics of the permaculture movement. I put these in dialogue first with new approaches to ethics in biopolitics and naturecultures and second with a reading of feminist care ethics. Across this discussion I focus on the potential of ethos transformations experienced through everyday doings to promote ethical obligations of care. If we are living in a naturecultural world where politics (...) and ethics conflate in biopolitics, the permaculture movement is an example of an alter-biopolitical intervention. It works within bios with an ethics of collective empowerment that puts caring at the heart of its search of alternatives for hopeful flourishing for all beings. (shrink)

Given the enchanted worldview of pentecost-alism, what possibility is there for a uniquely pentecostal intervention in the science-theology dialogue? By asserting the centrality of the miraculous and the fantastic, and being fundamentally committed to a universe open to surprise, does not pentecostalism forfeit admission to the conversation? I argue for a distinctly pentecostal contribution to the dialogue that is critical of regnant naturalistic paradigms but also of a naive supernaturalism. I argue that implicit in the pentecostal social imaginary is a (...) distinct conception of nature that is amenable to science but in conflict with naturalism. (shrink)

The Health Council of the Netherlands is an independent scientific advisory board to the Dutch government in matters of public health. In this article we argue that even for an independent body such as the Health Council there seems to be no escape from the increasing intertwinement of scientific and societal processes. In order to produce a serviceable truth for policymaking, the council needs to reflect on what goes on in its socio-political surroundings. On the other hand, how could we (...) ever come to understand the legitimacy of the council when notions of scientific objectivity dissolve in such a reflexive, inherently political stance? In a situation where science and society are thoroughly interrelated, the Health Council somehow succeeds in bringing about or re-claiming some sense of objectivity. Our central question will be how to conceptualise this notion of 'objectivity' without having to rely on idealized notions of objectivity that are criticized in philosophical, sociological and historical studies of science and society. In order to do so, we will regard the objectivity of advisory reports of the Health Council as being constructed out of heterogeneous elements and under complex circumstances. The theoretical point will be empirically underpinned with case material drawn from activities of the Health Council in the period 1985-2002 in predominantly the subject areas healthcare and medical technology. (shrink)

Taking ‘the idea of the tragic’ as a point of departure, this article articulates an approach to sociology and social theory from the perspective of a ‘tragic vision’. In arguing for the relevance of ‘tragic thought’ for the analysis of contemporary crises, it suggests that ‘the tragic’ must be understood as a reflection of the long tail of the formation of a particular secular, modern ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’. In making this case, the article provides an ‘interpretive genealogy’ of tragic ethics in social (...) thought, detailing the thought of Lucien Goldmann and Georg Lukács, and putting it in dialogue with contemporary posthumanist theory. It concludes by drawing on recent debates in the latter involving the place of ‘critique’ in contemporary social science, teasing out some implications for thinking about individual action and responsibility. (shrink)

This article explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the relationship between bodies, risk and mobility. Drawing upon ethnographic data from India, it is argued that measures taken by the Indian government to contain the spread of the pandemic link mobile bodies to the notion of risk which has profound consequences for the way in which people access and engage with public spaces in Indian cities. In this process, a new type of body – the risky mobile body – (...) is produced. At the same time, these measures run into problems due to the volatile nature of knowledge about bodies and diseases that they rely on. While the mobility of the COVID-19 virus is a subject of public debate, the fluidity and open-endedness of mobile bodies makes them difficult to regulate. This mismatch between governmental logics and unknowable bodies constitutes a significant challenge for the fight against the pandemic. (shrink)

Often, political theories of the subject detach the subject from nature or else reduce the subject to a mere aggregate of natural features. Consequently, many attempts to articulate theories of the subject purport to preserve political theoretical concepts such as freedom, normativity, or responsibility by means of disjoining the subject from its environment. This article proposes a new theory of the ecologically conditioned subject. Developing the concept of companion ecologies, the article employs three examples – architecture, the human microbiome, and (...) indigenous Amazonian ontologies – to show how theorizing the subject at all necessitates theorizing her ecological conditions, as well. Companion ecologies do not refer merely to our environmental conditions, then. The term also functions as a referent. Ultimately, companion ecologies reveal that the individuation and formation of the subject is a process that takes place, paradoxically, only because of the ecological plurality underlying it. From this, I derive a minimalist theory of the subject for which subjects are materially and temporally extended and causally distributed morphogenetic sites, which emerge only in the context of interactive, multiscalar, and overlapping companion ecologies. (shrink)

The politics of the Anthropocene has been widely debated within recent sociological theory. This article seeks to argue that Marxism, critical theory and especially the work of Herbert Marcuse have a great deal to contribute to these debates. Here, I seek to link together the recent revival of interest in the idea of the commons by the alter-globalisation movement and Marxist social theory in an attempt to challenge some of the dominant assumptions in respect of the nature/culture division and the (...) neoliberal dominance of mainstream politics. The more critical politics of the commons would suggest both a radical politics fit for the twenty-first century and a way of understanding the environmental crisis located within critical understandings of the histories of capitalism and social movements. This is suggestive of a civilisation-based politics focused on questions of emancipation informed by political economy, a critique of the dominant consumer society and culture rather than questions of deconstruction. In the final section, I seek to explore how Marcuse’s concerns remain linked to contemporary global ethical movements for change. (shrink)

This short paper offers a series of responses to Jochem Zwier and Timothy Barker’s comments on my extended paper ‘Taking Exception: Philosophy of Technology as a Multidimensional Problem Space.’ Part one responds to questions concerning the modality of the renewed understanding of the theme of the transcendental that was argued for in my initial paper: I argue for the deep _contingency_ of such a move, against any sense that it is _necessary._ Part two takes this consideration of modality further, considering (...) the _possibilities_ that a renewal of the theme of the transcendental stands to offer philosophy of technology today. I argue that the contingency of our contemporary sense of the transcendental can be precisely what makes it valuable. Whereas parts one and two turn on incisive questions posed by Zwier, part three closes by reconsidering the claims for a ‘multidimensional problem space’ offered in my initial paper. In response to an acute insight from Barker, I close by arguing that philosophy of technology’s problem space should be explored in terms of a notion of ‘shared agonism’. (shrink)

This article discusses xenotransplantation and examines the way its scientific promoters have defended their technology against potentially damaging public representations. The authors explore the criteria used to legitimate the selection of the pig as the best species from which to “harvest” transplant tissues in the future. The authors’ analysis shows that scientists and medical practitioners routinely switch between scientific and cultural repertoires. These repertoires enable such actors to exchange expert identities in scientific discourse for public identities in cultural discourse. These (...) discourses map onto similarities and differences between animal donors and human hosts. Finally, the case is used to comment on a number of related approaches where the dynamics of medical and scientific authority are discussed. (shrink)

Science policies and science studies largely share an understanding of scientific knowledge and objects as immutable mobiles. This article shows how the analysis of research assessment in a non-Anglophone country and its effects on social sciences can shed new light on this shared notion. The preference for immutable mobiles in assessment regimes pushes social scientists to publish in specialized, usually Anglophone journals, which can result in the attenuation of local relevance of the knowledge they produce and contribute to the performance (...) of globally converging societies. The author argues that the observed consequences for the social sciences in non-Anglophone countries underscore a larger problem with both the policy ideal and the science and technology studies idea of immutable mobiles on two counts: the relation of the social and natural sciences to society and the engagement of sciences with the multiplicity of societies as well as natures. (shrink)

What is so special about science? Taking up the old epistemological challenge, this article seeks to rephrase the question of scientific autonomy beyond conventional essentialist criteria of demarcation between science and society. The specificity of science is primarily sought in its studied `lack of haste', its socially sanctioned withdrawal from the swift pace of everyday life and from `faster' cultures such a politics and business. This `unhastened' quality defines science's peculiar delaying tactics, which systematically slow down and objectify ordinary conversations, (...) actions, and conflicts, attracting `slow' personalities who read and write more and talk less than the `fast cats' who are attracted to more decisionist, stress-driven and hasty cultures. Such a description, rather than claiming performative innocence, simultaneously expresses the ambition to strengthen what it characterizes, i.e. to liberate science from the stress and haste which are increasingly imposed upon it by the `external' pressures and performance criteria of enterprise culture and political correctness, and by the growing impact of media publicity and the academic celebrity system. In this fashion, the article simultaneously advances a new factual description of the specificity of scientific practice and a new normative/political project to enhance scientific and intellectual autonomy. (shrink)

This article engages the French pragmatism of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour in debates on how to forge a moral-political sociology of ecological valuation, justification and critique. Picking up the debate initiated by Thévenot on the possible emergence of a novel ‘green’ order of worth, the article juxtaposes the sociology of critical capacity of Boltanski and Thévenot with the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. In doing so, the article suggests that each of these three pragmatic sociologists succeeds, in (...) characteristically different ways, in theoretically articulating an important but partial socio-political grammar of ecological worth. This claim is substantiated by invoking three case studies into environmental critique and compromise, on transnational carbon markets, urban sustainability projects, and Japanese whaling, respectively. Against this backdrop, the article concludes that – when read together as grammarians of the ecological bond – pragmatic sociology provides important insights into the bounded multiplicity of nature’s worth in political modernity. (shrink)

The work of Bruno Latour has animated debates in sociology, anthropology and philosophy over several decades, while attracting criticisms of the ontological, epistemological and political implications of his focus on networks. This article takes a particular depth example – the case of the genetic condition of sickle cell – and, drawing upon anthropological, archaeological and sociological evidence of the sickle cell body in history, appraises early, and later, Latourian ideas. The article concludes that while methodologically useful in drawing attention to (...) the complicated links of humans, animals and things, concerns remain about Latourian ontological claims. Limitations include an empiricist failure to account for absence; an insufficiently robust conception of emergence; an unwarranted curtailment of counterfactual human knowledge; a lack of concern for serial ‘undeserving losers’; a tendency to accord excessive freedoms to human actors; and a lack of a conception of how things may be considered as agents rather than actants. (shrink)

The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened up serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents, thus signalling a temporal shift in Earth history: it can be seen as a new (...) object of knowledge and an order of governance. A promising direction for theorizing in the social and human science is to approach the notion of the Anthropocene as exemplified in new knowledge practices that have implications for governance. It invokes new conceptions of time, agency, knowledge and governance. The Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. It entails a cultural model, that is an interpretative category by which contemporary societies make sense of the world as embedded in the Earth, and articulate a new kind of historical self-understanding, by which an alternative order of governance is projected. This points in the direction of cosmopolitics – and thus of a ‘Cosmopolocene’ – rather than a geologization of the social or in the post-humanist philosophy, the end of the human condition as one marked by agency. (shrink)

This article examines the resources offered by various forms of critical cultural theory for the study of religion. It then briefly explores the turn to religion by a range of recent cultural theorists.

A traditional problem of ethics in mathematics is the denial of social responsibility. Pure mathematics is viewed as neutral and value free, and therefore free of ethical responsibility. Applications of mathematics are seen as employing a neutral set of tools which, of themselves, are free from social responsibility. However, mathematicians are convinced they know what constitutes good mathematics. Furthermore many pure mathematicians are committed to purism, the ideology that values purity above applications in mathematics, and some historical reasons for this (...) are discussed. MacIntyre’s virtue ethics accommodates both the good mathematician and the ethics of the social practice of mathematics. It demonstrates that purism is compatible with acknowledging the social responsibility of mathematics. Four aspects of this responsibility are mentioned, two concerning the impact of mathematics via education, and two concerning explicit and implicit applications of mathematics. The last of these opens up the performativity of mathematical and measurement applications in society, which change the very processes they are supposed to measure. Although these applications are not explored in detail, they illustrate the importance of considering the ethics and social responsibility of mathematics in society. MacIntyre’s virtue theory opens a broad approach to the controversial topic of the ethics of mathematics encompassing purism, and absolutist and social constructivist philosophies of mathematics, but still enabling ethical critiques of the impact of mathematics on society. (shrink)

In this essay, I first analyze the extension of hermeneutical interpretation in the Heideggerian sense to products of contemporary technology which are components of our “lifeworld”. Products of technology, such as airplanes, laptops, cellular phones, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners might be compared with what Heidegger calls the “Ready-to-hand” (das Zuhandene) with regard to utilitarian objects such as a hammer, planer, needle and door handle in Being and Time. Our life with our equipment, which represents the “Ready-to-hand” in Heidegger's sense (...) of the word, is determined by temporalization (Zeitigung) which cannot be separated and isolated from the wholeness of things in the world. In the second part of my paper, I explore the positive achievement of material hermeneutics (Don Ihde) with regard to its extension to technoscience and the discussion of how such hermeneutics can contribute to the preservation of our threatened lifeworld, but also to explore the possibilities of how technical inventions, medical innovations could improve our way of life. (shrink)

In this paper, we tell the story of efforts currently underway, on diverse fronts, to build digital knowledge repositories to support research in the life sciences. If successful, knowledge bases will be part of a new knowledge infrastructure—capable of facilitating ever-more comprehensive, computational models of biological systems. Such an infrastructure would, however, represent a sea-change in the technological management and manipulation of complex data, inducing a generational shift in how questions are asked and answered and results published and circulated. Integrating (...) such knowledge bases into the daily workflow of the lab thus destabilizes a number of well-established habits which biologists rely on to ensure the quality of the knowledge they produce, evaluate, communicate and exploit. As the story we tell here shows, such destabilization introduces a situation of unfamiliarity, one that carries with it epistemic risks. It should elicit—to use Niklas Luhmann’s terms—the question of trust: a shared recognition that the reliability of research practices is being risked, but that such a risk is worth taking in view of what may be gained. And yet, the problem of trust is being unexpectedly silenced. How that silencing has come about, why it matters, and what might yet be done forms the heart of this paper. (shrink)

Images of brains circulate today as rationales for decision-making and selectivity in policies, curriculum, preservice teacher education and inservice professional development. The excitement over brain-based research, its visual reach and authorizing role accompanies longstanding debates in which the status attributed to biology, physiology and allied psychological approaches has been considered prejudicial. This article traces a series of dislocations in the linkages forged between discourses of vision and epistemic authorization, and how they still inhere in contemporary debates over brain imaging. The (...) critical history that the article offers within the general framework of Visual science and technology studies requires questioning some of the core tenets of visual culture, including what gets to count as the visual, ‘its’ role in legitimation, and the primacy assigned to looking and observation as strategies of truth-production. (shrink)

The main aims of the article are as follows: to indicate that cognition may be satisfactorily modelled from a constructivist perspective; to reconstruct the latest tendencies within science and technology studies encapsulated in the term constructivism rather than in the notion of social constructivism; to show how technoscience is conceptualised from the constructivist standpoint.

This paper focuses on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of Cannibal Metaphysics and the use of indigenous alter-anthropologies that offer the possibility to think thought otherwise than the dominant frameworks of Western modernity. It traces the use of cannibalism across thinking and making, exploring the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and his imaginative spatial and material practices that establish relational ecologies between humans and nonhumans. Ecology is foregrounded as a necessary precondition for thought’s possibility. The concept of ‘Nature’ is (...) contested as a foundational concept to enable modes of imaginative worlding to emerge that significantly challenge Western intellectual frameworks, depriving them of their universality and therefore transforming knowledge. “Cannibal alterity” is mapped as a political act of transgression where values are devoured in order to subvert their meanings, unsettle their cultural dominance and oppressive force, to transform their negative and destructive power into new creative and productive forms. (shrink)

Responding to the call to provide guidance for incorporating diverse perspectives in science-policy debate, Collins and Evans’ normative model of expertise provides a useful starting point for deciding who gets to come to the table—expertise and experience. However, new materialist critiques highlight the epistemic challenges of such an approach. Drawing on the work of Annemarie Mol, I propose that the theory of multiple ontologies and a practise-based orientation can enrich conversations about expertise and inclusion in science-policy decision-making, particularly in matters (...) of concern. Specifically, I reread Collins and Evans’ normative model of expertise through multiple ontologies, resulting in an expertise of doing. Such an approach both productively resolves gaps in each while leading to the creation of something new. I will explore what this expertise of doing might mean for the long-standing problem of expertise and inclusion in scientific, technical, and health policy disputes. Specifically, I pr... (shrink)

En este artículo analizo la aproximación “estética” de Malcolm Budd a la naturaleza, que sostiene que el modo correcto de experimentar la naturaleza es “como naturaleza” y no como arte. Estudio su relación con la idea kantiana de belleza libre y trato de mostrar que la belleza libre es un recurso teórico que deriva de la inevitable belleza dependiente. asimismo, basándome en la filosofía de Joseph Margolis, pretendo mostrar que “la naturaleza como naturaleza” es también un artefacto cultural.

The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University (“‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference,” convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the merits, possibilities, and problems of an ontologically oriented approach. The current paper is a portion of this larger conversation— (...) a format we maintain here because, among other things, it permits a welcome level of candor and simplicity. In this forum we present two questions (written by Alberti and Witmore, along with the concluding comments) and the responses of five of the Theoretical Archaeology Group session participants. The first question asks why we think an ontological approach is important to our respective fields; the second, building upon the first set of responses, asks authors to consider the difference that pluralizing ontology might make and whether such a move is desirable given the aims of archaeology and anthropology. While several angles on ontology come through in the conversation, all share an interest in more immanent understandings that arise within specific situations and that are perhaps best described as thoroughly entangled rather than transcendent and/ or oppositional in any straightforward sense. (shrink)