Sociological theories of space have so far not provided an in-depth analysis of online spaces. The paper addresses this issue by means of Löw’s relational theory of space. As this theory mainly focuses on material spaces, it is necessary to embrace the phenomenological perspective in order to apply it to the virtual realm. More recent phenomenological research has highlighted the ongoing mediatization or virtualization of the life-world. These theories, and presence research more generally, are useful for examining the layers of (...) virtual presence. This paper focuses on two emblematic types of spaces: multiplayer online role-playing games and Skype video chats. The first represents an online version of a Schutzian finite province of meaning, while Skyping is an example of how the paramount reality of everyday life expands into the virtual realm. Albeit differently, actors in both cases constitute hybrid, virtual-material spaces with various forms and degrees of virtual presence. User experiences in these spaces are in line with contemporary sociological diagnoses indicating the vanishing experience of living in space and the general tendency of late modernity to question previous social forms of modernity. (shrink)

This article details how patent law works to create discrete, immutable biological ‘objects’. This socio-legal maneuver is necessary to distinguish these artifacts from the unwieldy realm of the natural world. The creation of ‘objects’ also serves the interests of capital, where a stable, unchanging, immutable object goes hand in hand with commodification. Yet this stabilization is incomplete. Pointing to a variety of different examples, this article illustrates how biotech patents do not speak to specific, immutable things. Biotech patents, rather, are (...) better understood as ontologically fluid, which is to say their identity cannot be ‘fixed’ — or, at least, not without undermining the very existence of today’s biotechnology regime. The article concludes by speaking briefly about how this mutability is perpetuating certain inequalities, particularly between holders of various property forms. (shrink)

In this article, we draw upon ‘After-ANT’ scholarship to generate openings for a shift from purely deconstructive studies of object organization to a more straightforward generation of concrete and specific alternative trajectories towards the future by way of ontological experimentation. Through careful empirical investigation of a mine and a landfill, and how these are enacted in practice in different topological registers, we show how mines and landfills are intertwined; enacted sometimes as similar and in other cases as different types of (...) objects, thus shaping the paths of becoming for those bundles of relations that become enacted as either a ‘mine object’ or a ‘landfill object’. Mapping these practices generates openings for interventions suggesting how things could be made different in some specificity; in this case, for example, the appreciation of what constitutes ‘natural resources’. The overarching purpose of this article is to intervene in current debates regarding the potential merits of drawing upon Object-Oriented Philosophy as an inspiration in critical organizational studies. While we are highly sympathetic to calls for more experimental object studies, we are hesitant towards Object-Oriented Philosophy as a source of inspiration due to its specific metaphysical underpinnings. To clarify what we find to be at stake here, we conclude the article by situating After-ANT in a wider landscape of thought, discussing the contrast between broadly pragmatist research approaches, such as After-ANT, and Object-Oriented Philosophy. Finally, we try to spell out how we believe this contrast reverberates upon how we understand the purpose and potential of critical social science. (shrink)

This article turns towards the spatial life of ‘digital infrastructures’, i.e. code, protocols, standards, and data formats that are hidden from view in everyday applications of computational technologies. It does so by drawing on the version control system Git as a case study, and telling the story of its initial development in order to reconstruct the circumstances and technical considerations surrounding its conception. This account engages with computational infrastructures on their own terms by adopting the figure of the ‘stack’ to (...) frame a technically informed analysis, and exploring its implications for a different kind of geographic inquiry. Drawing on topology as employed by Law and Mol, attention is given to the multiplicity of spatialities and temporalities enrolled in digital infrastructures in general, and Git specifically. Along the lines of the case study and by reading it against other literatures, this notion of topology is expanded to include the material performation of fundamentally arbitrary, more-than-human topologies, as well as their nested articulation, translation and negotiation within digital infrastructures. (shrink)

Utopia – the word is simultaneously evocative of hope and dread. As a concept it is stupendously problematic, and yet despite its alleged passing into irrelevance, utopia still remains a household word. Why is this so?Utopia has been reduced to a category. We place a solution in the category of the utopian or, conversely, the not-utopian. Without fail, discussions involving utopia will eventually veer toward debates on whether a book, project, or building is utopian or not.Utopia reduced to such a (...) category invokes both a problematic universality and a convoluted end of history – perhaps nowhere more so than in the field of architecture. However, if we begin with the problem to which the solution is a response rather than the solution being proposed, we soon realize that utopia is more complicated than a simple image of a perfect future.The study at hand re-interrogates the utopian concept. The question is not what architecture is utopian, but how and why architecture is utopian. Utopia is reinterpreted as a concept predicated on survival and a desire for a better way of living, rather than on immortality and perfection. Utopia in this sense is monstrous; its function is to challenge the presuppositions that define the horizons of our imagination, and to show us that the future is not predetermined: the future is fundamentally open.What assumptions, then, are formative of how architects relate to the future and utopia when projections of that future perfect have become irrelevant?If the projection of a perfect future is impossible, yet intimately associated with the architect, utopia becomes paradoxical for architects. Utopian desire is instead expressed in other ways, consciously or unconsciously. The study argues that the present worldview is dominated by what is here dubbed the Network-image; we think of everything in terms of networks, privileging connections over form, and the architect is again assuming a new role for herself as a manager, rather than an expert.Networks offer different ways of working with architecture. Rather than specifying the forms of the future, architects can and do work by defining and elaborating protocols that enable and cultivate connections which, according to the prevalent narrative, build transversal collectives that can potentially transform the world.However, there are other implications linked to these new opportunities. Any network is governed by multiple protocols, and the architect as manager becomes inscribed in a logic of control. There is an implicit notion that architects can produce architecture that is self-governing, participatory, and implicitly egalitarian through designing protocols. This assumption urgently needs to be interrogated.The discussion in this study centers on the need to challenge the Network-image itself, and not only to take our role in it as given. The dissertation is an argument for considering the how of imagining the future with more scrutiny, and it offers a set of principles and a terminology for discussion to enable further research on the subject. (shrink)

This thesis proposes a re-conceptualisation of engineering practice that moves towards responding to the nature of our 21st Century (21C) predicament – the dynamic, turbulent, labyrinthine flux which has developed through the inhabitation of modern humanity in our open living world. It describes a philosophy and practices to achieve this. Key concepts are the context within which practice takes place and an integrated approach at the system level. Together these principles promote processes and practices that can design life situations which (...) are more desirable and feasible, not only for humanity but to strengthen our natural environment. This is active adaptive planning; it changes practitioners’ relationship with the world by providing spaces where the agenda is not “driven” by the “push” of the past but elicits the “pull” of future intentions. Using these approaches people are engaged collectively in processes that re-connect with context taking into account the relevant uncertainties across what are often articulated as “different” systems (e.g. social, environmental, technical) and between past, present, future. Further, it works the loops – performing ontological politics that is linking and knotting what emerges from these processes with all the potential stakeholders, mobilising resources, peers, allies and the public. The thesis identifies links between Socio-Technical Systems, Actor-Network Theory and process philosophy. This extends Actor-Network Theory which has already removed those intellectual constructs that disarticulated reality, focusing attention on practise, movement, the making and remaking of reality, or net-work-ing with the complex heterogeneous nature of agency. It envisages practitioners having an epistemology and ontology that is formed through being “out-and-about” in the world, making “translations”. Through embedding these ideas in the way engineers learn and in the processes that they use, engineering becomes a “putting through”, manoeuvring, dissolving boundaries, always being in action, moving towards sustaining with others, while recognising purpose, congruence and transforming as emergent properties. Through purposive imag(in)ing of different ways of sustainable doing and being integration can occur, reframing across methodology, epistemology, ontology and philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconceptualise ‘building type’ in order to better account for its general role in society and everyday life. The paper merges the concept of building type with actor-network theory and object-oriented philosophy in order to develop the concept of ‘territorial sorts’ as a way of widening building-type research and making it more useful for investigating how building types are actually produced, not just in terms of the work done by different kinds of authorities, such (...) as architects, engineers, and building regulators, but also in terms of the ongoing practices and power relations of everyday life. (shrink)

The fascination and thrill of arts festivals relates to their capacity to host the unexpected, surprising and new. The economic model of novelty bundling markets presents a rare attempt to account for the potential impact of festivals on innovation. Its cognitive conception of festivals as sites of economic evolution offers a point of departure for this paper. The economic model is criticised and further developed, especially in two respects, drawing on sociological studies on science, technology and society and on empirical (...) data from two cases of innovatively used lighting technology in festivals. First, it is argued that festivals offer a fair space for the simultaneous discovery, display and valorisation of the new that is produced by performers, curators and audiences, and by innovators, intermediaries and consumers alike. Secondly, the production and consumption of newness in festivals is linked to the specific way in which their socio-material setting facilitates what has been termed framing and overflowing of cognitive formats. Finally, the analysis sheds new light not only on the innovative impact of festivals but also on the scholarly reserve to engage with this field of research. (shrink)

In business and government, databases contain large quantities of digital transactional data (purchases made, services used, finances transferred, benefits received, licences acquired, borders crossed, tickets purchased). The data can be understood as ongoing and dynamic measurements of the activities and doings of people. In government, numerous database devices have been developed to connect such data across services to discover patterns and identify and evaluate the performance of individuals and populations. Under the UK’s New Labour government, the development of such devices (...) was part of a broader policy known as ‘joined-up thinking and government’. Analyses of this policy have typically understood joining up as an operation of adding together distributed data about subjects, which can then be used in the service of government surveillance, the database state or informational capitalism. But rather than such technical or managerialist analytics, I argue that topological analytics capture what these database devices enact and do: they materialize the ‘individuality’ of subjects in intensified, distributed and fluctuating ways and materialize and intensify a logic of what Deleuze describes as modulating controls. Through examples of UK New Labour social policy initiatives over the past decade, I argue that topological analytics can account for these as immanent rather than exceptional properties of database devices and, as such, part and parcel of a governmental logic and ontology of subjects. (shrink)

Recently there have been pleas for STS to make a difference in how science policies are constructed and enacted. Much less remarked upon is the possibility that there may be troubling alignments between science studies and research policies in the form of shared conceptual, epistemological and methodological assumptions. Both have come to emphasise material outputs and visible activity, obscuring other processes, relationships and orderings involved in science work. This collection of papers focuses on these connections between STS and contemporary research (...) policies. They explore empirical material from ‘other epistemic places' to foreground and critique what is privileged and rewarded by science policies. But they also seek to make a theoretical contribution to STS itself, showing how its early focus on the hard centres of global technoscience have been constitutive of its characteristic concerns, epistemologies -and blind spots. As science studies moves out of the lab andbeyond the heartlands of the political West and global North, we argue that acknowledging some problematic affinities between science studies and science policy is both a critical necessity and an opportunity for new insights. (shrink)