This article is about recent attempts by scholars, database practitioners, and curators to experiment in theoretically interesting ways with the conceptual design and the building of databases, archives, and other information systems. This article uses the term ‘‘archive’’ as an overarching category to include a diversity of technologies used to inventory objects and knowledge, to commit them to memory and for future use. The category of ‘‘archive’’ might include forms as diverse as the simple spreadsheet, the species inventory, the computerized (...) database, and the museum. Using this protean concept, this study suggests that we are currently witnessing a time where close convergences are occurring between social theory and archive construction. It identifies a ‘‘move’’ toward exposure of the guts of our archives and databases, toward exposing the contingencies, the framing, the reflexivity, and the politics embedded within them. Within this move, the study examines ways in which theories of performance and emergence have begun to influence the way that archives of different kinds are conceived and reflects on the role of Science and Technology Studies scholars in their construction. (shrink)

Domestic eco-efficient technologies, such as recycling bins and compact florescent light bulbs, are integral to the eco-modernisation project. To date, however, little research has examined their role in the production of 'sustainable citizens'. In response, this paper explores the productivities of commonplace domestic objects. It draws on qualitative research into a Sydney-based sustainable living programme called 'GreenHome', to examine how participants' environmental ethics became articulated through objects' use. This forges a form of embodied 'techno-ethics' that permeates socio-material relations beyond the (...) immediate. Therefore, this examination of the quotidian deployment of eco-efficient technologies, whilst not denying the problematic nature of technologically-dependant futures, suggests some positive outcomes from individuals' enrolment in domestic eco-modernisation. (shrink)