Heterogeneities_DOTnet
sts issues

This page flags up current STS-related issues that puzzle or concern me. Its contents will change from time to time.

Baroque Places

Knowing or experiencing come in different forms, material, embodied and in terms of subjectivities. The 'baroque' is a different world of experience, theatrical, heterogeneous, sensible to Otherness, and deeply embedded in power relations. How might social science or humanities empirical research borrow from the baroque? These questions are explored in Assembling the Baroque
(posted 16 December, 2011)

Knowledge Spaces or Places, the 'North' and the 'South'

Postcolonialism and STS are converging in this respect: 'difference' is being understood not just politically, economically, and culturally, but also as a matter of metaphysics or ontology. For discussion see What's Wrong with a One-World World, and Cultivating Disconcertment; and (with a change in terminology to talk of 'places' rather than 'spaces') Knowledge Places.
(posted 25 September, 2011; revised 14 November, 2011)

Utopia, Tinkering and Catastrophe

Asked to consider the issue of disaster, and to place this in the context of utopian thinking, this piece on Heterogeneous Engineering and Tinkering raises questions about utopianism and, as its title suggests, revisits the notion of heterogeneous engineering to recommend non-utopian tinkering as a way of improving the human lot.
(posted 14 November, 2011)

Industrial Specificities

STS attaches itself to specificities and case-studies, and is suspicious of general models of science. But general 'neo-liberal' models of economic life are powerful, at least in the UK. Perhaps a concern with the specificities of industrial production would be better then the general 'value for money' approach adopted by the UK government to buy new trains. See Knowing What to Do? How not to Build Trains.
(posted 31 July, 2011)

Knowledge Spaces
What are knowing practices? Perhaps they include representations or their analogues, the realities being represented, a set of subjectivities or knowing locations, and a collection of implicit realities embedded and enacted in the knowing practices. Taken together we might think of these as knowledge spaces. For this argument In different modes, see The Double Social Life of Method, Cultivating Disconcertment, Collateral Realities, and most recently the Explanatory Burden.
(posted 16 March, 2011)

The UK's Economic Narratives
How well do grand narratives work in practical and economic policy terms? It wouldn't be surprising to learn that discourses of 'modernisation' or 'rebalancing' don't really engage with the specificities of, for instance, UK industrial decline. For this argument collaboratively developed see Rebalancing the Economy.
(posted 16 March, 2011)

Knowing the Social, Digitally
What's 'the digital' doing to the social? How is it representing it? And enacting it? How does this differ from older representations of the social? What are the continuities? And how might the social sciences think about this? For a CRESC working paper on these topics written with Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage see Digital Devices: Nine Theses.
(posted 23 January, 2011)

STS in the Social World - Again
Perhaps it would be useful to think of method as having a double social life. On the one hand perhaps it is shaped by the social. On the other (or at the same time) perhaps it also shapes or enacts the social. The consequence? Perhaps it is extreme obduracy. For this thought explored in a plenary presentation to the CRESC Annual Conference in 2010 see The Double Social Life of Method.
(posted 5th September, 2010)

The Elusive Enacted
If practices productively enact realities, then no doubt they also enact non-realities, or realities that didn't quite make it, others that one might think of as discarded reality-possibilities. Post-colonial theorists read against the grain in this way to discover subaltern histories. For this intuition explored in the context of animals see Slippery: Field Notes on Empirical Ontology.
(posted 5th September, 2010)

STS in the Social World
STS scholars have worked on the performativity of economics for some time, but we've thought less about how 'the social' and 'the political' get enacted as topics in their own right. This is changing. For an STSish view of how the UK 2010 general election was enacted see the CRESC blog on the social life of methods.
(posted 18th April, 2010)

The Conditions of Possibility
What can we say about enacted but hidden structuring realities? This continuing analytical and political concern leads to the genealogical territory of Michel Foucault. For an STS take on the hidden performativities of method see the paper on Collateral Realities.
(posted 29th December, 2009)

STS, Normativities and Politics
The puzzle is not the interest in politics, but the seemingly widespread STS view that general rules are necessary for good politics and proper demaractions. For an alternative situated view of politics that draws on Donna Haraway's work, see the paper on the Greer-Bush Test.
(posted 23rd December, 2009)