- Bangkok, Thailand
Routledge, fall 2016. Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced... more
Routledge, fall 2016.
Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters address both the promises and failures of infrastructure, tracing their complex, experimental histories and documenting variable outcomes. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.
For ToC see attachment
Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters address both the promises and failures of infrastructure, tracing their complex, experimental histories and documenting variable outcomes. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.
For ToC see attachment
Research Interests: Sociology, Social Theory, Anthropology, Media and Cultural Studies, Social Anthropology, and 13 moreActor Network Theory, Environmental Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Theory, Infrastructure Planning, Green Infrastructure, Urban Studies, Critical Geography, Urban Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, Infrastructure, Critical infrastructure protection, and Science and Technology Studies
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Sociology, Medical Sociology, Social Theory, Medical Anthropology, Ontology, and 10 moreActor Network Theory, Poststructuralism, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Theory, Computer Networks, Electronic Medical Records, Anthropology of Technology, Databases, Software, and Science and Technology Studies
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Research Interests:
This is the draft introduction for a forthcoming thematic section [featuring around 10 contributions and a post-script by Thongchai Winichakul] of Engaging Science, Technology and Society focused on "Entangled Areas" in Southeast Asia.
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The 2015 Paris declaration obligated international development organizations to assess the climate compatibility of their projects. For irrigation projects, like those negotiated between the French Agency for Development, Agence Française... more
The 2015 Paris declaration obligated international development organizations to assess the climate compatibility of their projects. For irrigation projects, like those negotiated between the French Agency for Development, Agence Française de Développement (AFD), and the Cambodian government in the early 2020s, calculations of estimated greenhouse gas (GHG)
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This supplement contains Mario Blaser's response to the concepts of Political Ontology and Practical Ontology as discussed by Casper Bruun Jensen in his paper »Practical Ontologies Redux«. The paper was published in Berliner Blätter... more
This supplement contains Mario Blaser's response to the concepts of Political Ontology and Practical Ontology as discussed by Casper Bruun Jensen in his paper »Practical Ontologies Redux«. The paper was published in Berliner Blätter (issue 84) in 2021, edited by Michaela Meurer and Kathrin Eitel. Additionally, this supplement includes a response by Jensen addressing Blaser's critique.
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Across the planet, the circular economy has grown into a complex governance agenda. This is also the case in Cambodia, where various formal and informal circular activ- ities have recently coalesced into new arrangements. However, much... more
Across the planet, the circular economy has grown into a complex governance agenda. This is also the case in Cambodia, where various formal and informal circular activ- ities have recently coalesced into new arrangements. However, much more is at stake than questions of economic governance. By tracing the circulation of diverse objects between practices guided by different worths and correspondingly variable enact- ments of circularity, the present travelogue exhibits circular worlds in tension. The relative significance of these worlds and worths is negotiated and tested at sites where representatives of many worlds are present. Later, some circular formats materialize in distributed practices, scale up, and gain in reality. Others linger in the shadows, obstructed by visions of the circular economy as a single integrated system. This exer- cise in applied metaphysics elicits circularity and its diverse potentials as patchwork effects of circulations between uncommon worlds.
[circular worlds; plastic scale-making; uncommons; waste; worths]
[circular worlds; plastic scale-making; uncommons; waste; worths]
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In the days after Bruno Latour passed away, many scholars celebrated his life by sharing lists of their favourite pieces of his. These primarily featured his newer works and well-known books, but almost none of the minor writings that... more
In the days after Bruno Latour passed away, many scholars celebrated his life by sharing lists of their favourite pieces of his. These primarily featured his newer works and well-known books, but almost none of the minor writings that first enamoured me with Latour some decades ago. In the spur of a moment, I shared a list on Twitter of my favourite lesser-known texts, which I expand on here. If a single word was to capture what I found so appealing about those older pieces, it would be irreduction: the insistence, as Latour wrote in the manifesto that back ended The Pasteurization of France, that ‘nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else’
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A tropical metropolis, Bangkok is subject to many Anthropocene transformations. While Covid-19 raged, the city’s mix of precarity and oppression gave rise to a youth protest movement that opposed the junta government and sought to... more
A tropical metropolis, Bangkok is subject to many Anthropocene transformations. While Covid-19 raged, the city’s mix of precarity and oppression gave rise to a youth protest movement that opposed the junta government and sought to intervene in Thai politics-as-usual. At the same time, a rewilding experiment aiming to undo environmental damage quietly unfolded in Benjakitti Urban Forest Park. By bringing the park and the paper together and drawing on science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, and urban theory, we elicit both as ongoing experiments in rewilding Bangkok on more- than-human terrain. Both park and protests involve overlapping critical zones where encounters between many beings and practices of worlding shape an uncommons and create problems of co-existence. Such problems call for cosmoecological diplomacy, understood as the art of giving collective shape to a more-than-human cosmos yet to arrive. Keywords: Bangkok, cosmoecology, critical zones, park, protest, rewilding, uncommons
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Variations are everywhere in reflections on knowledge. Almost a Century ago, the Polish microbiologist and amateur historian of science Ludwik Fleck described empirical discovery as emerging from transformations in thought styles... more
Variations are everywhere in reflections on knowledge. Almost a Century ago, the Polish microbiologist and amateur historian of science Ludwik Fleck described empirical discovery as emerging from transformations in thought styles “chaotically thrown together.” Around the same time, the French poet and madman Antonin Artaud characterized his own style as repetition with variation: “I always use the
same words and really I don’t seem to advance very much... but actually I am advancing more than you...cattle raisers, entomologists.” Today, we locate these figures and their very different explorations of knowledge at the beginning of two series of variations affiliated with science and madness, reason and unreason.
same words and really I don’t seem to advance very much... but actually I am advancing more than you...cattle raisers, entomologists.” Today, we locate these figures and their very different explorations of knowledge at the beginning of two series of variations affiliated with science and madness, reason and unreason.
Research Interests: Actor Network Theory, Poststructuralism, Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, and 10 moreMichel Foucault, STS (Anthropology), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Social Studies Of Science, Actor Network Theory (ANT), Actor-Network-Theory, Poststructuralist Theory, Science Studies, Ludwik Fleck, and Science and Technology Studies
Bruno Latour (1998) once insisted that “To Modernize or to Ecologize?” is the primary political question today. While scholars of actor-network theory (ANT) have tackled many different problems associated with environmentalism and climate... more
Bruno Latour (1998) once insisted that “To Modernize or to Ecologize?” is the primary political question today. While scholars of actor-network theory (ANT) have tackled many different problems associated with environmentalism and climate change, the implication of Latour’s question, that is, the need to develop a politics focused on ecological concerns rather than on the furthering of modernizing efforts, can be viewed as naming both his central project personally and, in different ways, the central project of ANT more generally. In the first part of this chapter, we seek to elucidate the changing ways in which Latour himself used actor-network theory to explore, address, and ultimately redefine the theory and practice of politics in relation to issues of climate and the environment. In the second part, we return to the more general project of ANT and consider other ways it has operated and could still operate in the future as a resource for an ethically and intellectually responsible and practically effective eco-politics.
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Research Interests:
ontological turn in anthropology
anthropology in Japan
anthropology in Japan
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Review of Michael Fisch's Anthropology of the Machine
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2019.1575890
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2019.1575890
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...For snart hundrede år siden, beskrev den polske mikrobiolog og amatørvidenskabshistoriker Ludwik Fleck empiriske opdagelser som et resultat af kaotisk sammenkastede tankestile. Omtrent samtidig karakteriserede den gale franske poet... more
...For snart hundrede år siden, beskrev den polske mikrobiolog og amatørvidenskabshistoriker Ludwik Fleck empiriske opdagelser som et resultat af kaotisk sammenkastede tankestile. Omtrent samtidig karakteriserede den gale franske poet Antonin Artaud sin egen stil som en gentagelse med variationer: “Jeg bruger altid de samme ord og det synes ikke som om min tænkning skrider fremad, men faktisk er jeg længere fremme end jer ... kvægavlere, entomologer.” I dag kan vi placere disse figurer, og deres meget forskellige udforskninger af viden og dens grænser, i begyndelsen af to poststrukturelle variationsserier, der handler om videnskab og galskab, fornuft og ufornuft...
Oversat fra engelsk original af Casper/Translated from English original by Casper.
Bidrag til en redigeret bog om samfundsvidenskabelige forskningsstilarter/Contribution to an edited book about sociological and social scientific styles of research..
Oversat fra engelsk original af Casper/Translated from English original by Casper.
Bidrag til en redigeret bog om samfundsvidenskabelige forskningsstilarter/Contribution to an edited book about sociological and social scientific styles of research..
Research Interests: Actor Network Theory, Poststructuralism, Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, and 10 moreMichel Foucault, STS (Anthropology), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Social Studies Of Science, Actor-Network-Theory, Poststructuralist Theory, science and technology studies (STS), Ludwik Fleck, and Science and Technology Studies
Actor-network theory (ANT) took form in the 1980s at the Centre de Sociologie de l'innovation of the École des mines in Paris. Based on its strong thematic focus on technological development and scientific innovation, it came to play a... more
Actor-network theory (ANT) took form in the 1980s at the Centre de Sociologie de l'innovation of the École des mines in Paris. Based on its strong thematic focus on technological development and scientific innovation, it came to play a crucial role in the emerging field of science and technology studies (STS). In conceptual terms, ANT quickly proved to be a more unusual beast than other sociological and historical approaches. Drawing eclectically on semiotics, ethnomethodology, and much else, it constructed an image of fluctuating networks comprised by human and nonhuman actors, which were, in turn, fully constituted by their mutual relations. This was a sociology of translations, which, though it has remained controversial, over time came to influence many disciplines beyond STS.
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Blog entry for Anthropological theory commons Jeff VanderMeer’s (2014) Southern Reach trilogy of weird fiction evokes a creeping relation between the weird territory called Area X and vertigo, a set of visceral, bodily affects involving... more
Blog entry for Anthropological theory commons
Jeff VanderMeer’s (2014) Southern Reach trilogy of weird fiction evokes a creeping relation between the weird territory called Area X and vertigo, a set of visceral, bodily affects involving dizziness, nausea, and a sense of hovering at the edge of the abyss, just about to take the final step. But vertigo also has a complementary conceptual dimension. It can be understood as embodying an experimental disposition (Jensen 2019) to make one available to ‘ontological openings’ (Taguchi with de la Cadena, 2017). At least that is the speculative proposition we explore in this short visit to Bangkok
Jeff VanderMeer’s (2014) Southern Reach trilogy of weird fiction evokes a creeping relation between the weird territory called Area X and vertigo, a set of visceral, bodily affects involving dizziness, nausea, and a sense of hovering at the edge of the abyss, just about to take the final step. But vertigo also has a complementary conceptual dimension. It can be understood as embodying an experimental disposition (Jensen 2019) to make one available to ‘ontological openings’ (Taguchi with de la Cadena, 2017). At least that is the speculative proposition we explore in this short visit to Bangkok
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review essay of Escobar, Arturo. 2020. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC & London, Duke University Press. Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel (eds.). 2020. Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on... more
review essay of
Escobar, Arturo. 2020. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC & London, Duke University Press.
Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel (eds.). 2020. Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. Karlsruhe/Cambridge & London: ZKM & MIT Press.
Lee, Clarissa Ai Ling. 2021. Artscience: A Curious Education. Gerakbudaya: Selangor, Malaysia.
Escobar, Arturo. 2020. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC & London, Duke University Press.
Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel (eds.). 2020. Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. Karlsruhe/Cambridge & London: ZKM & MIT Press.
Lee, Clarissa Ai Ling. 2021. Artscience: A Curious Education. Gerakbudaya: Selangor, Malaysia.
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In this article, we provide a somewhat different account from that of Nicholas Gaskill’s as to why the “philosophical wing” of science studies deserves appreciation as an important way of inheriting, rather than fundamentally breaking... more
In this article, we provide a somewhat different account from that of Nicholas Gaskill’s as to why the “philosophical wing” of science studies deserves appreciation as an important way of inheriting, rather than fundamentally breaking with, Rorty’s antifoundationalism and postepistemology. Taken together, the work of Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway, we argue, has been less about rebalancing the relative and the objective, and more about redrawing the checkerboard of knowledge into “in-disciplinary” styles of empirical philosophy. These styles rely, we suggest, on doubly held commitments to radical empirical curiosity as to the events of science and culture, on the one hand, and the promises of conceptual speculation for collective learning, on the other hand. This work, we agree, is highly important for the novel perplexities of the Anthropocene; yet not quite in the way proposed by Gaskill.
Keywords: antifoundationalism, Latour, postepistemology, Rorty, science studies
Keywords: antifoundationalism, Latour, postepistemology, Rorty, science studies
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This paper uses a series of serious games-a form of participatory modelling designed and played in Kandal, Cambodia-as an entry point for reexamining relations between development projects, participatory formats, landscape... more
This paper uses a series of serious games-a form of participatory modelling designed and played in Kandal, Cambodia-as an entry point for reexamining relations between development projects, participatory formats, landscape transformations, and sustainable futures. Critics of development and participation have shown that participatory formats simplify real-world complexities by rendering them technical. This is also the case for serious games. But contrary to what is often assumed, 'depoliticization' is not the unavoidable outcome. Instead, participatory outcomes depend on specific sociotechnical patterns of more or less generous constraints. To support collective exploration requires tinkering with these patterns of constraints to keep the boundaries between virtual and real worlds, insiders and outsiders, and the present and future relatively permeable. Generous constraints and permeable boundaries do not keep power out of participation but facilitate glimpses of different possibilities. In Kandal, they made it possible to shift from narrow technical discussions on the rehabilitation of specific preks (water channels) towards a collective exploration of sustainable futures for the full mosaic landscape. In general, we argue, serious games hold potentials as experimental systems, which are serious to the extent that they work like technologies of humility. In this capacity, they can support efforts to do difference together, and explore more-than-human worlds and divergent practical ontologies. Learning from this multiplicity matters for moving towards sustainable forms of living in Kandal and elsewhere.
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In the Forest of Virtuals: The Modes of Existence in Tokyo Godfathers Casper Bruun Jensen, Euan M. Auld & Steven D. Brown Satoshi Kon’s work is renowned for juxtaposing different orders of meaning. Unpredictable effects emerge as the... more
In the Forest of Virtuals: The Modes of Existence in Tokyo Godfathers
Casper Bruun Jensen, Euan M. Auld & Steven D. Brown
Satoshi Kon’s work is renowned for juxtaposing different orders of meaning. Unpredictable effects emerge as the viewer scans laterally across a surface with no depth and struggles to catch up with a continuously unravelling visual field. This is superflat.
Of all Kon’s films, Tokyo Godfathers seems the least superflat. It is usually depicted as a straightforward story, a kind of social commentary, or exploration of Japanese interpersonal relations and psychologies, which follows the adventures of three homeless people in search of the parents of an abandoned baby during Christmas. In contrast, this paper explores the proposition that Tokyo Godfathers is the most vertiginous and superflat of all Kon’s films.
The ‘modes of existence’ developed by Etienne Souriau and Bruno Latour help us see how Tokyo Godfathers disrupts the economy of surfaces and depths. A mode of existence can be understood as a way of going on expressive of any being or group, human or more-than-human, speculative or concrete. We are enabled explore the plural worlds of fans and viewers in the same way as we explore the expressions and effects in Tokyo Godfathers.
We begin at the surface, which is populated by a roaming set of feral actors not to mention diverse angelic messengers, a found baby, and a missing cat. They become entangled in events, which are animated by oblique forces emanating from what Souriau called the “forest of virtuals” with vertiginous consequences that exceed those in Kon’s ‘more experimental’ films. A constant stream of tiny miracles and moments of pure immanence within a hair’s breadth of death bend the series of events and create points of transition to new worlds. At the end, we are all animated sketches, figurations.
Casper Bruun Jensen, Euan M. Auld & Steven D. Brown
Satoshi Kon’s work is renowned for juxtaposing different orders of meaning. Unpredictable effects emerge as the viewer scans laterally across a surface with no depth and struggles to catch up with a continuously unravelling visual field. This is superflat.
Of all Kon’s films, Tokyo Godfathers seems the least superflat. It is usually depicted as a straightforward story, a kind of social commentary, or exploration of Japanese interpersonal relations and psychologies, which follows the adventures of three homeless people in search of the parents of an abandoned baby during Christmas. In contrast, this paper explores the proposition that Tokyo Godfathers is the most vertiginous and superflat of all Kon’s films.
The ‘modes of existence’ developed by Etienne Souriau and Bruno Latour help us see how Tokyo Godfathers disrupts the economy of surfaces and depths. A mode of existence can be understood as a way of going on expressive of any being or group, human or more-than-human, speculative or concrete. We are enabled explore the plural worlds of fans and viewers in the same way as we explore the expressions and effects in Tokyo Godfathers.
We begin at the surface, which is populated by a roaming set of feral actors not to mention diverse angelic messengers, a found baby, and a missing cat. They become entangled in events, which are animated by oblique forces emanating from what Souriau called the “forest of virtuals” with vertiginous consequences that exceed those in Kon’s ‘more experimental’ films. A constant stream of tiny miracles and moments of pure immanence within a hair’s breadth of death bend the series of events and create points of transition to new worlds. At the end, we are all animated sketches, figurations.
Research Interests:
This chapter introduces to a range of 'ontological' approaches that have emerged in the field of science and technology studies (STS). What characterizes those ontologies, in contrast with most conventional philosophical ones, are the... more
This chapter introduces to a range of 'ontological' approaches that have emerged in the field of science and technology studies (STS). What characterizes those ontologies, in contrast with most conventional philosophical ones, are the heterogeneity and variability of their elements, their composition, and their capacity for change, even dramatic change. They are effects,
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The issue explores multiple worlds and the multifarious being and becoming of and in worlds. Ethnographic studies within the framework of the ontological turn(s) reveal ecological moments of engagement with the environment (in the... more
The issue explores multiple worlds and the multifarious being and becoming of and in worlds. Ethnographic studies within the framework of the ontological turn(s) reveal ecological moments of engagement with the environment (in the broadest sense) to explore power dimensions, structural inequalities, and interpretational sovereignty over knowledge production and the constitution and forming of worlds. It brings together contributions from anthropology and STS that critically elaborate on a concept of the environment as deeply interwoven and entangled with multiple ways of being within plural temporalities in multiple localities. In doing so, the contributions urge us to pay attention to a relational otherwise that pivots in transversal (research-)fields to hint at ways to rebel against ontonorms and to intervene politically in predominant human-environment relationships.
Link to full issue: https://www.berliner-blaetter.de/index.php/blaetter
++++++ Content:
Introduction. Exploring Multifarious Worlds and the Political Within the Ontological Turn(s)
Kathrin Eitel and Michaela Meurer
Re-Imagining River Restoration. Temporalities, Landscapes and Values of the Emscher Set in a Post-Mining Environment
Stefan Laser and Estrid Sørensen
More-Than-Human Eating. Reconfiguring Environment | Body | Mind Relations in the Anthropocene
Anna Heitger, Sabine Biedermann and Jörg Niewöhner
Multispecies Monocultures. Organic Agriculture and Resistance on Indian Tea Plantations
Desirée Kumpf
Negotiating Salmon. Ontologies and Resource Management in Southwest Alaska
Paula Schiefer
Rethinking Political Ontology. Notes on a Practice-Related Approach and a Brazilian Conservation Area
Michaela Meurer
Practical Ontologies Redux
Casper Bruun Jensen
Link to full issue: https://www.berliner-blaetter.de/index.php/blaetter
++++++ Content:
Introduction. Exploring Multifarious Worlds and the Political Within the Ontological Turn(s)
Kathrin Eitel and Michaela Meurer
Re-Imagining River Restoration. Temporalities, Landscapes and Values of the Emscher Set in a Post-Mining Environment
Stefan Laser and Estrid Sørensen
More-Than-Human Eating. Reconfiguring Environment | Body | Mind Relations in the Anthropocene
Anna Heitger, Sabine Biedermann and Jörg Niewöhner
Multispecies Monocultures. Organic Agriculture and Resistance on Indian Tea Plantations
Desirée Kumpf
Negotiating Salmon. Ontologies and Resource Management in Southwest Alaska
Paula Schiefer
Rethinking Political Ontology. Notes on a Practice-Related Approach and a Brazilian Conservation Area
Michaela Meurer
Practical Ontologies Redux
Casper Bruun Jensen
Drawing on STS, anthropological, and geographical studies of infrastructure and extended forms of media theory, this paper examines events and processes unfolding around the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Cambodia as an ontological... more
Drawing on STS, anthropological, and geographical studies of infrastructure and extended forms of media theory, this paper examines events and processes unfolding around the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Cambodia as an ontological experiment. The initiate is elicited as a massively distributed arrangement for making futures the contours of which no one can foresee with much precision. After sketching some conflicting diagnoses of the BRI, I turn to its implementation in Cambodia. I move between two coastal towns, Kampot, where its impacts are still barely felt, and Sihanoukville, which has been greatly disrupted. These settings facilitate characterization of the BRI's scale-making capacities as consequent upon fuzzy relations between the infrastructure core and heterogeneous companions and parasites attaching to the initiative in search of untapped potentials opening at the edges. These complex developments provide the backdrop for a more speculative extrapolation of an infrastructural strategy oriented to emerging potentials. Over time, I suggest in conclusion, this strategy of maturation is likely to have dramatic social, environmental and climatic implications in Cambodia and far beyond.
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Blog post for NatureCulture series "On other terms."
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Draft chapter for handbook of alternative futurisms
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A genealogy of sorts of practical ontology/ontologies and their relation to ontology in STS, the ontological turn in anthropology, and political ontology.
Draft of a piece written for the Berliner Blatter, publication tbd.
Draft of a piece written for the Berliner Blatter, publication tbd.
Research Interests: Social Theory, Cultural Geography, Anthropology of Science, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Theory, and 15 moreGilles Deleuze, STS (Anthropology), Political Ontology, Anthropology of Technology, Bruno Latour, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics, Actor-Network Theory, Ontological Turn, Annemarie Mol, Anthropology of Infrastructure, Practical Ontology, and Science and Technology Studies
Introduction to special issue of EASTS on material itineraries and southeast asian urban transformations with contributions from Miki Namba, Gergely Mohacsi, Kathrin Eitel, Jakkrit Sangkhamanee and Casper Bruun Jensen.
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In Khmer, the word prek designates a connection between things. In Kandal province in Cambodia, preks crisscross the landscape, connecting rivers with floodplains, supporting rich ecologies and a variety of livelihoods. Drawing on science... more
In Khmer, the word prek designates a connection between things. In Kandal province in Cambodia, preks crisscross the landscape, connecting rivers with floodplains, supporting rich ecologies and a variety of livelihoods. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and critical water research, this paper explores prek(s) as a multiplicity. Rather than taking the prek as a passive object around which various practices occur, we examine how prek(s) are enacted as ontologically different: as irrigation infrastructure, as pathway to rice intensification, as device for Cambodian state-making, and as climate-friendly agricultural development. After analyzing interference patterns between enactments and their scale-making effects in- and outside the Mekong floodplains, we make explicit our own ontological politics. Focused on sustaining multiple uses and ecosystems, “our” prek is a socionatural mosaic landscape where many human and more-than-human actors and practices can co-exists. This ontological politics, we suggest, has implications for planetary environmental knowledges and delta management far beyond Kandal’s landscape.
Key words: Infrastructure, Enactments, Ontological Politics, Mekong delta, Cambodia
Key words: Infrastructure, Enactments, Ontological Politics, Mekong delta, Cambodia
Research Interests: Political Ecology, Irrigation, Cambodia, Critical Geography, STS (Anthropology), and 9 moreAnthropology of Development, Anthropology of Technology, Mekong Studies, Critical Development Studies, Anthropology of water, Annemarie Mol, Anthropology of Infrastructure, Practical Ontology, and Science and Technology Studies
Comments for Virtual presidential plenary for CIES 2020. April 22, 2020.
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Experimenting with optimization. Post-critical perspectives on monitoring and evaluation in an environmental organisation In this article we investigate a group of environmental consultants in their efforts to create a local standard for... more
Experimenting with optimization. Post-critical perspectives on monitoring and evaluation in an environmental organisation
In this article we investigate a group of environmental consultants in their efforts to create a local standard for monitoring and evaluating development projects. The point of these efforts is at once to improve the quality of projects and internal communication. We describe them as experiments in optimization. In particular, our analysis focuses on monitoring and evaluating as a form of optimization that generously constrains the world’s complexity in order to facilitate specific kinds of work. Contrary to a prevalent view that problematizes monitoring and evaluation as inherently reductive activities, we thus engage such practices as non-reductive. This post-critical perspective further enables us to compare the knowledge work of environmental consultants and of anthropologists. While reduction of complexity are important aspects of relevant forms of optimization in both kinds of work, these fields are premised on different registers of valuation, which might be brought into fruitful (post-critical) contact.
In this article we investigate a group of environmental consultants in their efforts to create a local standard for monitoring and evaluating development projects. The point of these efforts is at once to improve the quality of projects and internal communication. We describe them as experiments in optimization. In particular, our analysis focuses on monitoring and evaluating as a form of optimization that generously constrains the world’s complexity in order to facilitate specific kinds of work. Contrary to a prevalent view that problematizes monitoring and evaluation as inherently reductive activities, we thus engage such practices as non-reductive. This post-critical perspective further enables us to compare the knowledge work of environmental consultants and of anthropologists. While reduction of complexity are important aspects of relevant forms of optimization in both kinds of work, these fields are premised on different registers of valuation, which might be brought into fruitful (post-critical) contact.
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Bidrag til dansk håndbog om STS [draft]
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Position statement prepared for a workshop on 'The University in the Anthropocene' held at Aarhus University, Dec 18, 2019.
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Brief "review" plus commentary on cli fi in the context of comparative education
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Cambodia’s urban environments have changed rapidly over the last decades, and perhaps especially over the last few years. After the 2018 election, democracy was widely perceived as eroding. This change created a new context for... more
Cambodia’s urban environments have changed rapidly over the last decades, and perhaps especially over the last few years. After the 2018 election, democracy was widely perceived as eroding. This change created a new context for real-estate investment, which appeared more stable than ever. As investments exploded, the already fast-paced construction business accelerated. Combining an STS focus on distributed agency with an anthropological interest in practices of worlding, this paper analyzes urban transformations in Phnom Penh (and Sihanoukville) as effects of assemblage. Setting in motion new material itineraries, patterned flows of people and things, the construction boom has been felt across the urban spectrum. Modularizing and segmenting cities, and filtering populations, these itineraries have also catalyzed changing perspectives on life in the cities, on local and regional relations with “the Chinese,” and on what the future has in store for Cambodia. Interspersing street-level observations and ethnographic materials with media reports and political commentary, I show tuk tuk drivers, journalists, businessmen, politicians and academic scholars to be simultaneously engaged in assembling the city. Their vastly different projects and practices generate different urban scales—economic, cultural, political, and ethnic—which co-exist, layer, or overlap—incongruently. The resulting image is kaleidoscopic: Phnom Penh kaleidoscope.
Keywords: Cambodia, Construction, Material itineraries, Phnom Penh, Scale-making, Sihanoukville, Urban assemblage, Worlding
Keywords: Cambodia, Construction, Material itineraries, Phnom Penh, Scale-making, Sihanoukville, Urban assemblage, Worlding
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Introduction to special issue of OA journal natureculture https://www.natcult.net/ on Anthropology and science fiction [Experiments in thinking across worlds]... more
Introduction to special issue of OA journal natureculture
https://www.natcult.net/ on Anthropology and science fiction [Experiments in thinking across worlds]
wp-content/uploads/2019/07/natcult_vol5_Experiments_in_Thinking_across_Worlds.pdf
https://www.natcult.net/ on Anthropology and science fiction [Experiments in thinking across worlds]
wp-content/uploads/2019/07/natcult_vol5_Experiments_in_Thinking_across_Worlds.pdf
Research Interests: Social and Cultural Anthropology, Literary Theory, Michel Serres, Science Fiction, Anthropology Of Science (Science Technology And Society), and 8 moreSTS (Anthropology), Literature And Science, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Multispecies Ethnography, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Studies, and Science and Technology Studies
Comment on “Where Is East Asia in STS?” by Wen-yuan Lin and John Law, published in EASTS.
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Starting from a development pilot project that aimed to introduce new water accounting procedures to Cambodia, this paper examines interactions between technical experts from abroad and government officials. Drawing on STS, performativity... more
Starting from a development pilot project that aimed to introduce new water accounting procedures to Cambodia, this paper examines interactions between technical experts from abroad and government officials. Drawing on STS, performativity theory, and the anthropology of development, the paper shows that the dynamics at the project interface are characterized by parallel and incongruent performances. Visiting technical experts work on the assumption that they are operating at a science-policy interface. Meanwhile, officials align with the demands of technical rationality, aware of its discrepancy with the performance of politics outside the project frame. Two versions of project realities and their relation to broader Cambodian realities are thus performed simultaneously, but awareness of this is not evenly distributed, with significant consequences for the (development) aspiration to transfer knowledge. The case study feeds into a subsequent characterization of a more general pattern of sparks and fizzles, in which projects continuously start up, while efforts to bootstrap technology transfer peters out as they end. This pattern may be endemic to development projects that operate on the assumption of a science-policy interface that isn’t really there.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This paper explores how the Anthropocene, a scene of ontological transformation, reconfigures disciplinary knowledge-making and challenges conventional forms of critique in the social sciences. I examine these interrelated questions by... more
This paper explores how the Anthropocene, a scene of ontological transformation, reconfigures disciplinary knowledge-making and challenges conventional forms of critique in the social sciences. I examine these interrelated questions by considering the emergent relations between eels, researchers and their knowledge practices, and global environmental change, over the last century. The argument unfolds in two acts. The first centers on the Danish scientist Johannes Schmidt, whose obsession with eels was pursued over three decades and 65.000 kilometers of ocean expeditions. In many ways pioneering, Schmidt’s exclusive focus on the domain of ‘nature’ exemplifies what the sociologist of science Andrew Pickering terms ‘disciplinary dualism.’ The second act focuses on the recent emergence of the Anthropocene eel. Characterized by coupled becomings and multispecies entanglements this hybrid eel is threatened with extinction. Eel populations and disciplinary dualism, it appears, are both collapsing. This dramatic situation raises important questions about theory and politics in the Anthropocene. Confronted with catastrophically entangled and ontologically slippery objects like the Anthropocene eel, the epistemological practice of critique faces significant challenges. In conclusion, I argue that navigating the Anthropocene requires experimentation with ontological propositions adequate to the increasingly critical states of the world.
Keywords: Anthropocene, becoming, critique, eels, ontology, propositions.
Keywords: Anthropocene, becoming, critique, eels, ontology, propositions.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
As its title indicates, this issue of ARCP introduces Deleuze’s project on a philosophy of difference in its critical intersection with psychology. After a general introduction, this special issue employs the distinctions... more
As its title indicates, this issue of ARCP introduces Deleuze’s project on a philosophy of difference in its critical intersection with psychology. After a general introduction, this special issue employs the distinctions Philosophy/Science/Art articulated in his later work with Felix Guattari – What is Philosophy? – to frame an interrogation of the ways in which his project makes psychology rethink many of its disciplinary foundations and brings a gust of fresh (and critical) air to its practices.
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tekst om klimafiktion og klimaforandring publiceret for bloggen
https://forfatternesklimaaksjon.no/
https://forfatternesklimaaksjon.no/
Research Interests:
In recent years, threatened deltas have emerged as a significant matter of concern in numerous fields. While Earth System science and social-ecological systems focus on topics like global water circulation and sediment transport, social... more
In recent years, threatened deltas have emerged as a significant matter of concern in numerous fields. While Earth System science and social-ecological systems focus on topics like global water circulation and sediment transport, social scientists tend to consider the problems facing particular deltas in the context of modernization or (post)-colonial development. There is nevertheless broad agreement that the delta crisis raises fundamental questions about modern approaches to infrastructure planning. Thus, environmental and sustainability scientists have come to recognize “the social” as integral to the delta crisis. This understanding of ‘the social,’ however, takes two quite different forms. As an object of social-ecological systems research, the social is modeled alongside ecological systems. However, as a context for scientific interventions in environmental policy it appears as an obstacle to achieving sustainable delta policies. Based on a careful examination of Earth System science and associated discourses, we show that this instability of “the social”, combined with the ambition to integrate ‘it’ in an encompassing system poses serious problems for interdisciplinary delta research and for more imaginative and inclusive collaborative efforts to tackle the delta crisis—including, but going considerably beyond, policy and governance. Rather than integrative systems, we argue that the situation requires the creation of sophisticated conjunctions of epistemologies, methods, and practices. Such conjunctions, we suggest, pave the way for a cosmo-ecological approach, where social, environmental and sustainability sciences work together with designers, urban planners, policy-makers, and affected or concerned citizens on solving multi-scalar delta problems by working across their differences.
Research Interests: Environmental Science, Resilience, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Social-Ecological Systems, Environmental Anthropology, and 6 moreEcological Anthropology, Anthropology Of Science (Science Technology And Society), STS (Anthropology), Global Environmental Change, Environmental Sustainability, and Science and Technology Studies
Bruno Latour has become famous for his critique of critique, and of critical theory. To many in the social sciences and humanities, this is one of the main attractions of Latour's position. To others, it embodies everything problematic,... more
Bruno Latour has become famous for his critique of critique, and of critical theory. To many in the social sciences and humanities, this is one of the main attractions of Latour's position. To others, it embodies everything problematic, if not naïve, about it. In this chapter, however, we argue that the tendency to reduce Latour's position to a generalized 'critique of critique'—whether evaluated positively or negatively— carries the risk of losing sight of more particular and, in fact, often quite critical-reconstructive intellectual and political projects, in which he has been involved over the years. Moreover, the 'anti-critical reduction' also underestimates how deeply entangled Latour's encompassing vision for a thoroughly redistributed, non-modern knowledge space is with the humanities and its critical legacies. To offer a more adequate account, we outline relations between Latour's non-modern space and the redistribution of critique in four steps. Starting with Latour's inspiration from Michel Serres' interpretive strategies, we continue to examine his version of critical proximity as a mode of social science, consider his political-theoretical engagements with ecological issues and end with his belated (post-)post-colonial reckoning with the (Euro-American) Moderns at the present time of planetary destruction. Rather than a general anti-critical stance, we show, Latour's a-critical attitude has taken quite mixed forms and generated divergent effects. We suggest that the a-critical terrain Latour has mapped throughout his career offers a rich set of resources for the humanities as they continue to redistribute their own critical attachments.
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Japanese translation of an earlier version of "Thinking the earth: New disciplinary alliances in the anthropocene" The earth has crossed several thresholds thought to maintain global ecological stability; if this process does not stop... more
Japanese translation of an earlier version of "Thinking the earth: New disciplinary alliances in the anthropocene"
The earth has crossed several thresholds thought to maintain global ecological stability; if this process does not stop soon, earth systems may spin into positive feedback loops with unpredictable and likely catastrophic outcomes. Defined as a the period where humans began leaving measurable marks in geological strata, and connected with global warming and climate change, this new era is referred to as the anthropocene. Having simultaneously entered natural science, social science and public discourses, the anthropocene shows up in disciplines as varied as geology, marine biology, literary theory and anthropology and extends into anthropocene arts and climate fiction. Given the variability and magnitude of the challenges encompassed by the anthropocene, it is increasingly evident that tackling them will require new disciplinary alliances drawing on a range of knowledges across the humanities-social science-natural science spectrum. At issue, is nothing less than the need to ‘think the new earth.’ The paper discusses the challenges and opportunities for social science and the humanities in light of these transformations.
The earth has crossed several thresholds thought to maintain global ecological stability; if this process does not stop soon, earth systems may spin into positive feedback loops with unpredictable and likely catastrophic outcomes. Defined as a the period where humans began leaving measurable marks in geological strata, and connected with global warming and climate change, this new era is referred to as the anthropocene. Having simultaneously entered natural science, social science and public discourses, the anthropocene shows up in disciplines as varied as geology, marine biology, literary theory and anthropology and extends into anthropocene arts and climate fiction. Given the variability and magnitude of the challenges encompassed by the anthropocene, it is increasingly evident that tackling them will require new disciplinary alliances drawing on a range of knowledges across the humanities-social science-natural science spectrum. At issue, is nothing less than the need to ‘think the new earth.’ The paper discusses the challenges and opportunities for social science and the humanities in light of these transformations.
Research Interests: Social Theory, Cultural Geography, Climate Change, Political Theory, Actor Network Theory, and 14 moreResilience, Environmental Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Anthropology, Ecological Anthropology, Cultural Theory, Adaptation, Ecology, STS (Anthropology), Environmental Humanities, Isabelle Stengers, New Materialism, Anthropocene, and Science and Technology Studies
[draft chapter]
Experimental question posed as a contribution to ANT Companion, ed. Blok, Farias and Roberts, forthcoming Routledge.
Experimental question posed as a contribution to ANT Companion, ed. Blok, Farias and Roberts, forthcoming Routledge.
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[In Danish]
Chapter on social studies of technology for a handbook in sociology (ed Blok and Bagge Laustsen), forthcoming 2018.
Chapter on social studies of technology for a handbook in sociology (ed Blok and Bagge Laustsen), forthcoming 2018.
Research Interests:
In recent decades, scientists have developed a wide array of hydrological, hydrodynamic, and other models to understand the dynamics of the Mekong river basin. Indeed, the area has been described as ‘flooded’ with models. Drawing on STS... more
In recent decades, scientists have developed a wide array of hydrological, hydrodynamic, and other models to understand the dynamics of the Mekong river basin. Indeed, the area has been described as ‘flooded’ with models. Drawing on STS and the philosophy of modeling – which has described models as mediating instruments – the first half of this paper discusses how and why this proliferation has occurred, focusing on the Cambodian context. Highlighting that models are developed comparatively, with reference to one another, the analysis shows how they have generated a partially connected ecology of comparisons. As each model makes its own image of the Mekong, the ecology as a whole creates a kaleidoscopic effect. In principle, this ecology is important for that of environmental policy-making. In practice, however, it is tremendously difficult for scientists to bridge the ecologies. Examining two cases of NGO-based modeling aiming to influence policy, the second half of the paper offers a comparative analysis of the challenges modeling knowledge faces in Mekong environmental politics.
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This paper explores “how ethnographic collaboration configures its data” via examination of three relations: between ethnography as method and writing, between leaky empirical and conceptual sets, and between ethnographic and rhetorical... more
This paper explores “how ethnographic collaboration configures its data” via examination of three relations: between ethnography as method and writing, between leaky empirical and conceptual sets, and between ethnographic and rhetorical effects. I suggest that writing entails keeping the research imagination alive to two simultaneous processes of scaling—of the empirical within the text, and of diverse sets of literature in mutual relation—always with a specific focus and orientation. What emerges is an image of both ‘ethnographer’ and ‘data’ as hybrid and transformable companions.
I illustrate with reference to two quite different texts about emerging Mekong realities. Both are elicited as experimental additions to worlds. In that capacity, they are capable of generating reality effects but those effects cannot be preordained. I conclude that ethnographic collaborations find no other grounds than dic cur hic—why, here, now—or as Isabelle Stengers has formulated it “say why you say it.”
I illustrate with reference to two quite different texts about emerging Mekong realities. Both are elicited as experimental additions to worlds. In that capacity, they are capable of generating reality effects but those effects cannot be preordained. I conclude that ethnographic collaborations find no other grounds than dic cur hic—why, here, now—or as Isabelle Stengers has formulated it “say why you say it.”
Research Interests:
In recent years, climate fiction has exploded on the literary scene. Meanwhile, climate change is occurring in the Mekong river basin. In this paper, I put these phenomena into contact in an ontologically multi-sited ethnography of... more
In recent years, climate fiction has exploded on the literary scene. Meanwhile, climate change is occurring in the Mekong river basin. In this paper, I put these phenomena into contact in an ontologically multi-sited ethnography of climate change and climate fiction. Rather than assuming a radical separation between real and fictive worlds, this entails a comparison that moves back and forth between the realms. On the one hand, as objects of ethnography, works of cli-fi can be examined in terms of the climate-changed worlds they construct and the responses generated within those worlds. On the other hand, as objects for ethnography, these worlds and responses can be laterally compared with different situations, like those found around the Mekong basin. Inhabiting a zone of indiscernibility between Mekong climate change and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-up Girl, I suggest that lateral comparisons of climate change and climate fiction make it possible to broaden the imaginative spectrum of climate futures and to recover the “strange and adventurous task of believing in this world.”
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Special Issue Modes of Existence, Mechademia: Second Arc, Volume 15, Number 1, Fall 2022 (Co-authors: Casper Bruun Jensen, Euan Auld, Steven D. Brown, Paul Wells, Frenchy Lunning, Nicolle Lamerichs, Miguel Cesar, Yezi Yeo, Amanda Weiss, Kazumi Nagaike, Ziyi Lin, Stevie Suan, Yuji Sone, Miles Lee)more
Étienne Souriau and Bruno Latour explore the relations between multiple modes of existence, including their psychological, spiritual, physical, and fictive inflections. This volume of Mechademia: Second Arc, Vol.15.1 includes original... more
Étienne Souriau and Bruno Latour explore the relations between multiple modes of existence, including their psychological, spiritual, physical, and fictive inflections. This volume of Mechademia: Second Arc, Vol.15.1 includes original essays on their approaches to fictional modes of existence to bear on the multitudes of fandom’s love affairs with the characters found in anime, manga, theater, cosplay, and YouTube Japanese streaming platforms.
Japanese fiction is certainly swarming with metamorphic entities. Visible and invisible beings, cyborgs, and chimeras unsettle traditional manners of being, question the stability of spatiotemporal relations, and stir up passions. But which aspects of the work of fiction can compel a fan to fall in love with it? Can this attraction be summoned by the quality of the drawings of manga, the charism of a virtual YouTuber, the particular voice of the author, or the vividness of anime characters?
Souriau and Latour’s overviews of the implications of the modes of existence touch upon everyone’s responsibility toward building a better future. They evoke the creative contribution of individuals who participate in the achievement of projects larger than themselves. This issue also explores how similar aspirations can compel some fans to perpetuate the legacy of their favorite anime and manga characters by writing about them on online forums or by remediating works they admire.
Japanese fiction is certainly swarming with metamorphic entities. Visible and invisible beings, cyborgs, and chimeras unsettle traditional manners of being, question the stability of spatiotemporal relations, and stir up passions. But which aspects of the work of fiction can compel a fan to fall in love with it? Can this attraction be summoned by the quality of the drawings of manga, the charism of a virtual YouTuber, the particular voice of the author, or the vividness of anime characters?
Souriau and Latour’s overviews of the implications of the modes of existence touch upon everyone’s responsibility toward building a better future. They evoke the creative contribution of individuals who participate in the achievement of projects larger than themselves. This issue also explores how similar aspirations can compel some fans to perpetuate the legacy of their favorite anime and manga characters by writing about them on online forums or by remediating works they admire.