sociology: the treadmill of production, risk society, and ecological modernization. We conclude that these theories are not clear about either what expertise is or how to balance scientism and powerism. Therefore, we turn to science and technology studies
Search Results
Environmental Expertise as Group Belonging
Environmental Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies
Rolf Lidskog and Göran Sundqvist
Ocean Thinking
The Work of Ocean Sciences, Scientists, and Technologies in Producing the Sea as Space
Susannah Crockford
ocean sciences to human knowledge about Earth. In bringing together work on oceanography in science and technology studies with the sociology and anthropology of ocean sciences, this review article draws into view the ways in which science is implicated
Introduction
Oceans
Amelia Moore and Jerry K. Jacka
-determination and sovereignty of indigenous hunting communities are challenged in an era of global protection of cetaceans. With “Ocean Thinking,” Susannah Crockford uses a science and technology studies approach to understand how the work of oceanographers
The Ontological Turn
Taking Different Worlds Seriously
Andrew Pickering
nonhuman world we all inhabit. There’s nothing very disturbing there after all. But in the twenty-first century, the social constructivist consensus has broken down, and both anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) have taken an ontological
Raw Data
Making Relations Matter
Antonia Walford
of contemporary work in anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) ( Haraway 1991 ; Latour 1993 , 1999 ; Viveiros de Castro 1998 , 2004 ). But this observation has other related and equally kaleidoscopic effects, one of which I will
Unbuilt and Unfinished
The Temporalities of Infrastructure
Ashley Carse and David Kneas
place ( Peyton 2017 ; Yarrow 2017 ). Science and technology studies (STS) scholars reimagine technological failure and success ( Latour 1996 ; Rankin 2017 ). Historians reconsider historiographical assumptions and interpretive norms ( Keiner
Tending to Suspension
Abstraction and Apparatuses of Atmospheric Attunement in Matsutake Worlds
Timothy Choy
Scenes from mushroom technosciences illuminate forms, practices, and temporalities of atmospheric attunement. This article reanimates moments from scientific literature where chemists and mycologists chase elusive smells and spores, explicating how scientists’ experimental apparatuses of attunement arrange conditions for matsutake to be reduced and concentrated toward the goal of sensibility. Reduction and concentration do more than translate atmospheric elusiveness into specification; achieved through grinding, evaporating, and remixing, they condition a ‘tending to suspension’. Tending to suspension amplifies qualities and throws subjects and sensorial attention into the middle of volumes and durations. ‘Tending’ implies care as well as a ‘tending toward’—the sense that something may develop a tendency. Experimental apparatuses of atmospheric attunement, tending to such tendings, model a method for anthropological study of diffuse objects.
Introduction
Museums, Power, Knowledge
Tony Bennett
Michel Foucault argues that truth is not to be emancipated from power. Given that museums have played a central role in these “regimes of truth,” Foucault’s work was a reference point for the debates around “the new museology” in the 1980s and remains so for contemporary debates in the field. In this introduction to a new volume of selected essays, the use of Foucault’s work in my previous research is considered in terms of the relations between museums, heritage, anthropology, and government. In addition, concepts from Pierre Bourdieu, science and technology studies, Actor Network Theory, assemblage theory, and the post-Foucaultian literature on governmentality are employed to examine various topics, including the complex situation of Indigenous people in contemporary Australia.
Mobilizing Transport
Media, Actor-worlds, and Infrastructures
Gabriele Schabacher
The article deals with the relationship between media and transportation infrastructures and analyzes their links to the concept of mobility. It examines the assumption that infrastructure systems themselves are mobile, in the sense that they develop and have to be maintained constantly. According to such a perspective, they are to be considered not primarily as “structures,“ but as specific processes of mobilization (infrastructuring) that constitute the basis for mobility in the sense of transport and movement. Drawing on historical knowledge of transportation, it will be shown that a broad understanding of traffic as exchange, communication, and transportation has narrowed in the twentieth century, whereby the originally implied idea of transport as transformation became suppressed. Recent approaches in mobility studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) can be combined in a fruitful way to unfold the specific dynamics of infrastructure as a process of mobilization (Callon) and technical mediation (Latour).
Maryon McDonald
In Social Anthropology, we are perhaps wearily aware now of certain dualities – nature and culture and subject and object amongst them - that ought long since to have been taken out of our analytical tool kits and treated ethnographically instead. Unsurprisingly perhaps, important elements of this were first effected by anthropologists studying Europe and then later refined and elaborated, albeit sometimes in a less ethnographic vein, by that largely ANT-fed beast known as STS (Science and Technology Studies) or more recently by AST (Anthropology of Science and Technology). At the same time, space has been made within both the social and natural sciences for the mutual articulations by which each might not simply incorporate the other but both can imagine themselves to be composing, together, some new middle ground.