What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification -- the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

https://www.reciis.icict.fiocruz.br/index.php/reciis/article/download/794/1436

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

n today's fast changing and interconnected global world, researchers in a variety of areas have come to see identity as an important analytic tool for understanding schools and society. A focus on the contextually specific ways in which people act out and recognize identities allows a more dynamic approach than the sometimes overly general and static trio of "race, class, and gender." However, the term identity has taken on a great many different meanings in the literature. Rather than survey this large literature, I will sketch out but one approach that draws on one consistent strand of that literature. This is not to deny that other, equally useful approaches are possible, based on different selections from the literature.

Identity as an analytic lens for research in education

This paper considers the implications of the rise of the new molecular genetics for the ways in which we are governed and the ways in which we govern ourselves. Using examples of genetic screening and genetic discrimination in education, employment and insurance, and a case study of debates among those at risk of developing Huntington's Disease and their relatives, we suggest that some of the claims made by critics of these new developments are misplaced. While there are possibilities of genetic discrimination, the key event is the creation of the person 'genetically at risk'. But genetic risk does not imply resignation in the face of an implacable biological destiny: it induces new and active relations to oneself and one's future. In particular, it generates new forms of 'genetic responsibility', locating actually and potentially affected individuals within new communities of obligation and identification. Far from generating fatalism, the rewriting of personhood at a genetic level and its visualization ...

Genetic risk and the birth of the somatic individual

This article identi¢es an incipient and largely implicit cognitive turn in the study of ethnicity, and argues that it can be consolidated and extended by drawing on cognitive research in social psychology and anthropology. Cognitive perspectives pro- vide resources for conceptualizing ethnicity, race, and nation as perspectives on the world rather than entities in the world, for treating ethnicity, race, and nationalism together rather than as separate sub¢elds, and for re-specifying the old debate between primordialist and circumstantialist approaches.

/pdf/ethnicity-as-cognition-2z5abv4j5n.pdf

Ethnicity as Cognition

Given their increasing domination of the entertainment industry and wide spread popularity among a wide range of populations, massively multiplayer online videogames (MMOGs) are quickly becoming the form of entertainment and a major mechanism of socialization. Researchers have taken notice, and educational MMOGs are now beginning to emerge; however, there is a paucity of research on the actual culture/cognition of MMOGameplay, despite its necessity for sound theory and viable design. This paper outlines an ongoing cognitive ethnography of a currently thriving MMOG. Using discourse analytic methods, this project is developing a "thick description" (Geertz, 1973) of naturally-occurring gameplay, paying particular attention to the forms of socially and materially distributed cognition that emerge, the learning mechanisms embedded within community practice, and the ways in which participation shapes and is shaped by the situated (on-and off-screen) identities of its members. After outlining the data collection and analysis methods used, I present an illustrative analysis of selected data and preliminary findings specific to learning within this new virtual space for play.

http://comphacker.org/pdfs/631/learningMMORPGs.pdf

Learning in massively multiplayer online games

This paper is an account of the co-construction of categorical identity and personal identity among human beings. As people recognize themselves within a socially sanctioned categorical scheme, they reproduce that scheme, and hence institutional and personal reflexivity occur as a joint movement that, at the same time, can be seen as an exercise in social control. The inspirations for this account are lan Hacking's view about the distinctiveness of social kinds from natural kinds, and Dan Sperber's idea about cultural communication as a form of social epidemiology.

Making up People: On Some Looping Effects of the Human Kind - Institutional Reflexivity or Social Control?

On the Edge

To improvise means to be prepared for the unexpected, but since the unexpected is unforeseeable, we cannot be (fully) prepared. What is that status of this kind of knowledge? In answering the following question it is tempting to place improvisation within a range of unexplainable actions: something we may admire but cannot rationality clarify. In this article I will argue against such a view and, by analyzing cases of improvisation in jazz and in Argentinian tango, will underline two aspects of the rationality of the improvised conduct 1 the discipline required to acquire the improvisational habitus 2. The ability to exploit contextual affordances to generate coherent lines of improvisation. I will conclude that improvisation displays a form of rationality, albeit a form different from the instrumental rationality discussed in rational choice theory.

/pdf/improvvisa-azione-come-puo-un-agire-improvviso-essere-u5382fje7v.pdf

Improvvisa azione. Come può un agire improvviso essere razionale

L’articolo propone una riflessione sulle pratiche dell’improvvisazione, sia in ambito quotidiano, laddove l’improvvisazione si rende necessaria per “ricucire” o riorientare una situazione a fronte dell’emergenza di un imprevisto, sia in ambito creativo, e in particolare nell’esecuzione jazzistica, in cui l’improvvisazione risponde a uno specifico sistema di attese e in cui non ha la funzione di risolvere o negare la discontinuità creata dall’imprevisto, ma mira anzi a renderla “produttiva” (esteticamente), mantenendo aperta e rilanciando in modo continuo la discontinuità stessa, in un processo di negazione e affermazione. A partire da questa riflessione, l’articolo propone una riarticolazione interna del modello dei regimi di interazione elaborato da Eric Landowski suggerendo l’idea di un aggiustamento programmato.

L’improvvisazione come forma di aggiustamento programmato

Il nostro contributo riguarda due forme di danza, il tango argentino e il contact improvisation, in cui l’aggiustamento — in quanto sintassi inter-attanziale e in quanto “valore del valore” della pratica stessa — struttura la danza ed è al contempo l’oggetto della “rappresentazione” che essa genera. La prima parte sintetizza l’approccio teorico al “fenomeno danza”, per introdurre in seguito il lettore alle due danze e concentrarsi sulla loro dinamica interna, tentando di mettere in luce la tensione fra programmazione e aggiustamento che articola l’improvvisazione congiunta e struttura il processo dell’apprendimento. Una volta ricostruite — a grandi linee e in via del tutto provvisoria — le forme di interazione che le governano “da dentro”, la ricerca sposta l’attenzione sul senso che tali pratiche estetiche assumono da fuori, in quanto oggetti antropologici, rituale tramite cui danzatori reificano e presentificano una narrazione al cui centro è un’interazione per aggiustamento. Le osservazioni, anch’esse in fieri e in forma di “appunti”, si concentrano in particolare sui temi e contenuti opposti e speculari investiti nell’interazione sensibile fra i corpi e nella loro comune esperienza del presente, per avanzare nelle conclusioni alcune riflessioni relative agli immaginari di genere e più in generale di corpo e sessualità dischiusi dalla pratica.

Davide Sparti

Papers

Making up People: On Some Looping Effects of the Human Kind - Institutional Reflexivity or Social Control?

On the Edge

Improvvisa azione. Come può un agire improvviso essere razionale

L’improvvisazione come forma di aggiustamento programmato

Estetiche dell’aggiustamento. Spazio, movimento, corpi nel tango argentino e nel contact improvisation