This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...

http://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/media/Course_files/anth-490-edward-h-hagen/marcus-1995-ethnography-in-of-the-world-system_the-emergence-of-multi-sited-ethnography.pdf

Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography

Since critics first allegedthat feminism claimed tospeak universally for all
women, feminist researchers havebeen acutely aware ofthe limitations of 
genderas a single analyticalcategory. In fact, feministsare perhaps alone in
the academy in theextent to which theyhave embraced intersectionality – the 
relationshipsamong multiple dimensions andmodalities of social relations
and subject formations – as itselfa central category ofanalysis. One could 
evensay that intersectionality isthe most important theoreticalcontribution 
that women’s studies,in conjunction with relatedfields, has made sofar.1

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426800

The Complexity of Intersectionality

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

L anguage has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter. What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/345321

Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

http://www.columbia.edu/~mvp19/RMC/M5/QualQual.pdf

Qualitative research: standards, challenges, and guidelines

Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as "creatures" which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called "outstanding," "original," and "brilliant," by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.)

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

Recent social studies of science and technology, for example, have made available a very strong social constructionist argument for all forms of knowledge claims, most certainly and especially scientific ones. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see. The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology. “Passionate detachment” requires more than acknowledged and self-critical partiality. Positioning is, therefore, the key practice in grounding knowledge organized around the imagery of vision, and much Western scientific and philosophic discourse is organized in this way. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.

/pdf/situated-knowledges-the-science-question-in-feminism-and-the-ttb7c49cb5.pdf

Situated Knowledges : The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

"The Companion Species Manifesto" is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in "significant otherness". In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway's answer to her own "Cyborg Manifesto", where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just "cyborgs for earthly survival", but also, in a more doggish idiom, "shut up and train".

The Companion Species Manifesto : Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

From the Publisher:
Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances and politics in twentieth-century
technoscience.

The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan,
encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse.
politics...Haraway has produced a volume that richly rewards the hard work and generous literacy it demands of its reader. It is challenging, powerful, and unsettling to comfortable notions worth distressing (Laura Briggs, Sojourner)

Donna Haraway

Papers

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

Situated Knowledges : The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

The Companion Species Manifesto : Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

Modest_Witness@ Second_Millennium: .Femaleman _Meets_OncoMouse