Showing papers by "John Law published in 2013"

Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices:

Abstract: The aim of the paper is to intervene in debates about the digital and in particular framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilise and materialise social and other relations. In doing so, our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CReSC on the Social Life of Methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualisation; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilising; and non-coherence.

Slippery: Field notes in empirical ontology

Abstract: This paper explores empirical ontology by arguing that realities are enacted in practices. Using the case of Atlantic salmon, it describes a series of scientific and fish-farming practices. Since these practices differ, the paper also argues that different salmon are being enacted within those different practices. The paper explores the precarious choreographies of those practices, considers the ways in which they enact agency and also work to generate Otherness. Finally it emphasises the productivity of practices and notes that they generate not simply particular realities (for instance particular salmon), but also enact a penumbra of not quite realised realities: animals that were almost but not quite created.

ANT and Politics: Working in and on the World

Abstract: While it is possible to define ANT in a series of abstract bullet points to do so is to miss most of the point. Instead it explores and theorises the world through rich case studies. This means that, like symbolic interactionism, for ANT words are never enough: you need to practice it. In this paper we work empirically, drawing on an ANT-inflected ethnography of Norwegian salmon farming, and also dialogically. We do this because we want to show that for ANT theory is created, recreated, explored and tinkered with in particular research practices. Indeed, ANT is probably best understood as a sensibility, a set of empirical interferences in the world, a worldly practice, or a lively craft that cherishes the slow processes of knowing rather than immediately seeking results or closure. In particular it is sensible to materiality, relationality, heterogeneity, and process. At its best it understands itself as working in the world to create analytical contexts; but also on the world, to articulate and press particular contexts and their politics. As a part of this it explores the contingencies of power, generating tools to undo the inevitability of that power, while working on the assumption that other and better worlds are possible.

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF METHODS: Devices

Abstract: The collection focuses on ‘the device’ to explore how methods for knowing and handling the world have their own social life or even triple social life: how they are shaped by the social;work to format social relations; but also how they are used opportunistically by social actors in the systematic pursuit of political, economic and cultural advantage.

DEVICES AS RITUALS: Notes on enacting resistance

Abstract: In this paper we seek to expand the sense of what a device is. We draw from ethnography about contemporary farming practices, and in particular beef cattle farming, as we explore the craft of farming. Our concern with practices on the farm considers, in particular, the Cattle Tracing System (CTS) of the British Cattle Movement Service (BCMS). The CTS is important – nay financially crucial – to everyone who farms cattle in Britain, and it looks and feels like a metaphorical device. The CTS is systematic and it rests on an elaborate IT database, so it is mechanical or electronic in parts and hence it is machine-like. But are devices necessarily machine-like? We suggest that devices don't have to look or be that way. The Cattle Tracing System is a farming device that divides, separates, and classifies; it's a contrivance that is purposeful. But we also suggest that the work of the farmer in caring for cattle can also be imagined as a device or as a set of devices. In this expanded sense we treat devices as p...