In March 2009, a group of us came together at Lancaster University for a one-day workshop to talk about issues related to materiality and specificity. The speakers for the day included John Law, Nick Bingham, and Steve Hinchcliffe and the event was organized by John Law, Endre Danyi, Michaela Spencer, Jennifer Tomomitsu & Natalie Gill
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If you’re interested in seeing the talks from the event, a few of them were video recorded. Please visit this link to watch them. Below is the original call for the workshop but more information can also be found on the STS mixtures webpage: http://stsmixtures.wordpress.com/workshop/
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STS likes to work on specificities, material, and social, on how matters get done, and how heterogeneous practices performatively assemble realities. This attention to specificity throws up problems, empirical and theoretical:
- Seeing Specificity: We have to overcome the self-evidence of practice: to find ways of seeing and attending to what may otherwise seem mundane. We often need to put common-sense accounts of practices to one side. But how? Is there an aesthetic here to do with beauty? To be able to relate to/deal with the specific, do we need to see the entities involved as interesting, and beautiful.
- An Aesthetics of Scale: Then we face the question: what is small? Does attention to specificity produce the sense of smallness (as opposed to thinking in big, generally relevant stories)? What’s the difference between studies of specific cases and cases used as examples/illustrations? What’s the difference (if any) between anthropological and STS understandings of specificity?
- Narrating Specificity: We also have to find ways through specificities and materials to narrate these by discovering or imputing patterns. Writing specificity requires us to slow down, and attend to details. This is when the boring becomes fascinating, the small becomes beautiful. But this raises empirical questions: How much (specificity) is enough? How to make lots from little? And how to make little from lots?
- Making a Difference: If we narrate, then our stories are performative. What kinds of links do we make (up) when writing our stories? How do we make our stories transportable to other STS stories or disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. One issue is that our stories of specificity don’t readily map onto ‘big theory’ stories. Does this matter? And again if our stories are performative, what do we want them to do? What kinds of differences would we like to make?
All of which is difficult! And this is the rationale for this workshop. If we didn’t know better, we would say that this is about sharing ‘best practice’ – but STS tells us that there is no ‘best practice’.
