Flows, Doing, Edges II
Participants:
Paul Barratt, University of Hull
Hybrid climbing bodies: Technological engagements through ascension. My research explores the technologically mediated engagement between the climber and the mountain and crag environment, revealing how (new) technology changes the climbing experience. The theoretical focus sees technology as active and enabling, investigating the notion of hybridity. Given this approach I will examine the extent to which the climber’s ability is reliant upon a seamless fusion between body-mind and kit. The fieldwork for this research has been undertaken via a qualitative methodology of one-to-one, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a sample of 35 climbers, based in Yorkshire and the Peak District. The climber’s relationship to their gear whilst climbing was the focus of the interviews, with climbers recounting vivid accounts of their situated interactions with their ‘gear’ whilst climbing. Accounts expressed the complex nature of the climber-gear relationship with many differing factors coming together to physically and mentally enable the climb to take place with the desired experiential outcomes. Theoretically I am taking a relational approach to examine the complexity of the mediated climbing experience, with the aim of establishing the corporeal role that technology plays, the dynamics of the hybrid fusion, and, linking with risk research, the experiential implications of this. As well as the primary data collected from interviews I also have a range of other examples from my own personal experience of climbing, as well as, climbing articles, and interesting topics and debates taken from dedicated climbing internet forums. Being in the third year of study I am now faced with the task of coding and analysing my transcripts as well as writing up the results and feel a workshop such as this could help me make the most of the data that I have collected.
Uli Beisel, Open University
‘Who gets bitten? Malaria control in Ghana‘
Malaria is a disease that emerges out of an encounter of three species – the plasmodium parasite, the anopheles mosquito and humans. The object of scholarly attention hence has to be the meeting in itself – the fragile but potentially destructive moment when the lives of three distinct and very much alive species intersect. More concretely, malaria control in Ghana happens in a space where lively mosquitoes meet gold mining companies, fast evolving parasites encounter enthusiastic vaccine developers and where poor people still struggle to pay for antimalarial drugs. My doctoral research aims to tease out some of the complex intertwinnings of mosquito-parasite-human interactions, health politics and political economy around malaria control in Ghana.
James Clarke, University of Bristol
My research is interested in the current care strategy for people with learning disability in the UK: that of person centred planning (PCP). PCP is part of wider current changes in health care provision in the UK with a move towards a more personalised and choice driven approach. However, my research is interested in how this, more personalised health care, is actually being deployed within practices given that, as a universal strategy, it is actually being performed in many different practices and plays out through many different emergent relationships. In this sense then, if we focus upon the various practices in which this strategy is deployed what emerges is not a singular deployment of person centredness nor a singular uncomplicated deployment of choice but instead multiple performances of being person centred and ways of enacting choice. These multiple performances nevertheless still co-exist in a singular strategy that is translatable across practices: the universal understanding of a ‘personalisation agenda’; in health. It is therefore this emergence of the relationship between multiple enactments of something alongside a singular translation that is the key concern. To think through this concern my research draws from, but in no means exclusively, thinkers such as: Deleuze, Foucault, Latour, Law, Mol, Stengers and Thrift.
Endre Danyi, Lancaster University
Politics, and related concepts such as citizenship, democracy and publics have gradually become central themes in Science and Technology Studies (STS). By concentrating on specific sites and material practices of ordering, several STS scholars have challenged the universalist, humanist, discourse-centric assumptions of political theory. In one way or another, they have convincingly shown that politics is done as much in labs, hospitals, farms, or high-tech innovation centres as in ‘big and important’ political institutions. But how do these diverse sites and practices relate to conventional forms and technologies of political representation? My PhD research aims to contribute to ongoing discussions about materiality and politics by extending the STS gaze to one of the symbols of democracy: the parliament. It focuses on the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest and argues that this seemingly singular site is constantly caught up in (and shaped by) diverse political narratives. Following a material semiotic approach I argue that narratives about the origins of democracy, the operation of a political regime, and acts of decision-making are not separate stories about the same parliament, but produce an object that is multiple and non-coherent. What I’m interested in is the ways in which specific arrangements of subjects and objects define such non-coherent political sites, and render certain futures real(istic) while keeping others invisible.
Allan Day, Goldsmiths, University of London
My PhD topic is open source software production. Open source is a rich, diverse movement, with distinct cultural, legal, economic, political and technological features. Part social movement, part mode of production, it defies easy categorisation. My work on open source has a number of central themes – the relationship between discourse and practice, the role of emotion and bodily experience, and a more personal story of my increasing participation in the open source movement. Within my thesis, I’m going to be examining how software programs circulate and enrol humans and non-humans, the connection between ownership and inspiration, and the relationship between ideology and methodology. My research is distinctly ethnographic – I’m participating in the activities I’m studying, and a major part of my research involves my learning to be a programmer and open source contributor.
Joe Deville, Goldsmiths, University of London
My research aims to examine some of the ways in which forms of consumer credit in the UK are both performed and become implicated in people’s lives. More particularly, it explores some of the consequences of considering forms of consumer credit as a relational coming together of a series of human and non-human actors, implicated in shaping questions of morality and difference. This means not simply examining the ways in which money is given ‘meaning’, but paying attention to the processual materialities of consumer credit, to how a range of socio-technical processes become immanent to the always incomplete individuation of money, as well as of the users of money themselves. It examines how these processes are translated across two research ‘sites’: the first is composed of the various ongoing consultations and policy statements that have surrounded the former DTI (now The Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform) review of the Consumer Credit Act; the second consists of debtors and their homes, using a series of interviews with defaulting debtors in their homes aims to trace what happens when some of consumer credit’s (often disciplinary) socio-technical processes become entangled with the fabric of household life.
Peter Erdélyi, London School of Economics and Political Science
My doctoral research project is concerned with developing an account of the organising and strategising practices of small e-commerce firms in the South of England, with a particular focus on the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in these practices. I am interested in describing the ways in which organising competence, the ability to organise and sustain a small firm as a coherent entity, is developed and sustained over time. Drawing primarily on actor-network theory, I have been undertaking a relational approach to studying my empirical objects. My investigation has led me to consider the wider networks and flows in which these e-commerce firms participate and also to raise questions about the nature of the knowledge-based economy. Currently I am in the empirical data collection phase of my research. I would be keen to share my experiences and dilemmas in pursuing a relational approach and learn about how others conceptualise and operationalise relationalism in their research.
Duygun Erim, Open University
Geographies of Dance: Explorations of the Middle
My research is on ‘deep dance’ experience in high-tempo, repetetive, rhythmic, continuous music, that lasts over a long time. I argue that dance is fundementally elastic and therefore it can neither be located nor limited or identified through writing. I suggest a study of dance that is ultimately liminoid, middleness is all about the liminoid. This work aims to remain within and enact this liminoid state and through this I argue for a social science methodology that is liminoid. Following John Law I challenge objective realist claims of social scientific methods. From engaging in dancing and using a video camera, I generate middling by enacting the middle and offer this as a dancing of methods. Dancing in the middle and being a part of its affectivity and feelings is a mode of making the research, therefore in a way I work with my body and my data is mostly derived from perceptions of dance. I look for the ways of integrating the things I realise through these embodied experiments into ways of doing research. I argue that feeling is a way of apprehending the world. In that sense my methodology is embodied and sensuous and this is a transformative force in me and thus also the research process. Constant movement effects the body, thoughts, and perceptions and makes them flexible. More closed and rigid modes of thinking and ideas as well as feelings that derive from past experiences dissolve and change shape, they become liquefied in movement. In this sense dance is a force of transformation and when enacted as a way of looking at the world (a method of realising), it can have similar effects on our ways of understanding what is in and around us when we use what it tells us to enact social scientific knowledge.
Lesley Gallacher, Open University/ Edinburgh University
My thesis is entitled: The Sleep of Reason: Tales of Early Childhood Subjectivity. It examines the accounts ‘we’ give of early childhood subjectivity (particularly in the context of early childhood education), and explores how these stories might be told differently (and the consequences of doing so). My thesis will be a collection of textual and graphic essays (using comic book/manga storytelling techniques) looking at monstrous imaginative play and materials in the everyday lives of children at nursery school.
Natalie Gill, Lancaster University
Lancashire’s Waste Management policy is in the process of being implemented in the Lancaster District and I have been focusing my attention on the heterogeneous practices of Lancaster’s Waste and Recycling Office. Taking a material semiotic approach I am committed to the position that policy is done. Attention to practices reveals this policy as different configurations of materials, practices, trajectories and meanings. These different configurations at some points overlap, sometimes they live in tension, and sometimes clash. They also hold different possibilities. What I am interested in at this present time is the way normativities are being done through policy target configurations and how different configurations make visible some realties whilst rendering others invisible.
Franklin Ginn, Kings College London
My PhD asks how working class subjectivities emerge in gardening practice and garden spaces in suburban England, from 1930 to the present day. I outline a history including: a narrative of suburban expansion and decline from inter-war state-led experiments to contemporary ‘sink’ estates; changes in the gardening industry, expertise and the boundaries of ‘taste’ over the century; and; popular myths of gardening as an a-political and particularly Anglo pursuit. Against this historical-geographical story I use 30 in-depth oral history interviews to trace memories of everyday gardening practice and the meaning of garden spaces, to disrupt the separation of past from present, memory from archive, the everyday from history.
Bas Hendrikx, University of Nijmegen
Bas Hendrikx is a 3rd year PhD student in human geography and spatial planning at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In his research he explores the recent mushrooming/spread of alternative economic practices (such as LETS, fair trade, slow food, street papers…) across the (western) world. To understand how such movements develop and spread over space and time he employs a relational approach, which is heavily influenced by actor-network theory. In so doing, he develops a relational geography of ordering, which explores the ways in which localised practices interconnect and order interactions across space and time, and how these interconnections ’sum up’ into relatively stable alternative economic movements.
His main analytical case is the street paper movement (homeless persons selling newspapers on the street, Big issue etc.). His analysis gives insights into how the street paper movement has developed over space and time. He explores the circulation of certain ideas and forms of practice in the movement, how these are negotiated and translated in local practices, and how this again affects circulation and consequent processes of identity formation in the street paper movement on a whole. The analysis shows that certain actors have taken up more powerful/central roles than others (they are better connected). This has created a certain (contested) power geometry within the movement, in which a particular form of practice (ie. the Big issue model/way) has become dominant, while other (often more radical/ethical) forms of practice and identity have been marginalised. The analysis lays bare how and why this power geometry has been formed and what relations, practices and actors play a key role in establishing it. For more details please consult my website: http://www.ru.nl/fm/hendrikx
Simon Hutta, Open University
My doctoral project deals with the question of how LGBT people in different parts of Rio de Janeiro experience the places and spaces they inhabit. The acuteness of this question ensues not only from the diverse forms of violence queer people encounter in their everyday lives, but also from recent initiatives for citizenship and security enacted by the Brazilian LGBT movement in order to counter violence. By considering subjective (individual as well as collective) experiences of city spaces, the current project tries to explore the conditions of violence, safety and ‘Geborgenheit’, and thus to interrogate political engagements. The project, furthermore, aims at making a contribution to theorisations of subjectivity, affectivity and space.
Sara Koopman,University of British Columbia
I am a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of British Columbia, working with Derek Gregory. I am currently in the midst of a year of fieldwork in Colombia. I am researching international accompaniment (such as peace brigades) and how it makes peace space. I am struggling to theorize this work collaboratively with accompaniers, and would very much appreciate getting to think this process through with you all while in the midst of this work.
Kim Kullman, Lancaster/Helsinki
I’m a PhD student in sociology at the University of Helsinki, and my research draws from the sociology of childhood, human geography and science and technology studies. For my PhD, I’m conducting ethnographic research on how school children in Helsinki negotiate their agencies in relation to the shifting configurations of humans, technologies and risks of everyday traffic. Methodologically, I’m interested in different forms of mobile and visual ethnography.
Angela Last, Open University
‘Mutable Matter’
My project tries to bring public engagement with nanotechnologies and recent interactive ’sci-art’ exhibitions into dialogue with each other. How can sensory engagement with the counter-intuitiveness of the nanoscale help us make different connections to this space and see ‘our world’ differently? How can it inform geographical investigations into matter (and vice versa)?
Lucila Newell, Open University
Rubbish politics in Buenos Aires
This research aims to investigate the politics of rubbish in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It looks at how the city, rubbish trails and urban democracy relate in the making of each other in contemporary Buenos Aires. It aims at analysing the complicated and complex entanglements of humans and non humans that somehow get coordinated to construct the rubbish process in Buenos Aires, and that make it a political process, giving us insights into how democracy is being done in Buenos Aires. My proposal is to study the forms and possibilities of urban democracy through research on the processes of rubbish politics in Buenos Aires. My research proposes to use some of the tools that some Actor Network Theory (ANT) authors’ propose in order to understand the relationship between everyday practices in the making of the rubbish process and of democracy.
Cheryl Nosworthy, Reading University
Mind-Body Spaces of Human-Non-human Communication: A Socio-Spatial study of ‘Disabled’ and ‘Non-Disabled’ Horse-Riders. I am working towards a PhD that interrogates interspecies crossings of horses and humans through an empirical study of groups of ‘disabled’ and ‘non-disabled’ horse-riders. Horses are skilled empaths that rely on picking up the feelings of other members of the herd to survive in the wild. They are also adept at picking up on the feelings of riders that are not publically displayed as emotions. I aim to document how horse and rider each ‘learn-to-be-affected’ by the other and question how emotions, feelings and the body are inter-linked in our relationships with horses. Drawing on work within the social sciences that gives attention to the unique ‘lifeworlds’ of animals, I have been using video methodology to observe animal intentionality and decision-making through attending to their embodied expressions (Bavidge and Ground 1994). In combination with diaries, interviews and participant observation, this video material is utilized in order to examine embodied expressions of horses in relation to the micro-movements of riders. In the process of learning to be affected by horses, riding provides new dimensions of physical experience, an expansion of sensations and positive moments of embodied pleasure (Latour 2000; Despret 2000). Riding enables a denial of or a resistance to the fixed and othering boundaries associated with mind-body differences.
Nissa Ramsay, Sheffield University
I’m currently in the final year (well 4th year really) of a PhD project which ‘follows’ the spaces of souvenir production and consumption in Swaziland and the UK. I’m using the figure of the souvenir-object to consider how the meanings of objects transform through the social practices surrounding them. In particular I consider the taking-place of affective materiality through souvenir-objects as they forge connections with place, thereby inflecting its representational nature. By considering the complex relations between people and objects, objects and places this project is attempting to offer a renewed theoretical-empirical encounter with theories of cultural materiality. I consider how objects create attachment and estrangement, proximity and distancing, presence and absence to disrupt any straightforward notion of ‘relationality’ which underpins representational and non-representational concerns with object.
Karolina Ronander Taylor, University of Southampton
I am a 2nd year PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Southampton, and the theme of the workshop speaks directly to my concerns around practical research methods for my fieldwork. My PhD focuses on ‘therapeutic encounters’ with remote natural landscapes, and is based on fieldwork in the Scottish Highlands and Swedish Lapland. Currently I am trying to find ways of translating my interest in ‘more-than-representational’ geographies and emotional geographies into practical research methods that are sensitive to those theoretical concerns.
Michaela Spencer, Lancaster University
I am interested in the material practices which enact European Nanomedicine at three different types of location – the clinic, the laboratory and the conference. In laboratories nanomedicine follows rhythms of experimental practice and is conducted through technical proficiencies, collaborations and the organisation of project trajectories towards publications, patents and drugs for market. In the clinic it takes the form of technologies of diagnosis and the practices of patient treatment and care. In conferences it is entangled with the interfaces between disciplines and their associated research practices, as well as in the creation of communities and shared concerns. By attending to the ordering practices which are present at these locations, and to what they each make relevant or opaque, my project considers the different ways in which the distances of the ‘laboratory to clinic’ pathway and the figurations of ‘patient centred healthcare’ are being arranged within current work in nanomedicine.
Chris Sugden, Oxford Said Business School
Jennifer Tomomitsu-Tomasson, Lancaster University
Imaging the Invisible: Exploring Knowledge Practices of Nano Imagery on the Boundaries of Art and Science. An increasing number of visual depictions related to nanotechnology now circulate in mainstream science magazines and on the Internet. These range from stylized electron micrograph (SEM) images of minute objects to sci-fi computer graphic art portraying futuristic nano robots performing medical functions inside the human body. Many of these pictures fall under a general rubric of ‘nano art’ and the ubiquity of the scope of this type of imagery calls for attention not only to the images themselves, but more importantly to the question of how an invisible object becomes knowable through its visual construction. My PhD addresses this concern by investigating how knowledge is produced through techniques of image making at the nano scale. This practice-based research is informed by traditions in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and feminist technoscience, which argue that representations are a generative and performative process where “knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world” (Barad 2007:49). Therefore, this research adopts a material semiotic approach to consider the relational role between human/non-human actors and the inseparability of both subject/object in the creation of visual depictions. Additionally, it draws from a wider set of sensibilities in STS which is concerned with difference and non-coherence (Haraway 1999; Law 2004; Mol 2005) by exploring not only what is included during image-making, but more importantly, what is excluded. My project as a whole probes the boundaries between art and science, thus extracting ideas not only from STS but from other areas in visual culture and art history to look at how particular practices of image making translate different kinds of knowledge. To achieve this, the thesis is comprised of several case studies, some of which involve ethnography in nano labs as well as interviews with artists and scientists who have engaged in collaborative projects.
