2022
Citizen from Hell: An autoethnographic intervention
Time and place: Oct. 3, 2022 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM, TIK, Ullevål stadion, Sognsveien 77b
Brit Ross Winthereik visits TIK to discuss her chapter on "The Citizen from Hell" – the kind of citizen we sometimes become in digitized state-public meetings.
Winthereik argues that digital systems are woven into every step of citizen-state interaction in a digitalized country like Denmark. In Winthereik's rendering, the Citizen from Hell is a figure that constitutes a bundle of practices, indicating the messiness of a digital citizen identity; a form of self-healing, an attempt at surviving a long and confusing labyrinth of welfare services and communication platforms, a means of obfuscation of the standard citizen figure embedded in the system. It is also a kind of resistance.
Taking an analytical point of departure in what Sawyer et al (2019) et al has labelled ‘infrastructural competence’, Winthereik suggests we consider citizen-state encounters in the digital state as providing a window into situations in which differences are produced. To grasp life in the digital welfare state, we must have new methodologies and narrate forth an assiduous citizen, whose emotional efforts and self-efficacy carve out a space from where to negotiate welfare services as well as critique the digital as an opaque digital environment that is difficult to use and see through.
To understand life in the digitalized welfare state, we need to understand the citizen as already and always datafied in the eyes of the state. How digital platforms are configured and what people’s experiences of using them are is something we need to understand much better if we are to understand the (digital) welfare state in practice, she argues.
STS Methods Lab: Methodologies for animals’ geographies
Time and place: Sep. 21, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, Loftet, Professorboligen
Jamie Lorimer, University of Oxford, visits the Methods Lab Seminar September 21!
Animal geography is a vibrant sub-disciplinary field mainly concerned with how people organise the movements, territories, and spaces of other animals. A minor strand explores the lived spatial experiences of nonhuman animals themselves, or animals’ places. This talk reflects on ongoing efforts to develop concepts, methodologies, and practical methods for researching animals’ geographies. It reviews my own and others’ research collaborations with natural scientists in the field and in laboratories in which we seek to tune in to animals’ worlds. Our aims are to better understand animals, to improve their experiences, and to explore how thinking with animals enhances social theory. The focus is largely on terrestrial mammals living in proximity to people, whose worlds are similar enough to humans to allow us to transpose social science concepts and methodologies, while different enough to put these at risk.
Adolfo Estalella and Tomás S. Criado visit the methods lab seminar 20 January
Time and place: Jan. 20, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, Zoom
We are glad to welcome Adolfo Estalella and Tomás S. Criado. Adolfo is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology and Social Psychology (Complutense University of Madrid).Tomás is Senior Researcher at the Chair of Urban Anthropology and Director of the Stadtlabor of Multimodal Anthropology, Humboldt-University of Berlin. They are the authors of “Experimental Collaborations. Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices”, recently published in Berghahn books.
The ethnographic invention: Against the method's hegemony
It has become commonplace to assume that the figure of method stands for a technical knowledge guiding empirical activity as well as a faithful description of it. However, we know that the empirical situation always exceeds method’s rules and guides: our inquiries are always fraught with imponderabilia that forces our improvisation. Intriguingly, the inventive gestures and creative practices always present in our inquiries have been traditionally obviated and undervalued. Focusing specifically on the case of ethnography, and drawing on our own ethnographic experience, we propose that ethnographic inquiries grow out of improvisation and invention: ethnographers always invent in practice how to pose relevant questions. Against the hegemonic imagination that resorts to the figure of method to describe fieldwork we offer a conceptualization of ethnography as an act of invention: Ethnographers creatively invent how to relate to their ethnographic counterparts.
2021
STS Methods Lab: Resistant bodies - in science and culture: challenges, approaches, and concepts in immunology
Time and place: Dec. 8, 2021 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM, Eilert Sundts Hus, Aud 2
In the next STS methods lab, December 8, we are excited to welcome anthropologist Emily Martin (NYU) in conversation with evolutionary biologist Kjetill Jakobsen, and immunologists Shou-Wang Qiao and Finn-Eirik Johansen from the UiO: Life Science Convergence Environment COMPARE, on the challenges, approaches, and concepts of immunology ‘before and now’.
Emily Martin’s seminal book Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from Polio to the age of AIDS (1994), will be the point of departure for our conversation. Flexible bodies has been influential in forming our understanding of the role of science as culture and the traffic of knowledge, concepts and practices between science and society. In this conversation we will discuss Flexible Bodies, its contributions and concepts with core researchers from COMPARE – Comparative immunology in fish and humans.
In the COMPARE-project the immune system of cod is examined – and compared also with the understanding of immunology with a point of departure in the human immune system. COMPARE demonstrates new modes of working and comparing across bodies and species. How can this work add to our understanding of immunology? Do we understand immunity differently today than at the time when Emily Martin published her book? Are relations between science and society different? What tools and concepts are relevant in contemporary immunology and how do new tools and approaches impact what we take to be immunity and the discipline of immunology? And what can the combination of immunology and evolutionary biology bring to the table? These questions will shape the conversation in this unique meeting between an interdisciplinary group of experts on the immune system in science and culture.
STS methods lab: Encountering climate in Models and Materials
Time and place: June 3, 2021 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, Zoom
The STS Methods Lab at TIK is glad to host Hannah Knox, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Anthropology in our next session.
In this seminar, Associate Professor Knox will present the main argument of her new book, Thinking like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change, which came out last autumn. Based on ethnographic research that looked at attempts to bring climate science to bear on the governance of cities, the talk focuses on the methods deployed by people living and working in Manchester, UK, as they sought to make sense of their encounters with the ambivalent materiality of climate models. To understand these encounters and their methodological ramifications, Knox suggests we need to develop an understanding of climate not as a representation of an existing reality but a ‘form of thought’ whose contours are relational, but yet tangible, and whose ramifications are still being worked out. Building on the argument of this book Knox point to the methodological transformations this prompted in her own work, and end with some reflections on the directions that this research is taking her in now, presenting some nascent ideas about how to continue research in climate-thinking and its world-transforming possibilities.
STS Methods Lab: Poaching in Multispecies Worlds
Time: Apr. 22, 2021 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
We are glad to welcome Associate Professor of Anthropology (Research) in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization at Deakin University, Eben Kirksey, PhD for the next STS Methods Lab.
Trespassing into the domain of biology, multispecies ethnographers have been stealing organisms - such as bacteria, acorns, and vultures - and claiming them for their own. These transgressions were inspired by Michel de Certeau, who describes "reading as poaching," a form of intellectual trespassing in The Practice of Everyday Life. Reading as poaching allows one to "convert the text through reading," to trespass on the "private hunting reserves" cultivated by elite literati, who alone claim rights to ascribe meanings to texts or landscapes. The tactic of poaching fits within de Certeau’s larger argument that consumption is not a passive act determined by systems of production. He suggests that reading is a primary activity of modern consumers and, therefore, of everyday life.
In this session of the STS Methods Lab, Associate Professor Kirksey will offer an account of early practices of poaching in multispecies ethnography, as anthropologists began to purloin tools - like microscopes and DNA testing technologies - to study contact zones where nature and culture meet. Scientific artifacts were also reframed as artworks, to catalyze conversations with scientific interlocutors. His presentation will also point towards future poaching opportunities as ethnographers start to venture into the virosphere.