Originally developed during a year at the Center for Advanced Study in 2018-19 with the In Sync project, Ant Network Theory is a joint article for a special issue of the journal NatureCulture. It has subsequently been developed over several years into a series of overlapping tales and artefacts, where we continue to use the fiction format, including an epistolary piece specially written for the UNHCR to imagine the future of migration. The article and its various parts have now received a full graphic novel treatment by the historian of science and comic book artist Argha Manna (IIT Gandhinagar).
In this talk and experimental workshop we discuss the “Ant Network Theory” and its adaptation in graphic novel form. We discuss how, using the lens of ants and insect life, we use fiction as a method for interdisciplinary reflection on the entanglements between future histories, science fiction literature and film, and themes in evolutionary biology. We discuss how fictional timescapes, footnotes, and the manifesto format help us engage with different concerns in STS.
Geoffrey C. Bowker is Emeritus Donald Bren Chair at the School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California at Irvine. Together with Leigh Star he wrote Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences; his most recent books are Memory Practices in the Sciences and (with Stefan Timmermans, Adele Clarke and Ellen Balka) the edited collection Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star. He is currently working on time and computing under the rubric ‘life at the femtosecond’.
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is associate professor at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. He is PI of the ERC project CoFutures and the NFR project Science Fictionality. His most recent book is The Inhumans (The MIT Press, 2024) and (with Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, and Grace Dillon) the edited collection Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms (Routledge, 2024). Learn more about his research at: https://cofutures.org
Note: We invite you for an informal gathering at the TIK lounge after the event. Refreshments will be served. Please register by sending an email to Rakesh Paul (rakesh.paul@tik.uio.no) by 01 October 2024.